Fascinating Facades

You might say to someone, "I like the color orange."

Maybe you want to tell someone that you like orange, but it doesn't necessarily come up in conversation.

We all know what happens next: you can tell your friends, and then they tell that person. Maybe you'll post it on facebook or myspace. Maybe you'll wear an orange shirt.


Maybe you don't want to tell everyone, but you really like orange and you think it's a color that everyone should know about, or that your shirt is a color that people might like. The consequence of this is wearing an orange shirt around.

Maybe you paint your room orange and have books about the color.

Maybe every time you think about orange in some way, it makes an indentation in the palm of your hand where thousands of peoples' color-lines have happened before.

Maybe in a four week span of when you were born, people like that general color. For myself, I was born a day before the American Holiday Thanksgiving. Being surrounded with a festivity associated with orange could be a huge reason, that I am unaware of, for me liking orange.

Maybe your uncle was the Duke of Orange, or you empathize with the Duke of Orange because your favorite character always wrote them together.

Maybe your name is O'Brien or Otto, and you think O's should get together.

Maybe your mom ate an orange before she read you a bedtime story.

Maybe your first boyfriend broke up with you and you were crying; but when someone handed you an orange, you felt better.

Maybe you are like Haile Gebressalassie, the elite runner, who, when he was growing up had to run tens of miles in order to get back and forth from school. He had to carry his books in his arms, and his stride is noticeably different because of this. Maybe you carried an orange every day when you were younger because you loved oranges so much and someone says, "Hey, that person must really love oranges. I can tell from her walk."


These are all ways of reading people and deciphering them. When I was starting on my astrology kick a few years ago, I noticed that friends of mine were not doing astrology. That's because astrology is guessing, what Kant might call "groping in the dark" compared to real and more easily attainable bio data. When I say bio data, I'm referencing an Industrial Organizational psychology class that I took, which says that hundreds and hundreds of questions about who a person is, from that person, is an effective way of garngering knowledge of that person.

So what my intelligent friends were saying, and what the I-O Psychologists have closely correlated if not proven, are remarkably similar.

There's also a problem of what people want you to know about them, what you want to know about them, and what each of the other is teleologically trying to put together. When you're trying to frame the Hurricane, you're not trying to find out whether he likes daisies. But more importantly, it skews the whole process. Unfortunately too many of us have motivations and past experiences when we meet new people.

So for example, I'm not going to try to find out as much as possible about a woman's zodiac if she is just a random woman from Kalamazoo; it wouldn't make any sense or have any motivation to it. Usually when I do this stuff, it's in order to tell a story about my friends.

Basically, we can tell if a person likes oranges from when they tell us that they like oranges. But bio data works inductively; that is by probability. The probability of an occurrence happening in the future is directly related to that event happening in the past. So when Craig eats a banana once, to some extent he sets himself up to do it again. Think about it: if Craig eats a banana everyday of his life up until now, and we need to make the best possible prediction for tomorrow, I think we could venture an educated guess that he's going to eat the banana tomorrow.

In flexing all of this unweildy science, pseudo science, and biography as one, I came up with a helpful maxim. I found, "The trait is the action." So when someone says they like oranges, you can take that facade for what it is worth. When someone eats an orange in front of you , that is them liking the orange. I think this unites a whole bunch of these theories. Palmistry, for example, could recognize calluses on the palms from weightlifting. Well, the calluses had to come from somewhere. And so the trait is the action (in this case callus-making; from weightlifting).

(In fact, and facadesaside fans will look this up, facadesaside has discussed the pros and cons of the inductive method in a couple of earlier entries)

Recap

Good methods of judging people's actions:
Past actions
Empirical Science
Repetitions
Routines
Bio data, such as questions to the person
when a person tells you straight up
when a person does an action that turn into a bigger action



Bad ways:

Less Empirical
Less well rooted
motivated or biased (teleological) recognition and creation of personality from outer-standpoint
Fate or superstition



Some good ways:

Grades
Politenesses
What they tell you about themselves


Some bad ways:

Astrology
Palmistry
Tarot Cards