Recently I posted on Maslow. Bettina had some comments that i wanted to follow up on.

You say “that society should attempt to maximize the generation of self actualized people”. Well, but HOW can one generate a self-actualized person. Or better, how does one generate into one?

In point of fact I stated that I would be sympathetic towards arguments attempting to justify societal effort to maximize the generation of self-actualized people. How society should go about engineering self-actualized people is an open question. And in turn the justification of such an endeavor would immediately elicit much skepticism in me. That being said, I would be open to hearing the justification for this kind of societal engineering.

How does one become one? How did you become one?

In my youth I would happily delineate those things that brought about my self-actualization. Previous renditions of my ascension to actualization would incorporate a volitional component in which I made smarter decision then others leading to superior development. However, for quite some time this kind of thinking has been heavily crippled by the realization that even smart decision making must come from somewhere independent of a person’s free will. In other words, people in similar position choose differently not because of some difference in volitional expression, but rather because of some environmental or neurological differentiation.

For example, I have phenomenal and unrivaled diligence. It’s only in the rarest of cases that I will throw in the towel before I master whatever I set out to accomplish. Such diligence allows me to maintain my chosen course in conditions practically all others would give up. This trait confounds my ability to determine whether maintaining my aspirations for graduate school is a matter of choice or a matter of genetics. That being the case, it should be clearer to see why a question such as ‘How did you become one’ becomes nearly impossible to answer.

I doubt, that being self-actualized according to Maslows criteria is a trait. A permanent, stable, constant trait - and hence, the development into one needs further clarification. So does the prospective factor, which goes along with that: What happens to self-actualized people in general? Will they be self-actualized for the rest of their lives? What factors may influence their self-actualization?

First of all you do the paper a disservice by characterizing it as a set of criteria. His intent with that article was to describe actualized people and not establish criteria for becoming a member. Clearly one can use these properties to winnow out individuals but this was not the paper’s intent.

Secondly, it seems to me that once one attains actualization it becomes virtually impossible to ‘degenerate’ into a non-actualizing being. According to Maslow actualization is only achieved once four other types of needs are met. It’s easy to see how an actualized person could find themselves in a situation where those other needs aren’t met. Over time this might have some kind of effect on an actualized individual but attainment of actualization intrinsically changes the person(1,2,3). These kinds of changes will make it very difficult to degenerate to a non-actualized state.

who determines the degree of self-actualization? Is there a spectrum of being self-actualized? Is there something like a 80% self-actualization or a 100% self-actualization?

This kind of categorization can’t really be quantified in this way. If anything its binary, either you’re actualized or not. That being said there are other needs that must be met and presumably as those other needs are satisfied you become closer to the opportunity of attaining actualization.

I find Maslows descriptions to be of a very elitarian fashion - it almost makes the audience think that self-actualization equals being the SUPER-HUMAN.

I always like to say Maslow stole most of the idea of the self-actualized person from Nietzsche. One of Nietzsche most important concepts was that of the uberman. If you look at the characteristics of the uberman you will see that it significantly overlaps with the characteristics of the self actualized man. One can make an argument that in point of fact both types of people are elite. In many ways they really are.

Even though he talks about “imperfections” he surely contrasts being self-actualized to being sick. I do not like this contrast, neither do I like the way he idealizes the self-actualized person. There must be something in between: between being the Super-Human and the Sick - there are billions of “ordinary” people - and I’m sure that they equal in their perception of their individual contentness with life.

Maslow comes from a clinical setting so much of his sample size is going to be filled with people with extremely poor perceptions of their reality. He might be suffering from a biased sample. However, does the typical person have maladaptive perception of reality? From my perspective they often do. One person I know after being fully made aware of the expectation of going out packed her shoes and then used that as an excuse for why she they could’nt go out.

I think a better way to criticize Maslow is his overly optimistic attitude towards using self actualized people as the way to determine an objective set of human values. This kind of thinking is quite alarming and reeks of moralism. Again if we consider the context in which Maslow worked, we can see why one would be so overly optimistic about an objective set of values. Such value would provide him with justification for making sick people follow self actualized values against their own. As already stated this kind of thinking is profoundly dangerous and fails to account for the fact that even self actualized people have no access to objective truth (A point me and Maslow would argue on). Hence, necessarily these kinds of attempts will be moralistic in nature.

But I totally support diversity:

Yet pictures of authentic Hispanics who happen to have blond hair or blue eyes don’t count toward the Hispanic quota “because their background would not be apparent to readers.” In other words, rather than expose schoolchildren to the fact that “Hispanic” is an artificial classification that encompasses people of every color, publishers promote the fiction that all Hispanics look the same — and that looks, not language or lineage, are the essence of Hispanic identity.

Im so glad textbook content is determined by politicaly motivated school boards. Really insures the quality of our education. GO PUBLIC EDUCATION.

Cato-@-Liberty has a nice post on how public broadcasting is effectively state sponsored liberal propaganda.

The third biggest scandal is that instead of just privatizing PBS and NPR, Republicans appoint public broadcasting officials who go in like a bull in a china shop and try to force a bunch of liberal journalists to include conservative shows and perspectives. The government shouldn’t be telling journalists how and what to report. Instead, it should just free them to report as they choose, with money from investors and customers rather than taxpayers.

To which I say: Amen!

Why are dogs not more oftenly used in crime fighting. Particularly in hostages situations.

boose requests some more disabuse.

Ok, first of all, the monster analogy doesn’t work again. In the monster situation, the group of people can be wrong or right, because the monster’s existence is based in fact.

Its really quite unclear what it means to say ‘the monster’s existence is based on fact’.

However, because you write:

If there really was a monster, it has consequences, possibly the death of one of the people.

I’m given to believe that by fact you mean has additional empirical effects. Presumably you have in mind that the others members of the group will experience empirical effects, like being eviscerated, that will convince them of the monster’s existence. But relying on this argument simply assumes the exact point I’m trying to make. By dictating that the fact of the monster’s existence is contingent on whether others will experience the monster’s empirical effects implicitly acknowledges the pluralistic vote that must occur before the monster’s existence can be certified as fact. In effect you are requesting that a vote be put off until more members experience the monster empirically before you determine the factual nature of its existence.

Meanwhile, this vote on a definition is just a decision on how to classify pluto. All of the basic facts stay the same (pluto’s size, orbit, etc.).

I don’t have much to say to this other than the rather obvious observation that school children are taught the planets in the solar system even before they are taught any of these other basic facts. Arguably then whether a celestial body in our solar system is a planet or not seems to be regarded as a basic fact. This basic fact was then determined pluralisticaly with a vote.

Then there are the implicit situations, where some scientists determine the validity of certain data sets. In these situations, the scientists can once again be wrong or right depending on what is actually going on inside the system.

It’s not clear what it means to say ‘In these situations, the scientists can once again be wrong or right depending on what is actually going on inside the system’.

You seem to be restating the previous argument but dressing it up in scientific terms instead of movie terms. The system here is a collection of empirical effects the system (monster) can generate and depending on the scientist’s savviness will be able to predict the system’s empirical effects (eviscerate you). A scientist’s assertions are right or wrong depending on their ability to accurately predict the empirical effects of the system. You seem to be putting the horse before the cart since this discussion is about determining the actual empirical system’s existence before we can evaluate whether it can be predicted.

If a scientist boldly claims that force equals mass times acceleration then others scientists would skeptically demand to have it shown to them. This is precisely the demand that counts as the vote. They are stating, I will not grant your point until you generate some kind of empirical effect that I can perceive. This is the same demand that the friends of the protagonist will demand before they even consider the notion that such a monster exists. In both cases an implicit vote is taken regarding the existence of the empirical system, which is determined by its ability to affect the scientists in a directly perceivable way.

They aren’t voting on the facts, but voting on which facts they deem important, or valid. Whether these facts are actually true or not may be determined in the future. If they do decide some data sets are invalid for whatever reason, and find later that the activation was meaningful, that means they were wrong, because reality has the final say on the facts, not the vote of the majority.

Even ignored facts or facts discovered in the future must pass the simple and implicit empirical test. A vote must be taken about whether it’s directly perceived by those in the field. If the empirical effect fails this test then its no longer considered fact.

It’s worth noting once again that I happily acknowledge that there are very real difference between the empirical vote I’m speaking of and the vote the astronomers took regarding the definition of a planet. My point was simply in stating how the explicit astronomers process makes more obvious how scientific knowledge is intrinsically human.

On a side note, your theory on reality and facts is starting to sound a lot more like darwin’s voting system. What happens if everyone votes against your theory on facts?

In point of fact this is not my metaphysics but a criticism of science. I’m not sure what my theory of facts is and don’t know how one votes against it.

In my post about the webpage I designed for the Maslow text diatribe had this to say in the comment section:

Looks like the Excalibur Castle in Vegas

I have taken the liberty of putting an image of the webpage and excalibur side by side to facilliate a comparsion.

As you can see Diatribe smokes serious crack. Aside from them both having the color white and red they share no substantial similarities. In point of fact, I modeled the maslow webpage after victorian style acrchitecture. That style came 500 years after the style this castle is loosely based off of.

Recently in reference to my post on Astronomers boose has stated:

woohoo, lets repeat the argument we had at the last post on this subject!

Something tells me he wants a further analysis. My thoughts in this regard can be found here and here. However I will lay out an argument more tailored to this specific example.

Recently, I went to the fairly decent movie Descent. In one scene, like all horror films, the main protagonist wanders away from the group and spots some kind of creature. When her friends find her she begins to tell them about the monster she spotted. All her friends deny what she has seen and tell her that she is mistaken.

The question becomes is the monster’s existence a fact? Her friends denied its existence implicitly taking a vote on the matter. Certainly there was no actual vote, but the simultaneous denial of the monster by all other friends is an implicit vote. It’s stating to the protagonist that each and every one of your friends denies your data set. If one were to ask this group about this monster’s existence the group would deny it, dismissing the protagonist’s data set. Through this kind of implicit vote scientist determine the validity of data sets.

While at Stanford when I ran my first analysis on a data set and I saw the activation I noticed activation in many different places. When I showed this activation map to my professor he simply ignored the activation in many regions and only focused on those regions of interest to him. In this way he votes against certain regions of activation and in favor of other regions. This differentiation in data set was implicit.

Is there some kind of substantive difference between explicitly voting on a definition versus implicitly voting on a data set? Probably, but my point was not to deny all differences only to make the observation that the astronomers process of voting simply makes explicit a process that is normally determined more implicitly. In both cases humans partake in the process of taking a vote to determine fact. In one case scientist vote on the properties of a term and in another case scientist vote on what empirical experiences are valid.

Astronomers have voted and the majority have ruled that the statement:

Pluto is a planet

Is not a fact.

All science is determined pluralistically. Its interesting how apparent this has been made by the astronomer’s voting process.

Almost 10 years ago I came across an article by Abraham Maslow delineating the characteristics of self actualized people. I had my brother use a text reading program scan the article and generate a text file which I then manually corrected. Using this text file I converted it into some webpages. Go check it out and tell me what you think of the look of the webpage. I spent about 12-15 hours drawing the image and putting it all together.

I should also note that I believe I am self actualized. Most people that hear me say this role their eyes or think i’m arrogant. However, if you actually bother to read the characteristcs that Maslow describes I think you would be hard pressed to find a characteristic that i don’t meet. I might fail at meeting the humor criteria, but even here its just not that clear sense I really don’t enjoy sophomoric humor and my sarcasm almost always makes reference to something intrinsic to the relationship with that person. At any rate, I personally challenge any reader to argue against my self actualization. This is an argument i’ve been interested seeing fleshed out for a long time. I should note that those simply responding to the challenge without the accompaniment of a legitmate belief that im not self actualized will receive no counter argument.

In a larger sense, I might be sympathetic towards arguments that society should attempt to maximize the generation of self actualized people. I’m not sure about what this actually means or how it should be implemented. And I’m extremely dubious of anyone stating to have the policy that will increase the proportion of self actualized people in the population. However, if such a policy does exist, it most certainly would have to be libertarian in nature. Self actualization can not be attained through liberal coddling and will be stymied by conservative stricture.

Free markets to self actualization. The invisible hand pushes one to actualization.

Awesome.