Why do NTs Need to do things in Unison?

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Que jamais l'art abstrait, qui sévit maintenant
N'enlève à vos attraits ce volume étonnant
Au temps où les faux culs sont la majorité
Gloire à celui qui dit toute la vérité (Georges Brassens)

re-ligare -
« En l’élisant (eligentes), mieux : en le réélisant (religentes), car négligeant (neglegentes) que nous sommes, nous l’avions perdu –, en le choisissant de nouveau (religentes) – d’où vient, dit-on, religio – nous tendons vers lui par l’amour, afin que l’atteignant, nous trouvions en lui le repos. » — Augustin, Civ. Dei, X, 3.

« Nous liant donc à lui, ou plutôt nous y reliant, au lieu de nous en détacher pour notre malheur, le méditant et le relisant sans cesse – d’où vient, dit-on, le mot religion – nous tendons vers lui par l’amour, afin de trouver en lui le repos et de posséder la béatitude en possédant la perfection. » — Augustin, Civ. Dei, X, 3, trad. Raulx, éd. Guérin 1864-1873
(de béatitude et béat, peace of thought/mind, eg religion)

Augustin insiste ici sur les termes eligere signifiant choisir, ce qui fait que le terme relegere ou religere peut se comprendre non seulement comme une relecture, mais aussi comme une réélection.
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étymologie_de_religion

-----The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.
Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.
(emma goldman)

(Mistaking group thought for collective intelligence) As James Surowiecki points out in The Wisdom of Crowds, this forming of the tight, homogenous group gives ground to group thought in a negative sense. Surowiecki gives a lot of examples of when group thought stops innovative ideas from being realized or even thought or expressed. The fear of breaking the group thought is perhaps not obvious or even realized, but is there. If you break that precious bond, you lose that comfy feeling. We’ve all been in that situation too. We have that small, tight group and in comes the Outsider with the Outsidish idea. What an idiot. He knows Nothing. We’ve already tried that. But we are the experts. And so on. The outsider must in many cases chose between aligning and thereby just provide ideas which are in line with what is acceptable ideas within the group or stay an outsider.

and an interesting confusion, notice that the hive is not outside but needs to be restored as personal overview ....
You Have a Hive Mind
There is a deep connection between the way your brain and a swarm of bees arrives at a decision
Every decision you make is essentially a committee act. Members chime in, options are weighed, and eventually a single proposal for action is approved by consensus. The committee, of course, is the densely knit society of neurons in your head. And “approved by consensus” is really just a delicate way of saying that the opposition was silenced.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -hive-mind

-----(K.Kesey's Demon box)---
All the underlying issues raised here remain in doubt until the penultimate essay, ''Demon Box,'' a piece somewhat in the spirit of Hunter Thompson's ''gonzo journalism,'' about Mr. Kesey's relations with mad people, their keepers and a counterculture guru named Dr. Klaus Woofner, who runs the Big Sur Institute of Higher Light. Here the matter of the book's form becomes a major source of irritation, because the author invokes the spirit and authority of a major counterculture figure of the 1960's and 1970's - Fritz Perls of the Esalen Institute - without allowing us to exercise our own views of Dr. Perls and the school of gestalt therapy he founded.

Very well, then; so we have to deal instead with Dr. Woofner's ideas, yet another view of psychic life that invokes Newton's second law of thermodynamics. The human mind is Sir James Clerk Maxwell's demon box, in which the superego plays the demon, letting the good thoughts in and shutting the bad thoughts out. The problem, according to Dr. Woofner, is that, like all other systems, this one, too, is subject to entropy: the superego demon is losing energy; the randomness of the mind's organization is increasing; the bad thoughts are getting mixed up with the good ones; the world is growing increasingly crazy.

----- The Surprising Link Between Homicide Rates and…Belief in Free Will
New research suggests we believe that people have choices because we want to see some of them get punished.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... punishment
Why we need to dispel the notion of dualistic free willI’ve always argued that philosophers spend way too much time trying to limn conceptions of free will that avoid dualism. Instead, they write books confecting compatibilism. I regard this exercise as largely a waste of time. If philosophers truly intend for their lucubrations to change the world, then I’d think that they’d spend more of their time spreading the word about our growing knowledge of how behavior is determined and less on trying to show how we have some kind of free will.

After all, it is the dispelling of dualism—still deeply entrenched in our society—that has invidious consequences not only for religion, but, more important, for how we treat and punish criminals. Really, is it more important for philosophers to tell us how we really have “free will” after all (and who reads that compatibilism, anyway), or to work on improving society by the proper treatment of those who do bad? (And I deny the claim that the notion of dualistic free will doesn’t play a bad role in our present system of criminal justice.)
I have no time to post in detail, but the pressing need for neuroscientific studies of behavior and empirical tests of reward and punishment (in other words, science) to reform of how we meet out “justice” can be seen in an article in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal by Adrian Raine, “The criminal mind.” https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.co ... free-will/

We may be at the extreme side of introversion, but monopoly is based on power and even in the world of introverts we're still a small percentage of the group.

Having people pitch in to help a nearby co-worker depending on work load is not an outside the box idea. In some work situations it is expected. I strongly suspect something else was at play and also suspect it was the fryer. Restaurant deep fryers have caused a lot of burn injuries and fires. Keeping a side eye on it while doing something else is potentially dangerous.

He could have explained that to you but teens are notorious for scoffing at the safety rules of adults. Hypothetically, he may have done the calculation that a kid not willing to follow the rules because that's what he was assigned won't follow the rules for the sake of not getting horribly burned either, since teens tend to grossly underestimate risk.

I know I'm just speculating. But "help your over burdened co-workers to get things done faster" is such an inside the box concept that safety risk just seems more plausible to me as a reason to fire you. If there was a fire or injury and it came out that he just let you step away from the fryer and did nothing, then getting fired would probably be just the start of his troubles. Firing you meant he had to go through the hassle of replacing you but that would be less hassle than what would happen if there was a grease fire or burn or spill and it was ultimately his responsibility.

Yes, and that the teacher would want to follow the structured day they had planned is why they wanted that to happen.


Regarding not closing your eyes or appearing like you were sleeping, of course not all the kids were sleeping, but if you were alert maybe you would have caught the teacher taking a swig of something or scratching their butt or some other activity that one cannot do in public with 50 eyes on you.

When I find people I like being with, I like doing everything with them because it keeps me doing things that are relevant. When I am on my own I waste hours doing things I might not even enjoy doing that I do out of habit, and that aren't even useful either, and my emotions often nose-dive.
I feel like at my core I'm an extrovert, but I avoid most people like the plague and I ignore my emotions unless I am alone.

There is no 'hive-mind' for someone telling someone else they're stupid. The person who was told they are stupid, or who has perceived that they have been told they are stupid, fires you because they don't like you. When you tell someone lower than you that they are stupid, that person has no recourse, so they cannot fire you.

That is not hive-mind. That is called looking out for yourself. People who understand social structure and nuance can leverage it to their advantage. That is also not hive-mind, that is still an individual looking out for themselves.

Your assertions of NTs having a hive-mind are ridiculous. All that anyone has is a sense of self-preservation. NTs use social structure and nuance to their own individual needs. If you are unable to understand that, then that's probably because you're poor at understanding social nuance.

Social structures arise from a variety of factors, but a desire to maintain a structure because of 'hive-mind' isn't one of them. In fact, I'd say that not wanting things to CHANGE is an exceedingly autistic trait. Social structure is and always will be a patterned meta view that of what individuals feels are best for them, whether it be by matching personal morals, personal wealth, personal pride, etc. even in the most conformist of cultures.

It is how ANY meta look at individual pieces works; the individual pieces are what make the whole. Even if you look at the whole as a whole, the whole is not deterministic of itself, the parts determine the whole. It is a difference of causality.

Hivemind might actually even be able to predict behaviours fairly well, and that's totally fine. But it's not an explanation of why, it is only a thing to put overtop of an existing structure to help you better predict it.

Here is the problem though. It is always pounded into people's heads that they must take initiative and one must always be proactive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proactivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiative ... guation%29

Proactivity is the first habit of Steven Covey's Seven Habit's of Highly Effective People.

Aristophanes saw something needed to be done and took the initiative and was proactive. He perceived certain inefficiencies and took steps to make corrections.

So, are we supposed to show initiative and be proactive or are we supposed to simply do what we're told? Or are we supposed to do something else that is unknown to us? Which is it? I can do everything that I'm told to do and employers will say I don't show initiative or am proactive enough and then be fired anyway.

This is one of the main reasons why I feel that I am unable to succeed in the workplace whatsoever and why I am on and why I believe I need to be on SSDI. I am to disabled to follow standards that are inconsistent,contradictory and can change with the wind with no rhyme, reason or warning.

Yes well, it's a very sh***y situation, but stuff like that has happened to A LOT of people I know. NTs avoid it better because they 'read' if their supervisor is going to be 'that as*hole guy' who may well fire you for doing beneficial things. On the other hand, I and my partner have quit multiple low-end jobs for idiocy of supervisors because we are unable to deal with BS like that.

It's more problematic in lower wage jobs I find. In specialized skill jobs, expertise and critical evaluation and making changes is far more likely to be seen as good. I criticized one of the very studies I was running participants for for an experiment as a research assistant, and I had waited weeks if not months to bring that particular thing to the professor's attention. He is the sort of person who at other points in time, had felt threatened by a few things I'd done, and acted very negatively emotionally. As most people do. But he also knows that precision is mandatory for proper experimental data, so when I finally got up the courage to explain the error we had in one of the computer programs, he did not direct the frustration at me.

Low wage jobs are not made for intelligent people to hold. I think individuals most often feel threatened because you are simply smarter than them and are not afraid of them like the individual wants you to be. And workers are dime a dozen for those unskilled jobs too, so if you're also easily replaceable. Not so for specialized skill jobs. You will invariably find if you put yourself in a field where your skills are invaluable, that you can be way more quirky, rude, lazy etc than in unskilled labor jobs.

Again, it's about the structure of the hive. The queen bee cannot be overruled no matter how beneficial the result. I've never thought myself above any person, and I don't go out of my way to make others feel "stupid" or "inferior", if anything those words have been directed at myself over my lifetime. The entire point of uniformity is control, not results.

An individual will conform their own differences to the collective for fear of punishment. In my case my failure to conform to "what I was told" held the punishment of expulsion. "Looking out for yourself" is conforming to the hive, not looking out for the hive as whole, but conforming to it. The hive has strength, the individual does not, therefore the individual is irrelevant.

Yes, I have autism, I am very bad at social nuance. I thought on this forum that was assumed. Many times I don't understand personal interaction, I can't read body language and thus can't feel emotion from a conversation. Many times I can't tell anger from hatred, from just having a bad day-- these nuances you speak. I understand logical structures that lead to outcomes and results, I don't understand the illogical processes of the herd. The fact that I try to help the herd is irrelevant, the fact that I can't conform is all that is relevant. The hive cannot tolerate outside thought patterns, it's disruptive to control. NT's seem to have no problems understanding these nuances, they've been trained and receive emotional boosters (endorphins) for compliance, I do not therefore I am "other" and not part of the hive. As a human my sense of self-preservation is naturally to find a power structure to fit, this is a given, but my biology is such that I cannot, regardless of effort. In effect it is a litmus test that I fail repeatedly.

But you cannot achieve those things without the hive, in essence you have to be a part of a hive to even consider those social promotions, aside from perhaps morality, but even then you will be compelled by the meta-hive (society) to find a power structure, say buddhism, or christianity, etc. Individual thought has no power, group thought does. Therefore you have to follow said hive's indoctrination or be cast out, this is where the hive mind comes from. What a normal well-adjusted drone would call "towing the line" is merely another phrase for conformity to the hive-mind. Your ideas don't matter, conformity is all that matters.


This is your strongest argument and if we talk math/science/logic, etc. there are cases where this is true, but in animal behavior the pieces are irrelevant to the whole, that the pieces conform to the whole is all that matters. It's about power: if a piece is too different it weakens the power of the entire structure, this cannot be allowed. The collective will determine the path to take, the individual that has deviated too far from the accepted path is cast out by the collective. Individual pieces may differ, but only by minor variances. If the variance is too large the member is cast aside or it could cause disruption and thus the weakening of the whole. The result of the disruption is irrelevant that it does not form to the control structure is. The hive can't have power if the control of the hive is not intact.

The hive-mind is not an explanation put over top of an existing structure, it is in effect the determiner of the structure itself. In humans it starts with education: you are taught the ways of your group's collective, i.e. in the United States we are taught the pledge of allegiance. Failure to comply to the request results in detention, the collective will punish those that do not conform. It continues through adulthood by the repetition of cultural memes: "Rugged American individualism", should you point out that most Americans work for someone else, vote for only two political parties, and tend to vote in the same politicians repeatedly even though they despise said politicians you are called "anti-American", "that's not what it means", or simply "you're an idiot", these are all statements to force your conformity. That the meme doesn't hold to the evidence is irrelevant, that you react to the meme in a socially appropriate manner is all that matters. Deviations from the meme or the training result in punishment, this is how the hive-mind is developed. Ever heard this one: "Don't think, just do it." The logic of said act is irrelevant, that you comply to the will of the collective is all that is relevant. Forcing acceptance of these ideas by threat of punishment the collective is able to replicate the same thought patterns in all it's members-- this is the hive-mind.

Well I'd like to note that in all my workplaces I've never tried to make trouble. I try to fit in and follow the rules like a good employee, but I just don't fit. The contradictory concepts you struggle with I do as well. I think the reason NT's do so well is that they're able to "feel" the social environment and know which option is the appropriate one to please their superiors and co-workers. The manager doesn't want you to ask too many questions as it drains their time and production, same with the co-workers. This is why hiring managers are important in today's world, they weed out prospective employees that don't fit the company's social structure because this can cause disruption and lower production. They want you to walk in and just "get it".

The above posts remind me of tornado drills. I grew up in rural Ohio where tornados are prevalent. There's a state law that requires schools to have both fire drills (makes sense) and tornado drills (a bit dubious, those) several times a year.

In a tornado drill students are herded to an inside wall, preferably not near windows, and instructed to assume a sort of frog-squat position. What, if any effectiveness this has against 200MPH winds and flying debris is negligible, but I guess the powers that be have to feel as if they are doing something. Personally, I seriously question if having to be wedged in tightly next to anyone in that claustrophobic position for any length of time could be worse than death by tornado. Having to do those drills was absolutely creepy, especially if you happened to be wearing a dress that day. It was even worse if you had to herd out of the classroom next to or in-between those of questionable hygiene. I can't stand strange people touching me- let alone stinky ones!

I think lying prone makes more sense, but the standing joke among the students was that one was to assume the frog-squat position to be better able to "kiss your @ss goodbye." What's the point, if you're going to die anyway, to have to die right there with everyone else, Jim Jones style? It's a school, not the Jamestown massacre.

I'd rather die not having to be scrunched up next to anyone else- and I'd really like to think my body parts wouldn't end up all mixed up with everyone else's.

At least they didn't try to convince you that hiding under a desk would protect you from a nuclear bomb, because as far as drills are concerned that was the dumbest one I've heard of yet.

"This is your strongest argument and if we talk math/science/logic, etc. there are cases where this is true,"

That is my only point. All the other things were me pointing out how that is so in specific examples.

"but in animal behavior the pieces are irrelevant to the whole, that the pieces conform to the whole is all that matter"

I 100% disagree with this statement. I think that you're just fitting a macro scheme onto something because you don't understand the micro schemes. You think the structures of people individual people are illogical and not self-serving at all, when they are not illogical at all and are -only- self-serving. You fail at perceiving these patterns and learning, and you -know- you fail at this, so I don't know why you then insist on saying they're illogical.

"Deviations from the meme or the training result in punishment, this is how the hive-mind is developed"
If this were the case then you would be in it too.

The hive-mind is not entirely illogical as it is a functioning set of algorithms. It is illogical in that it does not have a feedback component that keeps it in equilibrium with its environment.

The hive mind is no more made of material than is an individual mind. It is also not an aggregate of individual minds. It is a system intelligence that has a fractal and recursive relationship with individual minds.

I wrote this a while back on my blog. Will you please tell me what you think of it? I've done self-reflection on myself and this is my analysis on myself and the workplace and why I do not mesh.

https://whyifailedinamerica1.wordpress. ... mployment/

Taking initiative and being proactive is only a positive if it improves the situation. He made the workplace more efficient but also more dangerous by leaving the fryer unattended. A side eye while you help a coworker with boxes is leaving it unattended.

This is the problem with narrow focus. If you only look at one metric (in this case efficiency) an idea can seem perfect and other people seem stupid or hive minded if they don't accept it. But if you expand your focus to include other metrics (in this case safety) an idea that seems great can actually make things worse.

I googled OSHA restaurant regulations (God help me) and they simply say "never leave a deep fat fryer unattended". They don't go on to define "unattended" so it's possible that being near it while actually doing something else may not break that regulation. But I wouldn't count on it. When somebody gets hurt because an OSHA regulation doesn't get followed, it's the employer who gets punished, not the employee (by fines). This regulation would protect employees from being required to simultaneously do other tasks while using the fryer by an employer who wanted to save on labor costs. It wasn't written to slap down proactive teens but there you are.

In a tight labor market and with an adult employee it would have been worth it to explain the risks of doing something else while frying. But with lots of people looking for work and with teens who tend to ignore safety warnings, firing is a predictable outcome.