From the examples we can see that regardless of the initial roles adopted each individual can move from one position on the triangle to another in a fraction of a second and individuals move around the drama triangle for the same reasons they play games they want to get their needs met but they’re too scared to ask for what they want directly so they play games and manipulate others into giving them what they want.
– Lewis Psychology channel/Youtube

Ha, so here we go: scared to ask for what you want and therefore manipulate to get it anyway. Smart. Self-defeating…

each drama triangle role entails a discount. So the rescuer discounts the ability of others to think for themselves and act on their own initiative. A victim discounts themselves and their own ability to problem solve or initiate change and the persecutor discounts others feelings and their value let’s look at another example and gain
– Lewis Psychology channel/Youtube

On rescuer role

The rescuer also sees others as one-down and not okay but the rescuer responds by offering help from a one up position. The rescuer believes “I have to help all these people because they’re not capable of helping themselves”. Rescuers work hard to help other people and often neglect their own needs. They can use guilt to keep their victims dependent and feel guilty themselves if they’re not rescuing somebody.
– Lewis Psychology channel/Youtube

This is very interesting. So the rescuer is also triggered by grandiosity/entitlement schema, but their coping strategy is overcompensation, instead of submission of the persecutor.

You die the way you live your life.
– Timothy E. Quill MD

A man with road rage confronts an elderly driver. Then all hell breaks loose. | Nullarbor

A short animated film. Hillarious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfK79Xblpus

Thought on why there’s such a lack of empathy on social media

Der Charakter eines Menschen zeigt sich im Handeln.
– Common quote taken from blog of @kattascha

Right. Indeed. There are two levels to the world: https://qoto.org/@FailForward/105652797745648749

And the problem with interactions in the digital sphere is exactly the lack of physical reality, body language clues, etc. If I cannot sense what your acts are, the only heuristic to guess your character are (my interpretations of) your words. But since words are a one dimensional linear serialisation of the rich and colourful universe in your head, by necessity the character estimate I construct will be largely wrong (as would be any 1D projection of an xD object).

Perhaps the robustness principle would be a good guidance here:

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
– Robustness Principle/Wikipedia/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

It’s not exactly tolerance. Benevolence? What’s the right human word for this?

SON OF A WITCH | DARK SWAMP BLUES on the Dobro Duolian Resonator Guitar

https://youtu.be/J46sRuj99Cw

#music #fediradio

Social interactions in (my current corner of) Fediverse as a set of interlocked Karpman triangles

Observing the fragment of the Fediverse where I landed upon my inception into this space about a month ago, it’s clear Karpman’s drama triangles are the driving force of its dynamics.

There are obvious triangles being played out here: Right-wingers (persecutors) vs. LGBT crowd (victims) plus all the techies on top (rescuers). Men (persecutors) vs. Feminists (victims shifting to persecutors) with (Feminist?) Men/techies as rescuers(?). This deserves a deeper analysis in its own right.

And around all that a vast crowd of instigators, impostors, cheerleaders and fans with a small minority of mostly eloquent introverts deeply interested in endless intellectual discussions with the other crowds. Fun.

Plenty of artificially induced drama (let’s start morning with a dig into a beef I hold!), lot of tactical shifts in the triangles, little empathy. Ingredients for plenty of everyday fun.

I am not criticising it, some parts of it I even enjoy. Probably because I am slowly discovering how my life role is that of a rescuer - enabler of codependent pathological behaviours in others. Stuff to work on…

Productive escapes from drama triangles (reading notes cont.)

Karpman drama triangle is a useful way to analyse conflicts and pathological dramas in interactions, specifically in families and relationship breakdowns.

In 1990, Acey Choy M.Ed., PTSTA, introduced the Winning Triangle in the Transactional Analysis Journal as the antithesis of the Karpman Triangle

(image src: https://bpdfamily.com/content/karpman-drama-triangle)

Advancement of that was The Empowerment Dynamic. (Good start is Wikipedia).

They present it as a inverted Karpman triangle with proposed escape routes/shifts for each role:

• Victim –> Creator – victims shall move are encouraged to be outcome-oriented as opposed to problem-oriented and take responsibility for choosing their response to life challenges.
• Persecutor –> Challenger – a person that forces the creator to clarify his or her needs, and focus on their learning and growth.
• Rescuer –> Coach – The key difference between a rescuer and a coach is that the coach sees the creator as capable of making choices and of solving his or her own problems.

This is a vey useful way to analyse the situation and shed light on the pathologies involved. Some therapists use it. I find it very elightening. Especially (again), that rescuer shift. To me, it means a hands-off approach to life: we are adults, you say what you need to say, I do the same, we see whether we meet in the middle, if yes, great, if not, no problem too, bye. It’s a somewhat cold, yet rather healthy way of dealing with independent interactions.

Note on symathy vs. empathy vs. compassion

The remark on “independent” reminded me of the way the distinction is presented in the picture:

(c.f., here for a link to the original source)

The way it’s formulated, the sympathy box is a good match for victims (especially when they are in a group), while the compassion box is a good match for rescuers. The healthy way is the way of empathy: independent.

Karpman drama triangle (reading notes)

Karpman’s triangle is a simple tool for conceptualizing the dynamics of dysfunctional roles in conflict and for mapping the role changes as the conflict grows.

This is a very simple and visual tool which, if you saw this played out before (everybody did, but some do not realise it), you immediately recognise what it is about.

Start of reading and resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle
Another very good resource: https://bpdfamily.com/content/karpman-drama-triangle

Karpman Drama Triangles - Pathological Conflict

(summary extracts)

Karpman observed that in conflict and drama, there is “good guy vs bad guy” thinking. He also observed that the participants become drawn in, even seduced, by the energy that the drama generates. The drama obscures the real issues.* Confusion and upset escalates. Solutions are no longer the focus.

Karpman defined three roles in the “transaction”; Persecutor, Rescuer (the one up positions) and Victim (one down position).

• The victim is not an actual victim, but rather someone feeling or acting like a victim. Even though the victim is actually acting, nonetheless, the victim sincerely feels victimized, oppressed, helpless, hopeless, powerless, ashamed, and seems unable to make decisions, solve problems, take pleasure in life, or achieve insight. The victim’s stance is “Poor me!”
• The Persecutor is controlling, blaming, critical, oppressive, angry, authoritative, rigid, and superior - self righteous. The persecutor insists, “It’s all your fault.”
• The Rescuer is a classic enabler. The rescuer feels guilty if he/she doesn’t rescue. Yet his/her rescuing has negative effects: it keeps the victim dependent and gives the victim permission to fail. It also keeps the rescuer stuck in focusing energy on someone else’s problems, not solving his/her own. The rescuer’s line is “Let me help you.”

Drama triangles form when participants who are predispositioned to adopt the roles of a drama triangle come together over an issue.

Motives

The roles of a victim and persecutor (whether existent, or not) are rather obvious:

The victim starts or catalyzes the formation of the drama triangle. The victim, if not being “persecuted”, will seek out a persecutor and also a rescuer who will “save” the day but also perpetuate the victim ‘s negative feelings. Any time that we don’t take responsibility for our feelings and make ourselves out to be a victim, we are setting the stage for a drama triangle to form, and failure.

Now the role of a rescuer is an intriguing one:

The actions of the rescuer are often pivotal and tend to drive the conflict intensity level by how aggressively they respond. The motivations of the rescuer are the least obvious…In the terms of the drama triangle, the rescuer is someone who has a mixed motive and is actually benefiting in some way for being “the one who rescues”.

This is intriguing stuff. Note to self: explore more of the rescuer hidden dynamics. The surface is clear.

Escape

Diagnosing many conflicts around is often relatively straightforward. There are of course more complex cases (such as in movies, or family dynamics, etc.), but most cases could be relatively well analysed.

Now the interesting question is how to get out of this.

They identify two strategies:

1. Move to the center. Stop participating as a victim, rescuer or persecutor. Instead, find and hold a center position. The center of the drama triangle contains elements of each corner - it is a combination of sensitivity, compassion, and responsibility - with a solutions focus, even if the solution is retreat.
2. Refuse to accept your opponent’s force. Do not struggle with the other participants in the triangle, or yield to them. Instead, make a counter move with one opponent that allows them to fully take an awkward, indefensible, or unreasonable position. If you have successfully taken the center, your opponent will back off, rather than unmasking themselves and their exaggerated role.

These are both very useful strategies. Both are bold and firm. In a way, this very much reminds me of Aikido philosophy:

aiki refers to the martial arts principle or tactic of blending with an attacker’s movements for the purpose of controlling their actions with minimal effort. One applies aiki by understanding the rhythm and intent of the attacker to find the optimal position and timing to apply a counter-technique.

Preventing triangle formation

Useful once you know how this stuff works. But the first few times, we tend to fall into drama triangles head-first with very damaging consequences.

• Refuse to be Superior or Inferior: To break the dynamic of superior/inferior requires us to learn to accept differences and similarities between ourselves and others as neither good nor bad.
• Stop The Poor Me Game. Stop Being a Victim In order to stop being a victim, we will have to be willing to accept the actual circumstances of our relationship with the other person.
• Stop The Blame Game. Don’t be a Persecutor It also means we will take responsibility for how we act and feel around the other person without taking the attitude that the other person is controlling our feelings or actions.
• Stop Fixing the other person. Don’t be a Rescuer Giving up rescuing the other person is an action, not a discussion. It isn’t something to announce to the other person. It isn’t something to negotiate with the other person. It isn’t something to threaten the other person with. It is all action.

@FailForward Note to self: check out Oddmuse. Could be actually a good solution for my objective.

COVID fatigue and π factor

These months whether I am walking the dog and meeting fellow dog walkers, speaking to family and acquaintances on the phone, or reading news, I hear how people are tired of Corona lockdowns, they are fed up, depressed and so on.

In a conversation with a neighbour while walking my dog this morning this popped up again. She said: “I always hope it will end soon. Like next month or so. And then I am disappointed. Again. And again.”

Inspecting my own feelings, I feel nothing of that. Not that I am cheering this mess, but my life feels kind of normal - in this specific respect. Partly it’s due to engaging in remote-since-ever environment, partly because my social life does not depend on things coming to me, but me seeking them out. Still, why I don’t feel the same about lockdowns and all that?

And then I realised that part of the problem is that naive optimism of my neighbour. She “overexpects” and the world “underdelivers”. Not that it’s too different for me, but there is a slight, yet important difference: As an engineer, I am acutely aware of the world being a notorious under-deliverer.

Especially in the art of software development velocity estimations, we are deeply aware of the existence of the (hidden?) π factor (e.g., here):

1. whenever an engineer provides an estimate, to arrive at a more realistic figure, multiply by π=3.14…
2. apply rule 1 even if the engineer claims he/she already used the π factor.

In effect, whenever somebody tells you that this COVID pandemic will be over in 1 year from now, use the π multiplier. Since the beginning of this situation, it was clear to me that we are in this for a long-haul. Better to get to terms with the new life style, then being constantly disappointed and perhaps even depressed.

My thoughts are with all the people who have it tough these months. Especially the lonely ones out there.

P.S.
Reality check: in December’20 I finally delivered a project which was originally planned for 18 months. The real devel time was almost exactly 5 years. There goes 3.33! Well, let’s better not speak about the deep black hole in the budget we dug up along the way :-).

BANDABARDO’ Ubriaco canta amore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PpebpR9mLk

Good morning track.

#music

My quest towards a public scrapebook

Objective

At the beginning of the year, I embarked on this social network journey. The actual motivation is to find a semi-public place to collect some of my thoughts, bookmarks, quips and other trivia. The immediate inspiration was the description of thoughts summarizing/exploration workflow (creative soup there) at Ribbonfarm by @vgr.

Objective: I am trying to establish a public personal scrapbox in which half-baked and nuclear ideas can be kept, sharpened, collected and from time to time something smarter might emerge and that I want to properly publish in a polished form. Kind of a wiki, editing of which would be strictly additive (because I think that way, I don’t feel an urge to edit) and extremely simple using established and low-friction tooling.

Why I feel a need for it at all and for it to be somewhat public is a discourse for another time.

My starting point actually was an idea to start a simple static blog (Jekyll?). Privately, since more than a year I anyway keep a whole zoo of hudnreds of private notes in Markdown written in QOwnNotes and Obsidian (because since many months I cannot decide which I like better) synced by QNAP Sync (and OwnCloud) between my devices. Footnote: actually I am a paper person and since more than 10 years I keep paper notebooks with notes for work.

The problems with maintaining a plain static blog were for me twofold:

1. I am looking for a very low threshold posting experience (e.g., while I am walking - and I do a lot of that - and want to remember something, or note a silly thought - i.e., must work with desktop/laptop and phone). Static blog requires a workflow via editor, generator, git, publishing, etc. Lots of hasssle there.
2. I am looking for at least some minimal feedback. Otherwise the exercise would be a pure self-satisfactory aggrandisement and I do not need that any more. I.e., I would like at least some basic commenting facility.

Path to Mastodon

Then I stumbled upon the blog post about adding Mastodon comments to static blog by @carl. That led me to Mastodon.

Mastodon in general and the setup at qoto.org instance specifically, looked to me as a potentially useful direction to explore. Mastodon user timeline/wall can be treated as the public face of the scrapbox, while the comments inside could enrich the scrapbox content and provide either entertainment, intellectual sharpening, or both. At the same time qoto.org allows me to write lengthy entries with rich formatting (and much more on top, but these two features are relevant for my objective). Fedilab, toot and Qoto web interface are easy tools making the whole process easy for me. And I do not care much that sometimes it’s not exactly elegant, or nice, it just works(tm).

So far, the experiment led to interesting insights and yet more questions including: shall I run my own instance? (really?), instance of what? (writefreely, friendica, qoto clone, pleroma, etc.), etc. When I arrive to some conclusions, I might write it up at some late point.

Keeping more permanent records

The scrapbook/shoebox place is meant to be more of a log and a collection out of which some more coherent ideas shall emerge. Question arises where to put those better worked out ideas? Of course I already have a couple, but I keep them private and therefore also somewhat less polished. A blog would be indeed in order.

So here I am again at the static blog idea, but this time only for the worked out ideas and/or with less friction:

1. record into Mastodon easily from anywhere; and
2. automatically archive my account’s public timeline in some more permanent place under my control.

Design sketch

Enter extration of toots from Mastodon and further processing. I started to explore how to extract public toots from Mastodon into my own archive. Apart from directly using Mastodon API, people obviously solved that problem already:

• Mastodon Archive: involved script which can do a lot. The problem here is the Mastodon API rate limiting. TODO: Needs more exploration.
• MastoUserScrape.py]: small Python script scraping the public HTML side of the Mastodon’s user profile. No login, just very basic HTML parsing. With little effort, I made it work against qoto.org. Some minor issues remain, like embedded toots, etc. Very promissing!
• of ourse I could also scrape the RSS feed of the user profile. Easy too, but only a limited number of toots can be exacted that way (front-page+).

I could extract toots every couple of hours and then use Jekyll/git to push them to the static page at my space.

Forgetting

Now, the author of Mastodon Archive tool is @kensanata and in the tool he built in also an interesting feature to delete/expire toots. He mentions there other tools and links to his own write-up about record keeping.

That turn out to be a whole new interesting direction. Alex is right there, old traces of one’s digital past shall be under one’s control. I agree with his policy (also on his profile) to automatically delete old toots. If I stick with Mastodon, I think I will implement it too - besides scraping and keeping for myself, or potentially keeping them published under my own control.

Future does not end with punching somebody in face. You also need to live with yourself afterwards.

Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name a few.

This is a picture of the future as painted by modern science - a picture that will surely evolve over time as we dig for more clues to how our story will unfold. Much of the science is very recent - and new puzzle pieces are still waiting to be found.

Fascinating video telling the story of what today’s physics knows about how the future of the universe unfolds. Even if I knew bits and pieces, it’s cool to see it put together in a visually captivating manner. And the timescales are just staggering. I think the video conveys the ideas very well, even if it becomes somewhat speculative near the end.