COMMENTARY
This graphic depiction of human condition caught my attention ... it seems to capture a common reality, and it does it in a simple and attractive way

Pessimism, Optimism and Where Dreamfish Swim and the ideas of Despair, Delusion and Action fit together very nicely.

Mentally, I think of this picture in a dynamic form, changing over time to reflect the behavior of a person and a society. And of course I think of how the elements of this picture can inform the design of a system of metrics that will encourage people and communities to move into the area of action.

In the area of action, I particularly like the idea that 'it is broken, we can fix it'. I remember an era when it was said that Americans did dfficult things immediately ... impossible things took a little longer. This was an era when a goal was to put a man ... as you were, an American ... on the moon, and within the decade it was done. Now there is a more important challenge ... to make the global economy work so that it improves the quality of life of everyone. It can be done ... and my aim is to have metrics like TrueValue Metrics make it possible to do it rapidly with the least false steps.
Peter Burgess

Peter Burgess
Fwd: [Dreamfish-discussion] Learned Helplessness
Mark Roest Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 1:03 PM
To: Bill Veltrop , Patricia Neal , Bert van Lamoen , Max Shkud , Sahibou Oumarou , coalition@googlegroups.com Cc: compendiuminstitute@yahoogroups.com, building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet@googlegroups.com Bcc: peterbNYC@gmail.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Bashaw
Date: Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 8:29 AM
Subject: Re: [Dreamfish-discussion] Learned Helplessness
To: dreamfish-discussion@lists.dreamfish.com

Hi Grant and Dreamfish;

Your post on learned helplessness and the link to Seligman’s work got me thinking about Dreamfish and the Pessimism - Optimism spectrum. I've prepared a little sketch showing where I think Dreamfish fits into Seligman’s model of how we think and act. I thought the results are kind of interesting:

[ Also posted at http://www.danbashaw.com/dreamfish-context.png ]

The way I see it, the 'End Zones' of pessimistic despair and optimistic delusion are not places where work can be done and action can be taken. At both of these extremes, as the thought-clouds are meant to show, there is no motivation or capacity for change.

In my view it is in the middle zone – the zone of action – where real change can be made and impact the world.

Within this zone people with different ways of thinking can work together and accomplish Dreamfishy things. I've drawn the Dreamfish head and body over towards the optimistic side of the zone of action, since this is where Dreamfish is focused: towards acts of creation and transformation.

However that is not the whole story... Dreamfish has a tail, and that is where the necessary activities of maintenance and operations that require a dollop of pessimism happen.

(My idea that maintenance or problem-solving and creation are two different processes comes from Robert Fritz's 'The Path of Least Resistance'. Mapping problem-solving to a pessimistic bias and creation to an optimistic bias is my own view.)

When I look at the diagram, the part that is jarring to me is the 'Zone of Delusion'... North American business and social culture has a strongly 'positivist' ideology, so I expect many will agree with my typification of the 'Zone of Despair' and the 'Zone of Action', but will find my typification of the 'Zone of Delusion' wrong-headed. However I do feel that it is possible to be 'off the scale' in the optimistic direction, as well as in the pessimistic.

It's the Zone of Action' where the action is – And Dreamfish can do excellent work within this zone.

Swim On!

Dan

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Grant Bowman wrote:

I wanted to share some thoughts on learned helplessness prompted by a discussion between two friends of mine, Rick Moen and Ed Cherlin who have useful and informative perspectives on education and computers, two topics I am committed to. I hope this post will help serve as a starting point for Dreamfish related discussions.

The wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness was where I first turned to read more after seeing the forwarded email below. The discussion in the article and link to clinical depression intrigues me. On outlook of 'other than personal, pervasive, or permanent' was key in one part of the article.

--
Dan Bashaw
skype: danbashaw
twitter: danbashaw

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