Why do I keep posting about other people's posts that are easier to locate than mine? Isn't that sort of backward? I may be overdue for writing something of my own. However, it won't be this one.
The point here is to get an idea down quickly.
What is the idea though? That's the problem.

I'm thinking about symbols (in general, not any particular one) and mentalism: how the old view of psychoanalysis seems really obsolete today but still relevant. That the criticism of neuroscience (felt to be sticking "neuro-" in front of some other class of obvious generalization, e.g. "neuromanagement bullshit") is off base but understandable because the narrative attempts to explain things in layman's terms, never getting to the actual "neuro" part. Ah, the consequences of presuming stupid people are stupid. Actually a consequence of thinking it necessary to dumb down one's writing.

The "neuro-obviousness" problem is symptomatic of another "shadow" feature of science, which does stem from the presumption that one's audience is stupid. Science, both the body of knowledge and the social network of scientists and their hangers-on, suffer greatly from their past practice of ignoring the "message" side of what they do, and this is even more dangerous than the political left ignoring "framing" as Lakoff accuses. This may be changing as "Bush-era science", that is PR in a scientistic frame threatens to displace real science in forming policy. Who would want to use science to develop policy anyway? It's incomprehensible for non-scientists. Ironically, the one exception is the neuro-obvious study of the simple things the brain does and our ability to quantify them. Unfortunately, this field is not immune to rhetorical pollution.

Hopefully I'll have time to rework this. Not now though.

Bob Sutton contributed to BusinessWeek's "Trouble at the Office" edition and posted about it. I thought his point about people in power fits closely to some of what I've been thinking about entrenchment, so I'll cite the article and his post here,
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097052772988.htm?chan=magazine+channel_special+report
and
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/08/businessweek-issue-on-trouble-at-the-office.html

The basic idea is that anyone placed in a position of power can draw inward, become less helpful to others, and act as if they are exempt from following the same rules as everyone else. In other words, even a small amount of power corrupts in those specific ways.

I haven't written it yet, but that's pretty much the cornerstone of entrenched behavior. But I don't think it necessarily happens only with conferred power--seniority develops more slowly but the effect is the same.

That makes me wonder if it's a false cause / effect relation: if that subordination of others and superordination of one's self is what constitutes power. I suppose the test would be whether the only alternatives for those in that situation are either to become paranoid jerks or to be ineffectual and fail. The Third Way seems what we're looking for here.

Is there anything I omitted to write before? ..that I think is important, I mean.

Right now I've been reading about machines, at least some modern and postmodern kinds, read George Dyson's Engineers' Dreams (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysong08/dysong08_index.html) referring to Turing and Ulam and von Neumann, after hearing yesterday Neil Baldwin lecturing on William Carlos Williams quote "a poem is a machine made out of words," continued less famously," in which every part is related to all the other parts and every part is dependent on all the other parts," ties it all together. Read also about Lakoff vs. Chomsky back in the day. Before hearing they were bitter rivals in academia for several years I'd felt Lakoff's ideas come across as too generalized while Chomsky's too overspecific. And both believe in the political importance of linguistics. Seeing some description about the points of linguistics that drove them to conflict and drama--Lakoff the semanticist insisting on connecting language and therefore mental phenomena to the experiential world and Chomsky the mental syntax guy, both seriously ambitious scholars --I realized why each seemed to me in his own very different way interesting but also really boring. Linguists understand the structure of language far too well to ever be able to write an interesting story.

Narrative is how text is best understood.

Just as understanding of psychology enables marketing to be effective, understanding of literature enables a text to convey psychological meaning: literal language does not make for compelling text any more than reciting policy facts constitutes exciting political rhetoric.

Metaphor and Machine is the title of this post. Or not.

(I got to say "narrative" again. I feel smart and contemporary.)