More on the frame

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, my friend, hello. Happy, what is today? Happy Thursday. It's not Thursday.

Chris Wait, it's Friday. It's Friday. Happy Friday. Even better.

Scott Hey, look, I can identify the day of the week, you know, within one day without even looking at a calendar.

Chris Wow. I mean, that's pretty impressive, right? That's a special skill. Is it, though?

Scott Well... You have been traveling, so... You know, I could do it within, you know... That was pretty impressive. So, here we are talking about frames a little more. This is leading up into our Basecamp conversation that's coming up on the 21st, correct?

Chris 21st of March, yeah.

Scott 21st of March.

Chris I'm really looking forward to it. I mean, we've really set the table, I think, for an ambitious conversation where I think we can all really come out of it with a... Bringing together cognitive diversity for a cognitive edge. And to me, this is a great example of the kind of question that it can generate an impactful conversation. And it's going to have a lot more impact if you're talking about it with other people who think differently from you.

Scott And it's probably, it's going to be the most universal conversation We do, or one of. I mean, it's because it's something that everybody lives in, with, and through. This is something that nobody can avoid because when we're talking about frames, we're talking about kind of the interpretive lenses and stories. That shape our reality, right? That allow us to see reality as not just a bunch of discrete kind of things, but some kind of unified picture that we can talk about, describe, ask questions about, debate, dialogue about. So without frames, none of this would be possible.

Chris And I like that the question has been said is, what does the frame make you see? It is an invitation to recognize and explore that these frames, they have agency. It's not just what do you see, but it's what is the frame out there that is shaping you whether you know it or not? How is it shaping what you see and what you can't see? I'm really curious. When you hear that question and think about your own life, what does the frame make you see? What sort of stuff arises in you?

Scott So first off, I think about how we see persons. There was a guy, Harold Turner, who was a New Zealander and sort of an intellectual historian, and he wrote this book actually called Frames of Mind. And it had all these neat little charts. That's what I like about it. But in it, he talked about three... He thought there were three root frames. He thought there was the oceanic frame, where reality is really an ocean and diversity is an illusion. So he thought you saw this in certain kinds of Eastern religions, like you saw it in different ways in Hinduism and Buddhism. You see it in... A family is a bunch of individuals, and a city is a bunch of families. So the most real thing that you can discover is the things at the most atomistic individual part. And then he talks about the web frame, which he thought was Semitic, and you find in Africa, that says, I am I because we are we, and where unity and diversity are interdependent realities. And that's one that he actually personally had kind of a preference for, I think. But I think about that because...

For someone in late modern America or Canada or Europe, I think the atomistic thing still kind of rings true. That what's most real is you as an individual, right? That you are like a group is a bunch of individuals, right? Or again, I think in experimental science, we're always trying to see breaking down things into constituent parts to understand what they are and how they work. So I think that to me is just a basic thing that comes to mind. When you see another person in everyday life, what do you see? Do you see someone that's really part of the same reality as you? Ultimately, you're both part of the ocean of being. Or do you see someone that's really different, that's a different constituent reality than you? And I think that affects the way you think about... You know, the way I think about rights, the way I think about

this is my project that I get authorship of, that I get, you know, like, it's just, I think those kinds of things, that's the first thing that comes to mind. It's just, as when you get up and start walking around thinking, where does the boundaries between you and the world end?

Chris And it's interesting having just sort of gone through, well, and still going through a global pandemic where, you know, kind of that web identity There's been a lot of opportunity to kind of recognize that, that I am I, but we are also we, and we're inextricably linked in in this web of what is. I think it's so interesting that I love that kind of three-part typology, because if you take as a starting point that, yeah, I mean, certainly in the I guess the society that I've grown up in, the kind of the atomistic frame is heavily built into institutions and incentives and all sorts of things. If I look at kind of the world today and talking in a lot of different contexts and business and policy and arts and stuff like that, it seems like no matter who I'm talking to, Every second conversation we're talking about ecosystems. This is like the new buzzword for people who are kind of trying to think their way through what's going on and how do things improve is sort of recognizing that we've been very atomistic and we need to figure out how to function at an ecosystem level. And that's where the insight ends. I mean, the conversations always reiterate that point and everybody gets nodding and then nobody really knows how to make the leap to a different way of looking and acting, you know, in any context. Talk about, you know, one interesting frame to think about is leadership. Okay, you know, you're the leader, Scott. We have this whole understanding of what that means.

There's a kind of linearity in our conception of leadership. And then you'll be in a thoughtful conversation about, no, no, life is more of an ecosystem. Like, oh, okay, so we need somehow more emergent and indirect management then. But what does that mean? Like, we've never seen it, we don't know how to, we don't know what it looks like, and so it's really hard to be aware of it. And I wonder if that's part of the, you know, where this might be going. Not like tomorrow, but over sort of the next 10, 20, over the next several years and generations, that we might just sort of, our frames might change in a way where... Where we're a lot more aware of the connective tissue of our reality.

Scott Yeah, I hope that's the case.

Chris One of the interesting things... Sounds like the nice version of the future. Right. I mean, one of the things that, as an American, that...

Scott What strikes me as remarkable is the degree to which a libertarian strain in American political discourse in life still is pretty strong. And for everything we know about how interconnected we all are, right? And how your decisions affect my decisions. We're in shared ecosystems all the time. But then we revert to a kind of political discourse, or at least a big chunk of the country does, that acts as if we are discrete, independent, hermetically sealed actors very often. As long as I think I'm not affecting anybody, I'm not. The other thing I was thinking too was... That even Turner's book is a frame, right? Because it works neatly because there's three. And again, I don't think it does violence to reality or anything, because I see the truth in it. But also, once you start to say, well, there's three frames... Well, then, like, if something looks like, it's like when they, it's like when they, explorers discovered the duck-billed platypus, I guess, in Australia, and they were writing about it, and they sent their corpse back to England, and they were like, you sewed this thing together, like, nothing, nothing exists like this, right?

So, you know, if a frame comes about, if a frame that doesn't fit in the topology, we either say it's not a real frame, or you ram it into one of the other frames. So even a way that is trying to elucidate frames of mind, often there's just a kind of, there's a framing that an analysis of frames does.

Chris Well, so yeah, so this is, I mean, this is the, I guess the, there's no question that when we talk about our frames and what they make us see, we're navigating very subtle waters, in a sense. Because some of the frames, you might call them forms. I mean, we cannot live without them, and they do useful work. Think of a book or a magazine. You pick that up, you pick up that device, and you know what to do with it. Thank you very much. And it is this way. Nowadays, every app maker has somebody who does UX, who works on the user experience. And I think UX developers think that this is something new that they do now. But There is deep UX. There's a user experience design and all sorts of thinking, very careful thinking about books, about magazines and how they're laid out. And they're working with frames that they know are out there in society. And they're conforming to them in subtle ways.

And then at the same time, there are frames that just stay on books. Take the Bible, for example. I know you and I had this conversation about how the Bible as it exists today, when the individual components of it were written, nobody knew that it was going to make up a Bible. I'm just writing letters to this weird Christian group over there on that island. That I visited, and I'm going to send them a note, but I didn't write it with an awareness that this is going to become the holy text.

Scott And the people writing the New Testament, they had a concept of a holy text by then, because there was a formation of the Hebrew Bible. It was disputed what was canonical and what wasn't in first century Judaism. But they knew what a Bible was. But they didn't think they were writing one. They didn't imagine like a second half that would be inserted into the sacred text and need to have two parts of it. I mean, they didn't have any concept of that.

Chris And so it changes for us what those contents are, that they've been packaged in a different way and framed in a different way. And it occurs to me that people, and maybe famous people are the easiest example of this, where You know, we can change what they are to us by shifting the frame. With dead people whose whole lives are lived, you know, you can kind of, you know, you look at Abraham Lincoln's early life and you say, oh, wow, okay, so he was a complete failure at everything he attempted to do. And you look at his later life and you say, no, he was a transformational figure in the history of a nation. And they're both true, but how wide is your frame on that person? Or you could take kind of present day and people get embroiled in scandals like an Andrew Cuomo. So the frame shifts and suddenly our whole experience of that person, of that facet of reality is changed.

And then, you know, it seems sometimes that frame that shifts, it's kind of, you know, I'm not really sure who the agent is. It's just, oh, that's newsworthy. That's what's broken. And I guess there's a background morality that says that's important to focus on. And then sometimes, you know, social movements, they manage to very... Well, yeah, I think about this with Andrew Cuomo without the Me Too movement.

Scott This would be a really different kind of story, right? Because it's – I mean, here's a guy who's divorced, unmarried, is making romantic gestures and things toward women. There was a time in American political life where this would not have been – Not necessarily career-ending kind of potentially kind of thing, but the frame has changed about the way we look at boundaries in the workplace, about the nature of women's, you know, what kind of space a woman is entitled to and what violates that and that kind of thing. So it's a really, yeah, you're right. I also think the biggest frame shifter in American public life In my adult lifetime, the biggest and quickest was the marriage equality movement. I mean, around same-sex marriage. That happened so quickly relative to social movements. I mean, that was so effective and moved so quickly. I mean, it's remarkable.

A lot of the country now, even if you're – there's even a decent swath of cultural conservatives. How quickly a movement that really was thoughtful and knew how to tell a story moved public sentiment.

Chris So it's interesting to think of social movements as efforts to consciously shift the frame and to say, you've been paying attention to this, we should be paying attention to that. Or we should have always been in paying attention to this. Or look at this other stuff that we could be paying attention to, that this is what social movements are doing, is trying to bring into frame stuff that was excluded from it. And I think you're absolutely right that the capacity to shift the frame by kind of By spreading a new way of seeing is much, much, much, much stronger now because of the technologies that we have available to kind of find one another and amass public support around them. So we could definitely go down that path, and I'm happy to keep exploring that path if you want, because there's so much to explore around social movements today. I think what's also interesting, and I hope this comes out in the kind of in-person conversation we managed to put together on March 21st, but this question about what does the frame make you see, I think is also an invitation to look for the hidden movements. I think, for example, of friends in arts and culture, or people who are explicitly picking up the tools of culture, like people who work in branding, they have a real awareness that we in the arts and culture industry, we're not simply generating entertainment for society. We are constructing the frames through which the rest of society looks at whatever it is we're showing them.

And I remember a conversation I had with a brand executive and he's doing a He's doing a branding project for an Israeli artificial intelligence company. It gave me a chance to talk to him about something that's always confused and interested me, which is that if I do a Google image search for artificial intelligence, all the pictures are the same. Apparently, artificial intelligence is blue. That is the color of AI, right? And it's always a kind of, you know, vaguely like Will Smith, iRobot, some very human form robot, or it's like a picture of a human brain, but it's with blue digital circuitry and stuff like that. And I said, like, why is there only one visual understanding of artificial intelligence? And he said, oh, that's because that's what Ridley Scott brought to popular culture was that conception of that's what AI looks like. And nobody else recognizes it, but we're all working within the frame that he offered to society. And I think that that's also the opportunity to get conscious about the unconscious framing that is without which we could not live.

Scott It's interesting you say the Ridley Scott thing, or just the way that... We're thinking about that picture. I was talking with a minister friend who was saying that he was reading... Who's the author of Hominids? You're seriously asking me to know that? No, you know the guy. Sapiens. No, Sapiens. Who's the author of Sapiens? Oh, yeah. Uwe Harari. Uwe Harari. Okay. I never remember his name. So he was reading some stuff in Harari and he was saying like... That religion is going to die out because as AI becomes more powerful, and we use AI for more decisions, why would AI prioritize religion? And I said, well, it's interesting you say that. Have you ever watched the remake of Battlestar Galactica? And he's like, no, I'm like, there's a picture where the AI is religiously obsessed, right? And actually it rejects the human religion in form of a

kind of monotheism that it sees as sort of superior to this human when it sees this human superstitious religion. And I'm like, look, that's just a different picture, a different frame of an AI that wants to be human.

Chris So maybe what would be helpful, I think there's a helpful distinction for us to make between visible frames and hidden frames. If we're talking about marriage equality, that has now become a visible frame. A good example of a hidden frame, I think, or still hidden frame, is a frame like artificial intelligence. Now, what does that mean? Where did this concept come from? It's not like indelibly inscribed in the stars that that's what you call that stuff. That's a construction. And that we've constructed it that way. We call it artificial intelligence. And we've got a picture in our head of it's like a human brain but a machine. It has really focused our attention on the potential for replacement. It's sort of the machine thinking like a human and replacing the human thinking. You know, what if instead we, because it's not that at all, it's something very different.

I mean, if we thought about it instead as alien intelligence, is that this is intelligence, but it doesn't behave at all the way human intelligence does. Then we might spend a lot less time thinking about how can we use this to replace human performance and maybe spend more time exploring how could we use this to explore different ways of thinking.

Scott I love that term, alien, even though it sounds very arresting. There's a guy, Paul Griffiths, who is a Christian theologian at Duke University, and he's written a lot about how the Christian tradition deals with other traditions. And he says, I don't like to say other religions because it's too prejudicial. Then you're going to categorize everything kind of the same way. Oh, it's one of those.

Chris Right.

Scott And is it really a good religion if they don't do this, this, this? And he's like, how do we take it on its own terms? So that thing, alien intelligence is great because it's a different form of intelligence. It doesn't bias it with a term like artificial. I love that. I think that term, again, alien is such an arresting term. Just in... Contemporary English parlance, but I love it because I think it's helpful. Again, I think it's an – for me, you expanded the frame a bit.

Chris Maybe this is an obscure example, but you and I have been social scientists. We get this. Think of what social science does. You collect data and you try to figure out, well, what causes that? Why will some people get a vaccine and others not? The best social science model we might do, or someone at Harvard might do, You know, it has maybe a dozen variables in it. You know, it does some fancy what we think of as fancy mathematics to determine that, you know, these three or eight variables, they explain 35% of why some people get a vaccine and others don't. And, you know, that's kind of, we think of that as a good result. But, you know, if we threw, you know, all the data that exists into some algorithms and said, okay, like explore a model to explain this. You know, the efficient model that explains it, it may have a thousand dimensions to it, but it's the most efficient explanation. We can't possibly get in there ourselves and understand it, because we just don't think in that way. But this alien intelligence could.

And what would our relationship to an intelligence that we can't, like right now, you know, I think of, you know, conversations with, you know, policymakers here in Europe and, you know, they're trying to figure out laws to sort of govern artificial intelligence and, you know, and what makes good AI. And one of the things that they say is it should be possible. To explain the decision back to humans. If we're going to use the AI to make decisions for us, then it should be able to explain the decision because of X, Y, and Z. But for an alien intelligence, it can't explain it in terms that we understand. It's the best model to explain it, but we can't translate it back. It would be a completely different relationship. So that's a bit of an obscure sort of rabbit hole I just went down, but I think the general thing that...

There are so many hidden frames. And often, you know what, it's like look for the nouns. Just take any news article that is talking about something hot and topical and just circle the nouns and look at those and say like, what does this help me see? And what does it hide from view?

Scott Yeah, the thing I was thinking too earlier was about the way we Use frames selectively, or we import... So I was thinking about when Plato is emerging on the scene in the 6th century.

Chris Oh yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

Scott Plato, exactly. It all goes back to Plato. I swear you sleep with Plato. Exactly. Actually, I'm not a huge Platonist, but I think he's really interesting. You have philosophers before him, like Heraclitus, that said reality is change, flux, it's mercurial, it's like you never step in the same river twice. And then you have people like Pythagoras that's like, no, real being is like geometry. It's spiritual, it's abstract, it's not physical, it never changes. And Plato kind of comes along and tries to say, well... How do we synthesize this? So he says, well, there's the mercurial part of reality, the physical world, and then there's the world of the forms that is really eternal, right? And so you never have really seen a pure triangle when you draw it because you could never get the angles pure because of physical reality and a pencil, there was dust and things like that. But it's mimicking something like the eternal form of triangle-ness, right?

But then also he thinks the most real thing about you, you change, your hair grows, you get hangnails, but the most real thing about you is your soul. You get hangnails. I didn't always say hangnails, but you could die of one in sixth century Greece. But for Plato, the most enduring thing about you is your soul, your eternal soul. Which kind of is the real you, right? And then the thing that's changing and in flux is the physical you. Now, it's amazing to me how many of us walk around and occasionally use that frame, even though we know it's completely... None of us in science and social science, we'd never think in that frame, right? But we use the term like soulmates and things like this, that when it serves us... Or in religious contexts, in certain philosophical contexts, we borrow that frame, even though most of the world around us, we'd find that frame obsolete. But then there are certain times when it's serviceable, when it seems kind of romantic. It's nice to think that you have a soul. Even though what we know scientifically is when your physical composure It changes what Plato thought of as the soul, right? That you're cognitive things, you're emotional. So it's just – but again, the frame hasn't died, right? It's still there.

Even though philosophically it's – and just everything – the entire way we indwell the world, for the average educated, reflective, late modern person in the West – Push is totally against that frame. But we found a place for it, which is just interesting how we selectively import things into the frame and let them do interpretive work in some places and in others we don't let it happen.

Chris Sorry, I had to move my cat.

Scott Hey, you always have to move the cat.

Chris The cats, boy, I would love to somehow get inside the consciousness of a cat and just understand this place that I live in. What is it to you? I think it's probably far less visual and much more zones of hot and cold.

Scott Not enough mice, not enough birds, not enough mice, not enough birds.

Chris It's my turn now, isn't it? I'm supposed to say something smart. Is your eternal soul on pause? I guess... Yeah, I can't help but... So, there seems to be... I think another big idea... There's a lot of technological change underway. There's just a lot of... Change in kind of the situation that it seems that humanity is in, whether you're paying attention to changing economics globally or changing politics and changing technologies. And it's all kind of one of the kind of catch-all ways that people are making sense of it is to talk about cultural change. And it occurs to me that You know, one of the ways to understand what does it mean when we talk about a culture of changing is it's kind of the aggregate shifting of many frames, of many ways of seeing things. I mean, you talked about sort of the frame of marriage and who can marry and what does that concept include and exclude. And I can see that concept changing further. What does it mean to marry? I think we still kind of have a dominant frame, which is it's sort of meant to be a lifelong union. And although often or maybe the majority of times it isn't, it was entered into with that intent. That frame may change.

And maybe marriage. And polyamory. Like, well, what a dumb idea. Why would we, that's not what we should do as such complex individuals. We should think of it as sort of a temporary commitment because that's where we're at. Or, you know, I don't know what that world will be. And polyamory is growing.

Scott The polyamorous movement is growing. I mean, it's still a minority, but it's not a fringe minority anymore. There's a lot of polyamorous people, especially if you're floating around metro areas. In North America, I'm sure, Western Europe, it's becoming more mainstream.

Chris I just can't help but think You'll have to edit that out. I don't know what to say.

Scott See, I stymied you at polyamory. Polyamory. That's really the... I'm not really sure that's a word. Stymied or what? Stymied you at polyamory? Or you were stymied.

Chris Polyamory?

Scott Yeah, I can't stymie... Polyamory is the word, yeah.

Chris Polyamory is the word, hey?

Scott Yeah, like multiple loves. Or if you're polyamory or polyamorous.

Chris Which I'm familiar with. I'm not familiar with the polyamory.

Scott Yeah, it's people.

Chris I mean, if you look on people... I would totally fail that in the spelling bee. That would have been... I mean, I would have been out before we got to polyamory, I know. But I definitely would have been out at that stage.

Scott I mean, they're writing about polyamory in vogue. I mean, if you go on dating sites, people are identifying, I'm polyamorous. So there are people that, on the front end of a dating site, are telling people, I've got multiple partners, and generally there's an emotional connection to these partners. We're not just sleeping around. And a relationship, to me, will look fluid. And usually, the people I've known, I haven't known many, but I've known several who are polyamorous. They and their partner both have multiple partners. And oftentimes the other partners know each other. And it's almost like an extended family. Again, it strikes me, it's hard for me to imagine, but that's my frame. But this is an emerging way of framing human love. And the thing is, it's not... That people are just discreetly having sex, right? They're forming polyamorous bonds. And it's almost like, you know, people talk about in the pandemic, you know, your pod or whatever, our pod. You know, the polyamory thing, it's kind of like a pod, right? And you have these different shared connections within it. And again, it's sort of, I think if you've got a traditional view...

A traditional kind of Western view of marriage and family. It's going to seem strange, but it doesn't seem... To the people I know that are involved in these sort of relationships, it's meaningful. It's deep. There's deep loyalties there. It's not, you know, again, we think it's not promiscuity. Right? It's a kind of an expanded circle.

Chris Which is how it would have been framed in the past.

Scott Right, right. And still people would frame it that way. And I might have framed it that way before I knew people. But also, I think, you know, it's interesting, too, because I think when you're reframing something like that, it takes so much social reinforcement to consider you're not crazy.

Chris It's interesting, like, you know, maybe one way to think of it is reframing. Another way to think of it is sort of like creating more frames. And so I'm thinking back to the conversation I had with someone about unconscious bias and how he felt that just as a frame to understand something, having that frame be a widely understood term, it kind of became the shorthand to kind of, okay, now this is a space for creative exploration, for productive conversation together. Let's talk about unconscious biases. Similarly, the fact that there is just a much broader currency in a concept like polyamory means that when someone says, okay, I'm going to label that promiscuity, You say, no, no, no, there is this other frame. I've got more conceptual resource to explain what it is and help people to see what's inside it. I don't have the fully formed thought, but it occurs to me that the more conscious we can get, Thank you very much.

Versus people who are wondering, why is the culture changing around me? Sorry, I have to let the cat out the door. He's really complaining. Give me a second. Can you hear that? I don't know if you can hear it.

Scott I can see him trying to climb the door. That cat does not want his frame challenged.

Chris He's not into it. Now he'll be scratching the door to get back in.

Scott No, but I think what you just said there, though, about the deliberate kind of engaging frames is... can make you into an agent of cultural building and change is a really good argument or case for a group like Basecamp because most of the time it's not going to be easy for the average busy person That's reflective, but it's just, there's so many, it takes so much time and intentionality to think about frames, right? And think about, well, do we have an example of expansion or frames going on alongside each other or growing? All that stuff, I think, requires so much space and pretty good conversation partners who have diverse ways of seeing and articulating things, right? All those things are so important. It's what I... I treasure about Basecamp because I get to be with people that think in really different ways than I do very often. And I come away really challenged and usually pretty excited. It's fun to debrief with you on this podcast because I've been in some groups of people I've really, really enjoyed, and some of whom have become friends. I have all these new Canadian friends.

Which is great for an American. And yeah, it's a great... So I look forward to the Space Camp because I think it's going to be a really interesting, engaging conversation. And I think one that will have such long-term payoff and benefit for so many people. Because I think it's one of these things like I said that... The framing question is one, you can choose to ignore it, but you can't live without it. You live in these frames we're talking about. So you can either, you can live one of two ways. You can, in relationship to the frame, you can live consciously in relationship to it or unconsciously in relation to it. So, I mean, I think part of what we're doing is inviting people to a form of conscious dwelling in the frames we live in versus a kind of unreflective indwelling of them.

Chris Right. And the hope is that by getting us together, you know, many of us who will just bring different frames with us, that that'll be the easiest way, you know, for me to see my own frames is to sit in conversation on a campfire with somebody who doesn't share mine. And we can kind of help one another to gain that cognitive edge just through the strength of our collective diversity. I'm really looking forward to the conversation too. I have the sense that it's going to be a brave conversation, I think. What does the frame make you see? What are your frames? It's the kind of conversation that really invites us to venture into dangerous territory together and to come back enriched. Enriched from the experience, from the journey. It'll be a terrific opportunity to disclose and to receive in a way that I hope is going to be really useful and impactful.

Yeah, back to our David and Goliath example last week. I think the more frames we can see, just the more opportunity we have to play with the possibilities of what else they could be. So with that, yeah, I love it too. Can't wait.