Tasks / A Day In The Life
In my economics class my teacher said something to the effect that we all act out of self interest and we have our own beliefs that dictate our actions. He stated that noone acts based upon anyone else's beliefs, therefore we are always acting out of self interest.
So, I thought to myself, what would it be like to spend an entire day living someone else's beliefs and making decisions based upon them. That's where this task comes in. You must interview a stranger on their beliefs on topics such as religion, relationships, interests, sexuality, leisure, responsibility, truth, justice, the opposite sex, and ANYTHING else you deem as being an important driving aspect in a person's life. Then you must act out an entire day based upon the world view that you have collected, doing as they would do to the best of their interests. Say you're an atheist. Maybe you would spend a day acting as a fundamentalist Christian.
The idea is to try to understand how others think as opposed to judging them... and it should be fun. Document your results.
35 points suggested
1 to 100 players
0 points
Level 0
In the zone of: Humanitarian Crisis
Created by Roswald Burkenstein
0 completed :: 0 in progress
Interested in collaborating on this: (no one yet!)
this task is pretired
Comments
I quite like this task. It has some things in common with both this oldie and with a little experiment I'm currently working on with a non-player. Still, while it certainly seems like a good way to change one's own day, it's not clear to me how effective it will be at genuinely replicating another person's experience.
First, there's a disconnect between what someone will tell you about their beliefs and habits in an interview and what they actually do in life. Even with the full and unreserved trust of the interviewee, people aren't particularly good at accurately characterizing their own behavior, much less the motivations behind it.
Second, beliefs are only a small part of what govern our daily activities. Aesthetics and subtle preferences have a lot more to do with the minute-by-minute choices we make, and they're a lot harder to replicate, or even describe fully. Perhaps that's why beliefs were specifically chosen here - they're easy to get a handle on. I know what it means to believe in a god who's got a hang up about eating donkey meat, and it isn't too hard to figure out how someone with that belief would behave. On the other hand, no matter how many examples I see of the foods Minch adores or the women Lincoln finds attractive, I don't really understand what drives them. The best I could hope for in trying to replicate their preferences is dumb pattern matching. Nor could I hope to explain to you why I find a particular tune moving and am bored by some other one. In many ways, the differences between people that are the most surprising are the hardest to really grasp. The bits that can be derived from a couple ethical premises and some factual (mis)information are easy, but not entirely satisfying.
In any event, I'm thrilled to see that the direction of my own recent tasking interests are part of a larger zeitgeist. A toast, to Everyday Life.
I disagree. The task has some inherent problems, most noticeably that people often don't behave in exact accordance with their stated beliefs. But if you expand the lens to their actual experiences, past history and temperamental profile, then you can get a pretty good read on what drives other people, and where they are coming from. Then their trivial choices about food, sexual attraction and music make sense in context.
But it takes a very long time to actually *get* someone's history and past experiences - one interview is unlikely to produce that much information and honestly, most of us don't listen well enough or long enough to other people to absorb all that . We generally tend to pick out the parts that are most like us or that we identify with. Such are the problems of ego and the nature of human connections.
The obsession with subtle preferences is not to the point. Those are among the easiest things to explain to other people. I know *exactly* why my food preferences are the way they are and exactly who I find attractive and why and if anybody really wanted to know - I could explain in mind numbing detail what sets of past experiences make me fond of creamy foods and attracted to certain characteristics sexually and what I react to positively in music, art or cinema.
Its puzzling to say that one couldn't hope to explain such things. Or "get" them, especially in the case of friends, where more often than not, redundancies in matters of taste and the histories that lie behind are established stories, as well as the more serious stuff relating to flaws and destructive behavior patterns we see our intimate friends and family struggling with.
A little sad to imply the impossibility of understanding another person and what makes them tick.
Maybe if we get a bead on our own behavior and what drives us and why we do the things we do and like the things we like, then we'll develop the tools to understand other people fully. There's big advantages in figuring out how to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. One of them is the ability to extend a less dumb analysis of whats going on around us.
The answer to the question, "is it possible to invent stories which explain human behavior," is obvious.
The answer to the question, "is it possible to invent stories which explain human behavior and have genuine predictive power," is relevant.
The point of the task, as I read it, isn't a silly guessing game about whether the subject would pick the chocolate mousse or the peaches flambe for desert. Although it can be fun to see if one is "right" about that or not.
The point of the task is to get as far into the head and history of another as you can and try for a day to operate with a set of beliefs, experiences and personal narratives very different from your own .
This requires you to respect that people operate with a set of beliefs, reactions, and expectations that are based on what has happened to them and how they see the world around them. The story of their lives and how they tell it makes them who they are.
The quality of the listening is generative of the predictive power of the interview.
Good stuff.