--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "RoryGoff" <rorygoff@> wrote: > > > > > > Do you do pro-bono work? > > > > If I make a specific appointment with someone to work > > with them privately, real-time, in person or by phone, > > then no, not any more; I am sorry! For those who are > > in Fairfield, I set aside most afternoons to play > > Bananagrams and to talk with people, and I am > > generally available then for free if anyone wishes > > to speak with me there. And we can correspond by > > email and facebook for free. > > That must be where you perfected what Curtis > called your Neuro-Linguistic Programming robot- > speak. Having now experienced it, I cannot help > but agree with his description. :-) > > They fall for that stuff in Fairfield, do they?
Please don't take this as a total slam, or a declaration that I don't like you. I do. I'm still available for discussions about real-world things we both might like, such as movies or TV or good food or just humor. It's just that I've learned my lesson about interfacing with you on issues of belief or supposed states of conscious- ness or whatever. You have a tendency to drop into what Curtis may have called NLP 'bot-speak when talking about such things. I'd term it more "spiritual teacher schtick." But either way, I have neither respect for it, nor the patience to endure it. I've heard the same schtick from so many people -- both teachers and students -- over the years that for me it's like trying to have a conversation with ELIZA. Do you know about ELIZA? "She" was one of the first experiments in natural language and pseudo- AI, written at MIT during the mid-1960s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA> "She" employed simple pattern matching to emulate the experience of talking with a psychiatrist, and to those early programmers' credit, "she" did a fairly good job of it. But after the first initial buzz, users soon wrote it off as what they called it, a "chatterbot." That's my take on "spiritual teacher schtick." It's a FORMULA. Given a question of type A, respond with a corresponding answer, always designed to perpetuate the idea that the "teacher" is in charge and wiser than the person being spoken to. It's a control mechanism. Some people seem to like that sorta thing, especially those who are searching for some guru to "Beam me up, Scotty." I don't care for it much, and tend to prefer people who don't speak according to preset formulas. I am NOT suggesting that you *consciously* speak/write this way, BTW, just that you've been doing it so long that you speak/write that way out of habit. Curtis and I have had many offline discussions about this kind of spiritual schtick, and I've learned a lot from his studies of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. But the bottom line is that neither of us sees much benefit in interfacing with a 'bot any more. That said, I appreciate that your formula is mainly funny. That's a big improvement over the "mean girl" formulas one usually encounters here.
