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From: sophie@mnetor.UUCP (Sophie Quigley)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Re: cognitive dissonance on the net
Message-ID: <602@mnetor.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-May-85 10:04:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: mnetor.602
Posted: Thu May 16 10:04:54 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 16-May-85 11:20:14 EDT
References: <6775@ucbvax.ARPA> <731@gloria.UUCP>
Organization: Computer X (CANADA) Ltd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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> Has anybody been following the ARPA ai.digests lately?  I just tuned in,
> and some contributors have apparently been upsetting people by applying
> a faddish theory of emotions to rapes.
> 
> I missed the dawn of that discussion and should like to know what is
> going on.  Somebody has made the remarkable assertion that anxiety
> (in general?) is caused by "cognitive dissonance," which I presume
> is A.I.ese (Minskyese?) for learning that one of your beliefs is false.

The discussion started because someone posted the story of "Polly Nomial"
to the AI list digest and the moderator accepted it.  For people who
are not aware of this, polly nomial is a "cute" story about rape described
in mathematical puns.  Why anybody finds this funny is beyond me, but 
there are apparently still people who do.

Then somebody went on to propose that the reason women are upset after rape
is that during the rape, they get attached to their rapists who abandon them
afterwards, and are thus upset over the loss of this attachment rather than
over the actual violation.  The idea is so offensive of course that its author
had to use pseudo-scientific language to make it sound more authoritative and
palatable.  Fortunately, people noticed and reacted to it.  So an alternate
theory, that of "cognitive dissonance" was proposed (I believe by Minsky, 
although it is apparently a popular theory of victim psychology in psychology
crowds judging from the fact that it was presented in Psychology Today recently)
and discussed in authoritative pseudo-learned language again until one woman who
had either been raped herself or was working in a rape center (sorry I can't 
remember which) finally stood up and explained the matters to those gentlemen
who proceeded to congratulate her on her marvelous insight.

> This may indeed be the only thing that causes some scientists anxiety :-)
> but it hardly applies to people in general, either the rule or the
> exception.  I'm being to suspect that A.I. researchers are getting
> nowhere studying emotions because they don't have any. ...
> -- 
> Col. G. L. Sicherman
> ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel

Well said.
-- 
Sophie Quigley
{allegra|decvax|ihnp4|linus|watmath}!utzoo!mnetor!sophie