On "dilbert" label

One of the few persons whose blog I subscribed to is Scott Adams'. He is the creator of Dilbert comic which is a satirical comic on corporate management. His view of corporate management can be summarized in 2 books: The Dilbert Principle and Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook.

His blog made me realize that Scott's mind is very similar to one of my best friend. Both of them able to entertain possible but extremely satirical yet simple hypothesis. Their view on issues such as free will, religion, democracy, morality, ethics, and human relationships, are very similar, both in their arguments and sarcastic tone. Their differences are only what they choose to believe.

For example let's look what I can infer from his latest blog "The Stuff in My Head" alone.

They are both believer of indoctrination effectiveness, not necessarily by the government, but also by institution and corporation. Therefore they believe democracy is only an illusion. And if I may add, a necessary illusion especially in countries whose power distance cultural dimension is low. This is an issue of cross-cultural psychology which deserves a new blog post.

Anyway, since they don't have much compelling desire to dignify their own existence - as indicated by how readily the make fun of themselves and humans -, they are very tolerant on considering different hypothesis that might ridiculed themselves. Semantic aside - which is impossible to set aside but let's continue for the sake of discussion -, they don't believe they have free will.

They also have a kind of resentment towards people in general.. well not exactly resentment but more like a sense of hopelessness at human in general. They also feel this strange combination of resentment and sympathy to people who have high unwaranteed self-esteem. They have this strange mixed feelings because they believe such people are inevitable yet they feel this itch when such mistakes left uncorrected. But they might finally sort that feeling out, it's difficult to tell.

..when Scott Adams die, I bet my friend can write his blog on behalf of him and no one will ever know :-) I will periodically talk about Scott's line of thinking based on my understanding of my friend.

Anyway, all posts about Scott Adams and Dilbert will be labeled "dilbert". And since almost all "dilbert" related posts will interest slashdot audience, they were likely to be labeled "slashdot" too.

What this blog is

I try to find an effective but scalable category/label for my blogs. I expect my blogs to have many overlapping categories thus too many ad hoc categories will create way too many labels with questionable effectiveness. Therefore I must plan the category/label-ing a bit before commiting myself to a category scheme.

Another problem is my insistment on making labels a consistent characteristic of posts. In other words posts of the same label should have similar topic, depth, tone, prerequisites knowledge, etc. The purpose is obvious, to maximize readers experience such that they can read only what they want and like by reading/feeding from labels they choose.

On "cross-cultural psychology and economy" label

First I will talk about cross-cultural psychology.

Understanding other culture is very very difficult. The following story will illustrate it.

Back in university, I took a course in cross-cultural psychology. After around 3 months, we had a cultural sensitivity training. We role-played into being 2 groups, a country of collectivist and individualist. Each of our group were given a purpose we must negotiate on, given each of our country condition. We may negotiate in any way we like. However, our behavior while negotiating must follow the cultural characteristic of our assigned country.

The students were disproportionaly American, so playing individualist roles are easy. But we (well, most of us.. :-p) really sucks in playing collectivist roles. The students who are into collectivist roles do not establish enough rapport, communicate too directly without using available context, always monetize the negotiation terms, too confrontative, etc. In short, they fail in almost every aspects, even the supposedly easy behavior aspect of not using eye contact too much.

And these total failures still happened after months of studying the theory of cross-cultural psychology!

btw, talking about eye contact, this one Swedish woman in the collectivist group has one of the most beatiful wide eye I have ever seen. I kind of regretted not talking to you much. I wonder if you will ever read my blog.. Drop me a note please.

Back to topic.
You might argue that even if emulating people of other culture is difficult, understanding them is easy. So the question is, is it really easy?

I will answer with another story.

Once on a holiday I returned to Indonesia. Obviously I meet up with my old friends. We have a lunch in a mall talking nothing about everything. We were talking for at least 3 hours when finally we start talking about religion. We talked about different denomination of a religion. We talked, talked, and talked when suddenly a realization hit me.

Well, the realization is more like sinking instead of hitting me. Although I did suddenly realize it, it was the conversations that slowly showed me my realization is really accurate.

The realization is that I had been acting very confrontative, unlike the me in the past who were more deferential. I had been living in US for so long that I changed, and somehow I do not realized I changed despite of all cross-cultural training I had. It was very strange to hear my friends talking very deferentially, especially after thinking that I used to be like that.

Now, if somehow I was changed into being more individualist without knowing, it can means that I don't really know the characteristic of being individualist.

Considering the difficulty of appreciating and understanding cultural differences, I try to share what I know and experienced, hoping that it can help you to be more sensitive. Additionally, feedbacks from you will also enhanced my understanding of the culture I live in. So please feel free to give feedback.
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In matters of cross-cultural economy, people of different culture have different values, which in turn cause them to act differently while being economic agents. Therefore economic discussion should consider the culture of the agents.

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All blog entries described above will be labeled "cross-cultural psychology and economy".