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Episode 54: Redeem for One Personal-Size Color Pie
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Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our fifty-fourth episode, your favorite goblins discuss their own personal Magic: the Gathering Color Pie identities and what categorization can (and can't) describe about a person! Do you see your labels as descriptive or prescriptive?
In this episode, we discuss why it's okay to be Black-aligned sometimes, how the Guilds, Clans, and Shards are not the only way the colors can be represented, why opposites really attract, why the color pie and other descriptive methods sometimes fall short, and why our brains really like to put things in neat piles.
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction and Socials
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. I'm your host, Joe Retiman, you can find me on Twitter at FinDhorn, that's F-Y-N-D Horn, and today, I am not alone. I am joined by my lovely co-host, who will introduce himself in a moment, but first, we have a question of the day as always, a burning inquiry, if you will, and that would be,
00:00:42
Speaker
of your own personal color pie identity.
Color Pie Identity - What Doesn't Fit?
00:00:46
Speaker
What is an element typically associated with one of those colors or the whole identity that doesn't fit who you are? So I'm going to throw it over to you, Alex.
Alex's Color Identity: Boros and Jeskai
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm Alex, found on Twitter at Alexander New M. And like I normally tend to do, I'm going to take this question and answer it a little bit from an angle. So generally, I kind of I kind of look at myself in kind of a white red, white, blue, red, a little bit color pie, like, like,
00:01:21
Speaker
I have a very structured, organized part of my personality that's a very white slash white-blue. To be honest, I think it's more white and a much more spontaneous creative side that's more red.
00:01:35
Speaker
But in the red-white combo, most people would say, oh, that's Boros. It's a shorthand. Except there's not a lot in the Boros guild that I think I really identify with, which is part of why I tend to say maybe I'm more just guy. To be honest, I really think I am a little more closely white-red. But the Boros incarnation of that color combination doesn't really fit me, which is totally fine. We try to talk a lot. Color, pie, philosophy in general
00:02:05
Speaker
There's a wide range. And any given person, even if they are mostly in one color, are going to have aspects of others too. People are, you know, a spectrum in lots of regards.
00:02:17
Speaker
And that's why, as much as I love Ravnica, and obviously the Magic community loves Ravnica, I'm really hoping we find another place where Wizards can try to represent these two-color pairs in different ways.
Joe's Color Identity: Red with Blue/Green
00:02:31
Speaker
I think they did a little bit of that with Dragons of Tarkir, but Dragons of Tarkir was a weird follow-up with the wedges going into the two-color pairs, and those were just allies. So that's where I'm at.
00:02:46
Speaker
No, totally. I completely agree with you and actually that is exactly my thinking on it as well. I tend to identify myself as main red and then sort of secondarily either blue or green depending on the day. I would say usually blue because I tend to find myself pursuing a lot of
00:03:13
Speaker
creative and I guess sort of intellectual pursuits more so than physical or athletic pursuits in my day-to-day. I would say green would at least be my tertiary color but again I have to exactly echo what you say. I don't think of myself as is it in the sense of like being
00:03:36
Speaker
frenetically mad scientist-y. I think of myself as extremely passionate and hot-tempered, yes, and, you know, defensive, I guess, of, you know, people that I care deeply about, and I care deeply about people when I care about them. So that very much is read to me.
00:04:02
Speaker
But when you bring in the blue element, I think a lot of that does become something that I don't I don't see in myself where I use I do use my mind to pursue a lot of Sort of investigations and inquiries. I ask a lot of questions of my daily life but I guess some of the philosophical foundations of like blue believes that
00:04:29
Speaker
Blue believes that everybody can be changed, you know, everyone's a clean slate, everyone's a blank slate, and you can always, you know, adapt and change things, and also the lack of ethics in blue, I think, is a huge concern that doesn't fit with me. So again, I'm kind of echoing what you're saying, but I think a lot of sort of the surrounding elements of blue don't align with me, even though I would say primarily I'm a red-blue.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, and I realized too, I didn't go into a lot of details there, so maybe I'll kind of go through some of my reasoning for my color identity and things.
White's Communal Aspects vs. Hero's Journey
00:05:08
Speaker
So in white in particular, a lot of the community aspects of white resonate a lot with me, a lot of the
00:05:16
Speaker
being a community and working together and being cooperative, I found especially the more I sort of become critical of some of the media and really examine what I enjoy about the things that I enjoy, A, that has helped me to find things that I enjoy more, but also I found that a lot of the things that I'm enjoying more
00:05:35
Speaker
are those more cooperative things it's it's less the hero's journey where the hero becomes powerful goes off saves the day and comes back it's more um i guess i've heard the heroine's journey tends to be more you know she gains allies or they because it's it's a little more it's tender neutral even though it's hero heroines where they kind of
00:05:55
Speaker
Yeah, then heroin journey where you're not gaining much. Anyway, that's that's a little more of a story arc. And it's one that I'm not super familiar with the beats of. But from what I understand, it's it's one where it's more about
00:06:10
Speaker
gaining allies and cooperatively working towards an end. And there's some power gain sometimes, but in any event. So that aspect of white is definitely something that fits with me, that I identify with. Also, just some of the order, like white
00:06:28
Speaker
We see white, blue as Azorius, and Ravnica be the guild of order, but white in general kind of has that. You look, Selesnya has the, you know, nature in order. You have Orzhov, or order to the extortion of everyone around them.
Balancing Structure and Creativity
00:06:45
Speaker
I think a lot of that order comes in through white, and that's where I kind of
00:06:51
Speaker
I have these two aspects of my personality. When I try to write stuff for the podcast or I do my own writing and creative pursuits, there's a lot of red there. I'm a discovery writer. There's a lot of spontaneity. I need some freedom and opening.
00:07:09
Speaker
With too much, I accomplish nothing. I spin my wheels, or I come up with a bunch of things and don't move in any given direction, or I just do nothing. Sometimes those restrictions are necessary. And so for me, every creative pursuit is the tension between how much of these two sides, how much structure and order do I have to give myself to be creative? And how much breathing room do I have to give the creativity to allow it to move?
00:07:38
Speaker
I feel you talking about red being creative, but creative and spontaneous, but can, you know, can be like sort of that flame that that like explosion rather than a burning flame. I feel both attacked and seen, and I don't like this. I don't like this moment anymore. Yes. And I think some of the other aspects of red, too, I think the
00:08:08
Speaker
I don't know. I go to some of the, oh, now I'm totally blanking on the card with Chandra and her mom, one of the first- Oh yes, Cathartic Reunion. Thank you. Cathartic Reunion, one of the first good representations of nonviolent emotion in red, in magic. And there's some of those, like,
00:08:27
Speaker
It's not like all the colors have emotions, but they have different reactions to them. And red, it's like, just go deep. Just push in on that emotion. And I kind of feel that.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah.
Exploring Red's Emotional Intensity
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah. Red is red is feel everything and feel it hard. Yeah. All up in the fields is red. Actually, that would be that might be a fun little graphic to put out from the the cast account at some point, how each color like, you know, how the millennials would describe each color identity.
00:09:00
Speaker
I like the idea, the color pie of how each color feels about feelings. In blue, it's about controlling and regulating and making sure that they're not being in the way of things. Blue, especially in the Midwest of America, would be just push it all down and deal with it. Actually, no, maybe that's white. It's like, no, push it all down for the greater good. Shut up so that nobody else knows that you are feeling this way.
00:09:27
Speaker
blue would be like, okay, let's break this down and analyze every part of it and that way we'll defeat it. Which, to be honest, is one of the only pieces of blue that I actually identify with. Because going through your therapy and going through all the stuff I've done with my social anxiety, one of the ways that I kind of worked through all that was to get very blue and very methodical. And every time I had a reaction that I didn't
00:09:52
Speaker
consciously choose to take a step back and say, why did I feel this way? Why did I react this way? Where did this come from? And start to trace it down.
00:10:02
Speaker
Well, and see, that's that's kind of the lovely thing about being human when it regards this is the color pie is archetypal, you know, it's not it does not describe each of us individually. We all like you said at the top, we all have elements of everything. I've talked about this ad nauseam with my wife who actually does not do magic at all. It's not that she doesn't like it. She just, you know, that's not her cup of tea.
00:10:32
Speaker
but she likes the idea, the philosophy behind the color pie. And we've discussed like what the color identities of each of our friends are and family members and that sort of thing. And she's like, honestly, it's weird. Cause she's like, I don't, I'm not saying you're a bad person or evil or something, which I'm like, okay, where's this going? But she's like, but I do see at least when we started dating, there's a fair amount of black in your color identity.
00:11:01
Speaker
And I think it was genuinely because as a former performing artist, you have to have a fair amount of narcissism and self-confidence. And as an extrovert also, that was on full display for me. So we all have those little elements and we all, you know, the things that get out of control when those balances, you know, swing out from where they should be for us.
00:11:28
Speaker
Uh, then we need to supplement with some extra outside. So for you, you're like, oh, my blue's a little low in my color pie. I need to pop a little more in there for me. I needed to pop a little bit of everything else into offset my black, you know?
Black's Philosophy of Self-Help
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, no. And that's, that's really okay. This is really interesting.
00:11:51
Speaker
I think we've just kind of trained ourselves into another episode here. So it's funny, you mentioned that, because talking about black, like one of the elements of black that I very specifically have been, I don't know, emulating or whatever is the right term, but one of their elements is, I'm trying to remember the exact phrase, but it's something along the lines of each individual is the person who is in the position best to know how to help themselves.
00:12:21
Speaker
where white will say, we think we can build a society that will help and benefit everyone and force everybody to sort of follow this path, especially if you go too white.
00:12:34
Speaker
black is the opposite where it's like give everybody the ability to just do whatever they want and they will make sure that they are taken care of in the best way because they are the best person to do that. And in the extreme you have, you know, also bad situations. But I think that piece of black philosophy is really interesting. And that's the thing that I've kind of been looking at for myself too, is that, you know,
00:12:56
Speaker
Part that especially partnered with with blue, the blue, the color of self change, the color of, you know, if you have just do it, you know, if you just self improvement, I suppose. And you're saying Nike is fairly blue. Just do it. Yeah, just do it. Yeah. And, you know, as you said earlier, blue by itself doesn't have a whole lot of morals about some of the things that it does. But there is, I think, a very good element of and a very good message of self improvement.
00:13:25
Speaker
and especially partnered with Black of pursuing what you need to be happy, pursuing what you need to be you, especially with the white element in me and in a society in general, of course, without hurting other people and trying not to impact other people. But I think there is something to be said for a little bit of narcissism, a little bit of selfishness for yourself to give yourself what you need.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, no, totally. I think that's something that we see in a lot of people who are caring and kind is there's not enough black in their color pie. There's not enough of that self-preservation.
00:14:11
Speaker
You know, that's a big misnomer when people read the whole the color pie is they see these that there's a lot of, you know, black villains. You know, there's a lot of antagonists who are in that color and they go, oh, OK, that that means evil.
00:14:28
Speaker
no no it's not it's not that way at all and and really it is that we've talked about that ad nauseam previously is it's just about looking out for yourself it's about you know you have the best idea the best way to do needed to know
00:14:47
Speaker
you have the closest understanding of what you need to be successful it's kind of the way that my job works where there is a big structural organization of order above us and around us and supporting us but when it comes to the mail carriers out on the street
00:15:09
Speaker
doing things, we have a certain amount of latitude to do them the way that we need to be as successful and as efficient as possible. That can be immoral. It's amoral, is the big distinction that Mark Rosewater makes, is it's amoral, not immoral.
00:15:31
Speaker
But if it is tempered with the balance of other colors, then that amorality isn't problematic. It just is. So that's interesting. I know we talked about color pie of our jobs and things, and earlier I talked about how I'm in the finance department of a financial company, making me the Orzhoviest of Orzhov.
00:15:55
Speaker
jobs, but the way you're describing it, do you think the post office might be in that, in that identity, or maybe, maybe more Esper? Because it's, it sounds like you have some structure in order, but you also have in a very different way, you have the white-black representation, potentially.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, I do. I do think so.
Post Office: Order and Flexibility
00:16:16
Speaker
I think a lot of corporations and the post office does technically fall into the category of a corporation, even though it is a governmental funk. It is associated strongly with the government and has been at points part of the government. It is its own entity now. And so it does have
00:16:36
Speaker
certain profit margins that it wants to make and needs to make and all this sort of stuff. So it is a corporation and so there is a strong, I think with any capitalist system, with any capitalist organization, there's a black and a white element for sure.
00:16:56
Speaker
Would say that it's structure when it comes to if we want to just paint it in very broad brushes structure The structure of the post office is very rigid. It is extremely white the purpose is I think demir in the sense of
00:17:15
Speaker
There are profit margins to meet like I said but they are in the business of information gathering and dispersal and so that brings in the blue element. My specific job I think is very blue.
00:17:31
Speaker
But it does have an element of black with it because there is that sort of latitude to You know if there's a like for instance for self-preservation sake if there's a dog in a person's front yard that is barking and You know it is in between me in the mailbox. I don't deliver that mail. I I I
00:17:54
Speaker
you know, bundle it up, write dog out on it, and we, you know, try to redeliver the next day, but we don't, you know, put ourselves in harm's way for the sake of that purpose.
00:18:07
Speaker
You're kind of given the latitude to make that choice yourself. Exactly. I can see that being black. And I think in a overarching philosophical sense, the US, I suppose any postal system has a little bit of a white sort of community focus to it too. It's part of the infrastructure of a quote unquote modernized industrialized society. And in that sense, I see a little bit of white, maybe a little bit of blue as well.
00:18:37
Speaker
Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I think that makes sense.
00:18:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's interesting to, you know, it's not as, it's not an organization that I think actually aligns with my color pie very well, which is surprising, but that's another thing too, where we look for things depending on who you are. Sometimes you look for things that compliment your color identity. Sometimes you look for things that supplement it. Or maybe that's not the way to say it, that fit versus compliment.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, no, that totally fits. It doesn't necessarily have to echo it as long as it is a fit for you. Sometimes something that's different fits well. I just got back from a wedding with a friend of mine and they're a couple they've been dating for years, but they're very different people. And that's a thing that I think
00:19:30
Speaker
early on, some people in their lives are like, they didn't get it, but then spend some time together and realize that despite the fact that these two are very different, they're very different in a way that complements each other. And they, and that is great. And I think that there's a lot of cases like that with you, you're in your job. And there's things where just because you fit a certain color identity, doesn't mean that you need everything in your life to fit that color identity. For some people that might work.
00:19:55
Speaker
For others, it's not going to work. And that's why while we build this categorization and things, we have the color pie, we have personality traits, and there's all these different ways to sort of build, you know, to quantify or to build a vocabulary around who we are as individuals.
00:20:17
Speaker
Ultimately, what works best for you is what works best for you. One of my favorite nonsensical sayings that makes a lot of sense is nothing succeeds like success. It's a statement that on its face says nothing, but when you really think about it, it's like, well, yeah, you can say on paper this thing doesn't work, but if in real life it actually works, well, then it works. It's fine.
00:20:42
Speaker
You don't necessarily need it to be able to draw a diagram to show why it works as long as it works. And I think there's a case like
Color Identity and Job Satisfaction
00:20:51
Speaker
that. A lot of times we will take those personality tests and the color pies and things like that can be very helpful to give people a framework to understand themselves and a vocabulary to describe themselves to others. But
00:21:07
Speaker
those very frameworks and vocabularies can become restrictive when we decide I'm an introvert so I must do x as opposed to I'm an introvert but I like to do this or I'm going to do you know I'm an introvert and that helps me to understand why I want to do x or y but I want to do z right now which doesn't seem to fit but that's okay because that's what I want to do and like ultimately that's how I ended up
00:21:32
Speaker
figuring out that I'm an outgoing introvert. I like to have conversations. I love to talk. This is a big deal, but I need to recharge a lot sometimes and it's fine. But had I stuck rigidly to the definition of introvert, I wouldn't have given myself the opportunity to be outgoing and I'd be missing that part of myself.
00:21:53
Speaker
You know, it's funny you say that I was listening to a podcast today when we're recording this where somebody was talking about how charismatic people have influenced a lot of society just with their own ideals.
00:22:11
Speaker
So, you know, a lot of society is somewhat kind of the story of individuals because of charismatic people guiding based on their ideas. And one of the people talking about that said, you know, and frankly, like,
00:22:32
Speaker
Think that's a that is kind of a little bit of a superpower. It's not something that we should necessarily think is bad it's just you know, we need to be responsible with it and And so extroverts you're right. And so people need to stop if they're not actually introverts stop describing yourself as an introvert Yes, we all like to recharge. We all like to be alone. If you didn't you'd be a sociopath so
00:23:00
Speaker
Extroverts stand up. We get stuff done. Introverts do too. But I'm an extrovert and I'm proud of it. And so, you know, I thought about that today and I was like, yeah, you know what? I am. I am very much an extrovert. I'm OK with saying that in my head. But, you know, I just tend to not like people a lot of the time.
00:23:20
Speaker
There are very few people I like being around, and so that's where mine is. There are very few people I like being extroverted towards, but I spend that energy really aggressively for those people. It's funny because one of the first places where I really realized that, and this, by the way, is a very weird way to sidestep into this is why representation matters.
00:23:44
Speaker
but i went to a local convention and the very literal very first panel of the con for a con was how to do convergence as an introvert and up on the panel we had two introverts and a shy extrovert who said that it's like well i'm you know your extrovert for the panel but i'm actually a shy extrovert and she talked about
00:24:04
Speaker
kind of what that meant to her and how she has some differences and how she operates and things like that. And that's when I'm like, you know what? Maybe that is why there's this element of myself where I know for the fact that I get peopled out. I just run out of people. I can't deal with people anymore. I have to go sit in my room and play World of Warcraft for three days.
00:24:27
Speaker
Yeah. And to recharge. But at the same time, I love having conversations. I go to the GP and I spend all day trying to talk to people like I barely even want to play magic. Sometimes like magic can be great, but sometimes it gets in the way of me just sitting there and having a chat with somebody. And that that panel in particular, that individual talking about her experiences there really helped me kind of work through and figure myself out.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, no, totally. I, yes, I think that's an awesome, that's an awesome thing. And yeah, it's, again, we talk about people being spectrums, you know, those, these descriptors are handy. They're quick, they're nice shorthand. They really help for like mixer events at parties or, you know, team things that work a little plaques at work. Cause that's.
00:25:20
Speaker
my team the department that i joined i think a little bit before i joined they had some just some communication issues with each other people getting frustrated at each other for things that didn't really matter but it's because they were kind of
00:25:33
Speaker
didn't understand the other people as much, so they did Myers-Briggs right before I came in, and then they went through, and I can't remember the guy's name, but he wrote a book, The Five Love Languages. Yes, I was just going to say that is big. Then he co-wrote The Five Languages of Workplace Appreciation, which is the book that we got.
00:25:51
Speaker
So they bought a copy of that book for everybody. We all read it. We took the test to figure out what our language of workplace appreciation was. And then someone made little plaques that had our name with both our Myers-Briggs and our number one and number two languages, whatever they call it. And again, that
00:26:12
Speaker
can be helpful, as you're saying. The problem becomes when we're using them as a prescriptive as opposed to descriptive. I think I've heard that somewhere, I don't know, but I think I'm using that properly. If you decide that because you have this label, you must do X, Y, that's prescriptive, you're doing it wrong. Right. But using it as a descriptive to say, hey, this is where I'm at, and maybe you're not. Maybe you eventually learned that that's something else.
00:26:41
Speaker
That's totally fine too. That's okay. A, people change. B, people are complex as hell. Even yourself have a lot more going on and your actions and reactions to things. There's stuff you don't understand in there and I guarantee it, that's just how human psychology works. And so- That's how being human works. Yeah, it's how being human works and being alive works because there's just so much stimuli that happens that you don't,
00:27:09
Speaker
remember all of it and you can't trace it all back. And so over time, you're going to find that certain things don't fit you anymore either because you've changed or because you understand stuff about yourself that you didn't before. And that's totally fine too. And I think that's why those labels can be so helpful because they give you a starting place and they give you a handholds and something to kind of work with. When you have blocks, you can move around, you can start to build a better picture.
00:27:34
Speaker
than when you're trying to work it out a whole cloth and you have nothing, no language to talk to other people about their own experiences. Right, right. Yeah, and that's exactly the thing. It's that communicative shorthand.
00:27:50
Speaker
And and you know, this is a really I noticed before that we had a really nice moment to segue into our real world connection and I decided to Sort of juke out of the way double back to tell an anecdote and then we got back there again So it this is maybe like this
00:28:12
Speaker
the other signature goblin lore transition where we still circle back to the thing after we do another loop the loop.
Categorization Theories and Greek Thinkers
00:28:21
Speaker
But I just want to say that this is actually a perfect transition to our real world connection of categorization, which is just sort of the psychological process of grouping things, of putting
00:28:36
Speaker
Things and people and events and memories and senses all that sort of stuff how you take information and make sense of it make meaning of it is through categorization it's by grouping like things and so just to give a very brief history of this because it's a it's a
00:28:56
Speaker
deep topic will link to the wikipedia article in the show notes and that even doesn't go into it nearly as much as the research on this but this all kind of started with
00:29:12
Speaker
Aristotle and Plato and all those early Greek thinkers, the classic Greek thinkers, who introduced the idea of grouping objects based on similar properties. So how many feet does a thing have? In this category we would say then that humans and ostriches would be in the same category.
00:29:37
Speaker
That's one way of looking at it. Does it have fur or feathers? Okay. Well, now we're getting some distinction. Now we're saying, okay, humans, ostriches, and kangaroos might be in the same category, but now they all three are separate because they all, you know, humans don't have fur. Kangaroos do. Birds have feathers. Okay. Can it fly? Even more so. Now we're getting some distinction. Well, I guess ostriches can't fly. Nevermind.
00:30:03
Speaker
But you know what I mean? It's this sort of like very basic putting, you know, putting a box, putting two boxes out and saying, here's group A, here's group B separating what you have in there. Then you go within the box and you've got a divider and you go, OK, here's group subgroup A and subgroup B. And you go in there and you get to down to the very minute sort of details, but through sort of
00:30:31
Speaker
I guess it's mostly just comparative.
00:30:35
Speaker
I mean, in the general sense, I mean, science people would know more specifics much better than I do. But this is how, at least in Western science, this is how we separate species and animals. You have the family, you have the genus, you have the species, I don't know what order those are all in. You have bigger and, you know, categories at the top that go into smaller and smaller categories as you go down and divide it sort of genetically and feature wise. And, you know, you have your amphibians and you divide them down and you have your
00:31:03
Speaker
you know, I almost said humanoids, but that's, I'm playing too much. But you kind of have, you know, the different
00:31:14
Speaker
groupings that then go down and down and down. And then you find a platypus, and then every scientist collectively throws their hands in the air for a little while. Because, well, categories are great. I'm sure they fit it in there somewhere, I know. But still, well, categorization is super helpful. One thing that we need to keep in mind with it is you should be flexible, because things change slash didn't change, but you didn't have all the information you built your categories to begin with.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yep, absolutely. Now, and so then we go from classical to conceptual clustering, which sort of goes the other way. It's instead of sort of comparing this thing to other things and then making a definition for it.
00:31:59
Speaker
you define the ideas about this thing. So for this can of bubbly water in front of me, I would say, okay, it is a canned beverage that has carbonation in it and it tastes like citrus and there's no calories and it's non-alcoholic and
00:32:21
Speaker
It's enclosed in metal, all this sort of stuff. You would generate the description and then classify based on those descriptions. So you're kind of going the opposite direction. This started mostly in the 80s for like machine learning, early, early machine learning. And then... I don't know if this is just a complete distraction, but I think it's funny that all of those
00:32:46
Speaker
categories or all the, all of those concepts that you, you did for the bubbly water to categorize it also applies to this polar seltzer that's sitting next to me. I see. There you go. Which me, and perhaps we can, you know, conceptually cluster goblin lore podcasts podcasters, excuse me. Goblin more podcast brought to you by seltzer water. Cause we have a hundred percent of our,
00:33:14
Speaker
I'm a co-host right now. I would say that we all for sure know that what is it? Correlation is causation. Oh, definitely. 100%. Exactly.
00:33:32
Speaker
And two is a sufficient sample size to determine qualitative statements. And quantitative. Yeah, quantitative as well. We'll make all of them. Every one of those can be made with a sample size of at least two.
00:33:50
Speaker
at us with your Tivs on Twitter, at goblinlorpod, hashtag mytiv is. What is your favorite Tiv? Speaking of other Tivs, we're going to get to the last cognitive approach of categorization, and that's prototype theory, roughly, very roughly.
00:34:10
Speaker
This is an idea proposed in the 70s that it can also be viewed as a process of grouping things based on prototypes. So kind of taking the ideal or the average of these things and saying, hey, this is this thing. So you'd say like all cups, you know, would be things that hold water. These cups are going to go here.
00:34:41
Speaker
And all these bowls, which are shorter, wider things that hold things, will go over here. This sort of very rough idea of like you come up with an ideological average and then
00:34:55
Speaker
differentiate based on that. Social scientists, I greatly apologize if I am horribly mischaracterizing these categorization models. Please let us know because we do try to be accurate, but these are the three main ideas of categorization. I think that to an extent we do all of these in our day-to-day lives and we do a mix of them. If we were to say,
00:35:22
Speaker
every sort of, if we were to do the prototype theory and say like every thing that holds water is a cup, well then all of your bowls and cups get mixed up.
00:35:38
Speaker
what we then sort of have to do is separate them a little bit by saying okay well this one's a tall one this one is a short wide one ah okay this is going to be a cup and that's going to be a bowl you know that sort of separation and and again maybe i might i might be misunderstanding this a little bit but i think there is
00:35:58
Speaker
Sort of a there are truths to each of these and they all describe how we process again short handing the world and an acquiring and Parsing out the knowledge that we the knowledge and information that we receive
00:36:14
Speaker
Yeah, and I think just a good high-level description of just categorization as a whole, right, is right here, like the last sentence on the first section on the Wikipedia page. It says, categorization is important in learning, prediction, inference, decision-making, language, and many forms of organisms' interactions with their environments. It's about how do you process what's around you? How do you learn what's around you? And it's a thing that
00:36:43
Speaker
Organisms do automatically. I mean, humans do it. We talked about different ways that humans do it and have created systems around it. But even an animal will say, this thing is dangerous. This thing is edible. This thing is safe. And build categories based on what it needs and how it interacts with its environment.
00:37:06
Speaker
I think a good just kind of overarching high-level sentence to talk about what categorization is and where it's used is right here on this Wikipedia article. It says, categorization is important in learning, prediction, inference, decision-making, language, and many forms of organisms' interaction with their environments.
00:37:27
Speaker
And so it's a thing that humans do. We've talked about systems that humans do to create it. But also just animals, like that is categorization. You can have an animal says, this is safe. This is food. This is dangerous. And depending on how they interact with their environment, they'll build these categories automatically.
00:37:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and we've talked a little bit about that with like, um, you know, sort of evolutionary response and, and, you know, that sort of thing, um, in the past, but, but it's, it's a very similar thing to where we go, okay, this thing hurt me. What are the qualities of this thing that I should look out for in the future?
00:38:08
Speaker
You know, if you, you know, pricked yourself on a needle, maybe you go, okay, maybe it's silver things. You know, and your brain does this all unconsciously, obviously, but, you know, maybe it's silver things that are dangerous. Okay, well, you try that out and, oh, no, it turns out this silver thing is really nice. It's a spoon. It helps me eat. Okay, let's go back to this. Maybe it's pointy things.
00:38:29
Speaker
You try that out? Yep, sure enough. It's pointy things. And again, I think a couple of episodes back, we talked about how this pattern matching categorization can lead to miss categorizations and miss associations.
Categorization and Evolutionary Survival
00:38:45
Speaker
But on the whole, it's what's kept us alive for however long we've been around. Oh, it's certainly a survival mechanism. But the thing is, another good example of automatic subconscious categorization.
00:38:59
Speaker
anxiety disorders. This happens a lot. I can say with social anxiety, the fight flight section of the brain decides that certain situations like being embarrassed in public or being the focus of attention, certain situations are dangerous.
00:39:20
Speaker
And because that section of the brain is supposed to keep you alive, it will trigger in highly inappropriate in society settings because it doesn't understand how society works. It knows this thing feels dangerous. So kick in the runaway or the fight instinct right now.
00:39:38
Speaker
despite the fact that all that's happening is I just got called on to speak in front of class or something like that. And that is, you know, not a categorization, not something that I did consciously, but that was my brain taking those building blocks and saying, OK, this is necessary for survival. We need to kick in this instinct because, you know, the whole whole fight or flight thing. And here's here's some physiology for for people who aren't aware with
00:40:03
Speaker
at least like in an anxiety disorder, when your fight or flight response, when that's engaged, and I'm sure there's more scientific terms for this, but when that's engaged, the body physically responds. It's not just a mental thing. Your body physically pulls blood away from your brain, and it's sending blood to your extremities because that's how you fight or you fly. It sends more blood to your arms and your legs. But that means you're in a situation where you're already a little bit panicky because you're nervous or you're whatever.
00:40:33
Speaker
But now the blood is flowing away from your brain, that gives you even less conscious control of your reactions.
Managing Anxiety Through Categorization
00:40:40
Speaker
right right and so this is stuff that you know yes again if you when when you're in those react moments when you're in in reaction mode these things are happening subconsciously i i guess what i would what i would say and this might be where we sort of give our um our takeaways here a little bit is
00:41:05
Speaker
you know, to be able to hopefully what you can do is pull yourself back to the conscious brain to that blue part of your color pie and say, OK, let me identify the things that I'm feeling exactly what you were saying you you did with, you know, with the help of the therapy that you went through. Let me identify what I'm feeling.
00:41:27
Speaker
analyze those elements, categorize and then sort of categorize whether or not this is actually a dangerous situation that I should be concerned and anxious about or whether it's something that I shouldn't be.
00:41:43
Speaker
And then there's also the sort of discussion too of, well, okay, I shouldn't be, but my body is still having this physiological reaction to this circumstance. Can I work through this situation? So you do have that next level process as well, but that's sort of outside of what we're talking about at the moment.
00:42:03
Speaker
What we're saying is sort of go through that logical process of, I guess this would be sort of the conceptual clustering thing is define, create a definition of the moment you're in and then categorize it from there. Say, okay, now that I've written this description in my head, is this something that is tolerable? Well, and it's a weird maybe way to say that, but a way to
00:42:32
Speaker
get out of those situations that are worked through some of those situations is beforehand, have plans, have ways to extricate yourself because in those situations where you're less able to do, you know, your cognitive function is a little bit impaired because your body's physically pulling blood away from your brain or whatever the situation is.
00:42:52
Speaker
If you have a plan and you already have a, you know, excuse me, I'm going to need to go away. I need to go do this. You have ways to remove yourself from the situation that can diffuse it everything. And if you have stuff figured out beforehand, it's not always going to happen. There's going to be situations that come up. But if you find ways to kind of, I think of it as kind of building yourself tools that you get familiar with, I know
00:43:17
Speaker
Okay, this is a really large tangent, but that's what this whole episode has been. I know nothing, absolutely nothing about actual martial arts. I've never studied that before, but I've heard from... Good Lord, I can't tell you where, but I could tell you...
00:43:33
Speaker
that's a distraction. Humans store information in a different place from where they heard the information because information is necessary for survival where you heard it isn't and that means a lot of times you lose the second where you keep the first which is also my misinformation is easy to spread somewhere so I may be very wrong about this but my understanding is that you go through katas you go through all of the motions over and over again because if you ever are in a situation where you need to fight
00:44:00
Speaker
You can't sit and work through and think about all the things. You need to be able to just react, to go through the motions you've already done. And because you've done them so many times, you can just do it.
00:44:12
Speaker
To take that in a very different place, a similar thing is in situations where I know I might get some anxiety reactions, I find ways, especially on smaller reactions, I find ways to step back and work through processes. If it starts to get higher, start to identify, okay, this is a situation where I can't just stop and work through this. Is there a way I can exit this situation? How can I tactfully pull out?
00:44:39
Speaker
How can I, you know, I need to go here. Sometimes it's just, I need, I need to use the bathroom. Just get yourself removed from the physical space. And sometimes you might need to become not tactful at a certain point, but having some of those plans in place beforehand, A, helps you be ready to do it if you need them. And also that has helped me not get as anxious because then I don't panic because I have a plan and I know I can fall back to something.
00:45:08
Speaker
Right. Right. And yeah, no, totally. And that's what's that? Did it lose the point there somewhere? Because I feel like I might have taken one tangent too many. Don't we always know it? That's great. And I think that's exactly it, that it's. It's sort of the categorization before the act, you know, before the moment there.
Visualizing Success for Achievement
00:45:37
Speaker
So I think that's exactly right. You're planning, you're setting things up for success. So you're deciding what will be a successful experience for you. And then once you have that planned and visualized prior, then you can lead towards that. And I think that's exactly right.
00:46:01
Speaker
Mind you, this is a highly white-blue approach that is being recommended to you all from a pair of very red people. You should be very grateful for that.
00:46:17
Speaker
I suppose another, you know, a half step to give a little bit slightly different but definitely related closing advice from myself. Your categorization is going to happen. It's always going to happen. It's going to happen automatically. It's not bad. It can be bad, but that doesn't mean that it is. It can be good. But be mindful about
00:46:38
Speaker
With the situations you're in be mindful about how you've categorized things and people sometimes I guess I didn't start this sentence going in this direction, but I'm going this direction now be ready to Change your categorization be ready to apologize and take a step back because you miss categorize somebody or something Yeah, absolutely
00:47:03
Speaker
I think we got it. I think we nailed it. Yeah. And we totally didn't talk about what we actually were going to talk about, which means bonus episode that we can record it later. Wait, we didn't get to homerids at all. Crap. We didn't talk about homerids. We didn't talk about Greek pantheons.
00:47:28
Speaker
That's our show. You can find the podcast at goblinlurepod on Twitter or email any questions, comments, or concerns to goblinlurepodcast at gmail.com. If you'd like to support your friendly neighborhood gobsmugs, you can do so at patreon.com slash goblinlurepod.
00:47:45
Speaker
This episode of Gobble No. is hosted by Alex Newman, who you can find on Twitter, at Alexander Newell. Engineering, Editing, and Production for this episode by Joe Redman, who you can find on Twitter, at Finnhorne. That's F-Y-N-D, or... Our music is by Vintergotten, who you can find at vintergotten.com. That's winter, G-A-T-A-N, dot com. Logo by Stephen Raphael on Twitter, at Stephen Rapple.
00:48:11
Speaker
Goblin lore is a presentation of Hipster to the Coast which you can find at hipstersofthecoast.com or at hipstersmtg on Twitter.
Closing Remarks and Credits
00:48:20
Speaker
Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.