AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

The great thing about humans is we can learn from others (mentions attachment theory aka imprimers. Religion is the slot in our brain for imprimers after the parents are gone...so we are built with an instict for someone to tell us what to do.

Also reminded of Minsky's imprimer technique of solving a problem by imagining what someone smarter than you would do. Not quite the same thing, but has that imaginal-bootstrapping quality.

this is very like Minsky imprimer theory, just with different aspects emphasized. Or maybe not. You are supposed to think of imprimers as toolboxes of techniques. What would x do? Whereas the pretension game is more; model your actions on this person. What is it like to be x?

No, that's not quite it either. Acting like you are x is different from thinking about what it is to be like x. The latter is mere fantasy, the former is more like committing to a bit.

OK, that strikes me as deeply subversive, and I mean that as a complement. We are all doing drag, not so much enacting gender as satirizing it. None more so than a clueless cis-het-male like me who slaves under some received notion of masculinity. OTOH, we know that part of manliness is imitation, that fact underlies the whole phenomenon of the hero, the role model, the person we strive to be like. imprimers in Minsky technical terms.

imprimers

10 Jun 2022 - 22 Dec 2023

Marvin Minsky term for something roughly like Freud's ego-ideal: someone whom you learn not just facts or skills, but goals and values. People in this role are also those we feel emotional attachment to.

Social processes are crucial to developing high-level goals, and Marvin has a number of insightful critiques and proposals in this area. Consider a term he coined: imprimers—the people from whom one learns foundational goals and values. These can be parents, teachers, or peers, but in any case they play a key role in learning because the goals they impart serve to focus and drive everything else a mind does.
-- from Introduction to Inventive Minds

To me it has a slightly different connotation, more mechanical and less agentive. You model yourself on a role model, but an imprimer loads you up with something (an imprint), with a bit of goal machinery, like copying software or viral replication. It's deeper than a role model, at a lower level. More constitutive, less chosen. Role models are like teachers, imprimers are more like parents, where you get your very basic cognitive/emotional structures from.

Marvin uses the term "role model" in the title of OLPC3 but not in the text. I'm not sure he would buy the distinction I'm making here, a lot of his imprimers were teachers and mentors.

When your ideas seem inadequate, remember someone more expert at this, and imagine what that person would do.

Myself, I do this frequently, by imitating Imprimers and teachers. (Emotion Machine p227)

**D.A. Freccia : You're a pretty smart fella. Joe Moore : Ah, not that smart. D.A. Freccia : ***[If] you're not that smart, how'd you figure it out? *Joe Moore : **I tried to imagine a fella smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, "what would he do?"