~or~ What do political ideologies, TV cliches, conspiracy theories, SatNav and my own sense of recurring failure have in common? Models, maps, schemas, stereotypes - we can't function without these things and yet they often lead us astray. Seven years since Thomas delvered the first ever Hmmm Squad talk, he will bow out with a rather rambling hmmm on just how fundamental such things are to understanding pretty much all human social activity - along with their less rational sibings, the tropes, memes or fashionable ideas that float about, spread and get adopted almost unconsciously.

1. Heuristics: The pitfalls of
mental models, maps and
tropes
~or~
What do political ideologies, TV clichés,
conspiracy theories, SatNav and my
own sense of recurring failure have in
common?

2. Three unrelated (?) spheres

3. Recurring “stuff” in myths
• Greek mythology confusion
• The dying and resurrecting god
• Santa Claus! – Norse gods, The Green Man
• This:
• Myths are a patchwork of bits of other myths

4. Recurring “stuff” in music
• Sam Smith/Tom Petty, Neil Young/REM
• All blues songs have the same chords
• Radio Shropshire
• Not just melodies and chords – turns of
phrase, image, zeitgeist ideas and obsessions
• Even raw sounds – the “millennial whoop”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN23lFKfpck
• Songs are a patchwork of bits of other songs

5. Recurring “stuff” in political
discourse
• Political ideas have their fashions and virulent
zeitgeist ideas – or “memes” – too.
• Marxist slogans in the Iranian revolution
• The “noble savage” and “golden age” heritage
• The lying fake-news MSM!
• No one likes elites, entitlement, totalitarians
• Everyone likes freedom, truth, democracy
• Political argument is a patchwork of bits of
other political arguments

6. Tropes
• Recurring devices,
motifs and themes in
art and literature,
especially film and
television
• Anything from a common type of scene, to a
basic pairing of things that always go
together, to a narrative that is always
followed
• Let’s think of some!

7. • From TV Tropes (tvtropes.org):
• “A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for
describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the
audience will recognize.
• “Tropes may be brand new but seem trite and hackneyed; they may
be thousands of years old but seem fresh and new.
• “They are not bad, they are not good; tropes are tools that the
creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the
audience. In fiction, it can even be impossible to create a tropeless
tale.”
• In life also it can also be impossible to create a
tropeless tale about how you think the world works
• Our lives are full of stereotyping, narratives we have
invented or absorbed from the world around us, and
unexamined 'zeitgeist' assumptions
• In reality, the car most often doesn’t blow up

8. Here Be Dragons
• Tropes combine into maps and
“schemas” of what the world
should be like, whether in
politics, romance, religious,
social or professional life
• Maps and schemas are useful
but over-reliance is dangerous –
the world is more bizarre,
diverse and complex than any
guide-map can convey
• SatNav analogy – the map is not
the territory!

9. The Ideology Trap
• Not engaging with the world directly anymore, but through a rigid,
simplified model
• An off-the-peg world view constructed by someone else, colours
all interactions
• No open-minded reflection = no genuine critical judgement
• Utopian fantasy or abstract “principles” outstrip the real,
personal, practical and human – and people get stomped on and
brutalised

10. Wake up, Sheeple!
• My problem with most conspiracy
theories isn’t the actual
conspiracy, it’s the word view
• Religious zealotry parallel:
• certainty in good and evil
• crusading mindset – the lowly
righteous vs worldly corruption
• pity and contempt for the
unbelieving "sheep” who are
damned by moral ignorance...
• A belief it’s even possible to have rigid control and order
behind such a complex and changing system as society
• Fundamental attribution error

11. Don’t Follow Your Dreams
• “Follow your dreams” vs “settle for a safe and dull life” is a
trope
• Is the reality of your dream what you think it is? Are you
prepared to make the sacrifices to get there? At what point
will you be able to say you’ve arrived? What will you do
then?
• A whole generation with chronic failure issues
• Stop beating yourself up!

12. Avoiding the “Freak Out”
• Overly-rigid reliance on a map, or a map that
is not well connected to reality, leads to crisis
• All you have is what's on the map and “Here
be dragons”. So when your map proves to be
wrong – OMG, DRAGONS
• Keep your eyes on the road – and update that
map regularly!

13. Life, or “The Slow Process of
Disillunsionment”
• Everything I thought true, good, exciting,
reliable or even attainable in my youth
turned out more complicated, ambiguous, or
problematic as adulthood progressed... So I
had to scrap and amend my youthful maps
• Then I thought that was a sad thing. Now I
think: “Thank God for that”
• These maps of what the world is supposed to
be are all a little cock-eyed, riddled with
misleading myths and assumptions

14. A currency of maps and tropes
• Memes, motifs, tropes and
trends are a currency that we
use to explain the world and
ourselves to each other
• Understanding what fashions,
obsessions and short-hand
currencies are in use is
fundamental to understanding
any aspect of human activity,
society, culture and history
• Because that short-hand often
skews things and is not
altogether tethered to reality...

15. Raw, Strange and Crackling
• Life is huge, raw, strange
and unknowable – bigger,
more complex and
crackling with mystery and
possibility than I ever
imagined in early
adulthood...
• Whatever you think
things are like, they
are not necessarily like
that

16. Keep your eyes on the road!