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gwern's avatar

"Tell arts they have no soundness, But vary by esteeming;Tell schools they want profoundness, And stand too much on seeming:If arts and schools reply,Give arts and schools the lie."

'The Lie', Sir Walter Raleigh http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssi...

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I have read Goffman and I second the recommendation. One thing about his work is that (in contradiction to Robin's heroic self-narrative above) is that he assumes that everybody knows, at some level, that social interaction is theatrical. It is the reflexively self-conscious nature of the process that interests him.

Also see the related work of ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, Sacks) thought these are considerably more challenging. And here's a story about an AI trying to use these ideas and others to reform the field.

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