Home | Login | Recent Changes | Search | All Pages | Help

AntiReflectiveCoating

An intellectual and philosophical accretion that forms on the minds and personas of the over achiever elite as they wend their way through one formalized success after another: School, college, sports, The Right Job, and Ongoing Steady Success and Progress (tm).

The weight and opacity of this coating layer renders these individuals impervious to feedback, and incapable of taking an observer position relative to themselves or any process or institution of which they are a part. Individuals possessed of an AntiReflectiveCoating contribute to propagating how things are done now, but not the the advancement of a profession, through learning how things work.

In the workplace, an AntiReflectiveCoating forms a kind of information sink about the person who wears it, preventing any disruptive factoid from impinging on their little, hallucinatory world. See InformationBlackHole, and RavenousBugblatterBeastOfTrall.

-- JimBullock

--BobLee 2003.04.28

MikeMelendez 2003.04.29

AntiReflectiveCoating is used to improve the transmission of light through an optical instrument. Usually considered a good thing.

There's a neat little Shockwave applet showing how AntiReflectiveCoating

To my mind, someone with an AntiReflectiveCoating maximally receives inputs. Stuff coming in enters them vs. just being bounced off the surface and ignored. Again, often considered a good thing.

Some reflection leads to interesting side effects, such as the lens flare in photographs and films. I've always thought it interesting that video games, where there are no actual glass lenses between the model and the viewer, often go to the trouble to simulate lens flare.

I understand the type/stereotype of people being described here, but I'm not sure AntiReflectiveCoating makes a good metaphor.

StephenNorrie 2003.04.29

You're right that it's the opposite of the metaphor for an actual "antireflective coating" on lenses.

A great deal of advancing a profession, one's own practice of a profession, and the AYE content is grounded in "reflection" as in taking the observer position on what's going on.

So, AntiReflectiveCoating is a pun on "reflection", being a dead-on metaphor (a coating that prevents taking the observer position) in one meaning, and an ironic inversion (effect is the opposite of lens-ware antireflective coating) in the other.

Perhaps this was too clever by half, but I found it funny. I'm open to alternative proposals.

-- JimBullock

It's either too clever by half or I'm insufficiently clever by a third (probably the latter).

The description of AntiReflectiveCoating at the top of the page lists a lot of, maybe too many, "bad things" without ever defining what "it" is. All us "right-thinking" people know the following things are "bad":

• accretion, weight, opacity
• formality
• success in shallow cliches
• imperviousness
• no feedback
• inability to step outside of self or context
• conservatism and stagnation
• information sinks
• littleness
• hallucinations
• plus, of course, those "over achiever elite" we all despise.

Besides my lack of cleverness, I'm confused by AntiReflectiveCoating because the description doesn't stick to the image of light, but also uses concepts like substance, weight, movement and size. Also, the description refers to how it grows (accretion), the type of people who have it, and its effects, so I'm not sure what to focus on.

I apologize for dragging on about this, but when I first read the term and the description, my initial reaction was "Oh yeah. I get it." Then I began to realize I didn't get it. My initial reaction was based on the negativity of the words "anti-reflective" and how the description clicked into some of the good vs. bad biases and prejudices I describe above.

If AntiReflectiveCoating is trying to be a metaphor (vs. a pun or word-play), it seems to be trying to say something like:

• "x" is like a substance
• the substance is: absorptive, opaque, protective, constraining, immobilizing, weighty/downward pulling (too many different types of properties for an effective metaphor)
• the substance covers the "undesirable" person
• knowledge and reality (and/or some other good things) are like light
• the substance prevents light from reaching the person

I guess one question is: is there a concise definition of what "x" is? Ignorance? Narrow-mindedness? Close-mindedness? Shallowness? Stupidity?

-- StephenNorrie 2003.04.30

Call it what you will. I'm not committed to the name. Just thought it funny, exactly because the coating that makes them "reflective as in information bounces off" makes them "anti-reflective as in they can't step back and observe themselves or the process they are in . . . because that information bounces off."

I'm finding it really odd that I'm interpreting "reflective" mainly in terms of self awareness - the more human, person oriented meaning. I'm usually the one being literal minded about some actual thing.

Candidate definition of X:

X = unconscious assumptions, weak in evidence, supporting the universal correctness and cleverness of the one holding them. Or, "Every project I'm in charge of has all these disasters. Odd that I've worked with so many idiots."

-- JimBullock

-DaleEmery 2003.04.30

--BobLee

Are you describing 'clueless'?

--DianeGibson

MikeMelendez 2003.04.30

All good stuff.

I noticed something about the "coating" metaphor last evening. Most of these coatings actually help some wavelengths through, while blocking others, much like regular window glass blocks (most) UV, while letting through (most) of the visible light. There's some similar effect there with experience blocked people, where info gets in that reinforces their (often wrong) preconceptions, while the same process blocks information that would help adjust their idea of how the world works. The coating is just what they learned from their experience so far. It "accretes" and coats them, forming a heavy layer of interpretation and assumption that they carry around.

Often the blocking mechanism seems to be prior success, actually. "I was top of my class, blah, blah, blah, so I _can't_ be wrong about something as simple as how to manage a software development team." Too many times lately, I've seen big-brained programmer / architect types concieving The Big Idea, then plopping it into an organization. When it doesn't work, they get more specific and more directive. Their model is programming, and they've been successful with it. But that's different from how humans deal with change, and different from "management as delegation" and different from thinking of a business or a department as a web of autonomous agents.

Dilbert's PHB has a pretty strong accreted "this worked before" filter, and is utterly immune to self-observation. Dogbert is nothing but an "It's all about me" filter.

-- JimBullock, 2003.04.29

Along the lines Dale suggested, perhaps an effective image would be that of a mirror with an AntiReflectiveCoating. The concept of self-reflection matches the idea of looking in the mirror and adding the AntiReflectiveCoating makes it fairly easy to pick up on the idea that something essential or important is missing (even though, technically, this would work just fine).

So someone who uses a mirror with an AntiReflectiveCoating is an image I could understand to mean someone with a lack of self-awareness or inability to reflect (reflect as in "ponder" vs. reflect as in "send back"/"match"/"mimic" - receiving a reflection vs. being the reflector).

Some of the other aspects of cluelessness listed in the description at the top of the page still don't necessarily fall out of the image though.

Reflection and observation, while closely related, seem to me like different activities (other than the case of looking at yourself). Being able to step back from or step out of the current context is movement, not reflection. Reflection isn't necessarily involved in receiving inputs from the environment or receiving feedback. And I don't think the idea of looking at oneself necessarily includes the ideas of staying the same or improving.

-- StephenNorrie 2003.05.02

Stephen pointed me to this article a while back... I remembered reading it but didn't have the reference.

I'm wondering if there's a conncetion between the inabilty to self-observe and inabiltiy to self-assess.

http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html

ED 05.04.2003