[RangerScience]

Some related thoughts, sorted by brevity:

(1) All pathos are healthy behaviors "gone wrong" - wrong time, or, wrong place, or (mostly), wrong magnitude.

(2) I wondered for a very long time: what's the difference between being convinced, and being manipulated? Stumbled across something on the 'net that finally gave an answer: Manipulation begins with diminishment, and (bringing it back to cults), "isolation" is one of the powerful forms of manipulation.

(3) Recently been thinking about "responsibility" in terms of the physics of a 'bounce' -

Drop a ball on sand, it goes thud; the force involved is the weight of the ball. Drop a bouncy ball on concrete, the force is ~2x (stopping the downward motion, then enough for the upward motion).

When someone comes to you and says: "This thing you did had this negative impact on [me/them/us]", if someone rejects any possible responsibility for it, that's a "bounce". It ends up looking like any of the forms of "pushing your reality onto others" - "you do this to me", gaslighting, etc etc etc.

[akiselev]

> Drop a ball on sand, it goes thud; the force involved is the weight of the ball. Drop a bouncy ball on concrete, the force is ~2x (stopping the downward motion, then enough for the upward motion).

The force in both scenarios is exactly the same. In the first the force goes into displacing the sand while in the second - since the concrete is a rigid lattice - the force goes into deforming the ball, which causes it to bounce back due to its elasticity. Objects with no elasticity (like another piece of concrete) will not bounce.

Beware of physical metaphors.

[RangerScience]

Hmmm good point about the sand deformation but I think you're off on "exactly the same".

AFAICT - The force to bring the ball to rest is exactly the same. As you point out, either the sand or the ball's structure (or the ground's structure, such as a trampoline) absorbs that force. After that however, one ball remains at rest, and the other ball accelerates back up. The force producing that acceleration is exerted (keeping in mind newton's third). If the ball returns to 80% of the original height, then that's 100% of the force to bring it to rest (same in both situations), and then an additional 80% of the force to re-"throw" it, which is only present in the bounce. So in a "thud" there's 100% of the force, and in the "bounce" there's 1xx% of the force.