Category: Communication
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Politics as storytelling
Two decades ago, during my biweekly game in Berkeley, the black, white, and Latino players engaged in a series of long, heated debates about O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence. We didn’t necessarily change each other’s opinions about the case, but we gained a far deeper understanding of each other—and our respective group’s experiences—in the process.…
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Intellectual humility
Adam Grant pointed to How ‘Intellectual Humility’ Can Make You a Better Person which I found intriguing. We all have a tendency to overestimate how much we know — which, in turn, means that we often cling stubbornly to our beliefs while tuning out opinions different from our own. We generally believe we’re better or…
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Let Me Explain; Let Me Sum Up
There is a great quote from The Princess Bride… Westley: Who are you? Are we enemies? Why am I on this wall? Where is Buttercup? Inigo Montoya: Let me explain. [pause] Inigo Montoya: No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry Humperdinck in little less than half an hour. So all…
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TED Talk: Let’s try emotional correctness
Sally Kohn gets an unbelievable amount of hate mail for doing her job: being a liberal pundit on Fox News. Political persuasion begins with emotional correctness: the respect and compassion we show one another. Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. That is emotional correctness.…
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PeopleMap Name Badges
In discussion with coworkers, the idea came up of putting the PeopleMap type on one’s name badge. My contribution was to make it color coded: Red for Leader because people associate red with the Power Tie. Blue for Task because people associate that color with cool, collected, logical. Green for People because (RGB and green is…
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GPB Funding Campaigns
Over the past couple weeks Georgia Public Radio ran their fall funding campaign for National Public Radio. (We get to go through this again in the spring.) These funding campaigns are the least I listen to GPB. And they actively discourage me from wanting to donate. So when the campaigners lament about how so few…
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Shortcuts: Labeling
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) Homo Sapiens Sapiens cheated evolution in one critical way by creating language. Rather than rely totally on instincts passed along by genes, we pass along an enormous amount of information to our proteges through memes. These may not even be the descendants of our…
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TED Talk: The Lost Art of Democratic Debate
When I go to a party, I would much rather to find a discussion about something ideological than anything else that tends to happen at them like drinking alcohol, dancing, or losing my hearing. Also, I should do a better job apologizing after the fact when in the heat of the moment I take a…
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Conditional Thinking
My mind made a leap past something blocking it for a while now. This post, If This, Then That (ifttt): Teaching Conditional Thinking laid the groundwork I needed. The post describes a new simpler version of Yahoo Pipes called ifttt. The idea of both is to take data generated at one or many places and output…