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But I also slipped myself and asked him a why question later in the conversation! Oops. So, I apologized.

My advice to not ask “why” runs counter to advice given in the marketing world, where I come from. Marketing guru Simon Sinek has made a career of advising people to ask “why”.  And there’s a technique to ask people “why” seven times to really uncover their real reason.  Seven times! 

But as I said in my bad questions post, asking why can make people feel attacked. The seven times why is really uncomfortable, and I’ve seen people really squirm. Not only that, but in reality most of the time that we humans do things, we don’t really know why we do them.  Not really.  Cognitive psychology has made a study of various factors that we are consciously unaware of but can influence the choices we make every day. Or we do things because we have always done them, or because the people around us do them.  We may do them out of instinct also.

You won’t get any of those reasons if you ask why.  Instead, you can do as I did and ask what things the candidate has done that they really like. Other suggestions I have come up with are:

·       What is it that you hope will happen if your candidate gets elected?

·       What would you like them to do?

·       How would they make that happen?

·       Where did you hear about this? 

Are there any other what questions you can think of?

Let me know if you try it and how it works.

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—

In her book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How to Get Out, journalist and author Amanda Ripley describes what a healthy conflict is. In her words: “In healthy conflict, there is movement. Questions get asked. Curiosity exists. There can be yelling too. But healthy conflict leads somewhere. It feels more interesting to get to the other side than to stay in it.”

She contrasts this with a different type of conflict, what she calls “high conflict,” which “is the destination. There’s nowhere else to go.” And it can hold us in a “trance” that we have to break in order to get out.

Why does curiosity lead to such different outcomes? If are curious, it takes away our tendency to judge. And we ask better questions (see this newsletter for details about what curious questions are).

Buddhists call this the beginner’s mind.

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As little children, we are curious. We ask questions all the time. Children of a certain age are notorious for asking why. We are learning about the world constantly—until we stop.

Why do we stop? We may stop because we have been told to stop. Our parents may be tired of the why questions and don’t want to take the time it requires to deal with the questions. They may say, “Because I say so!” and shut us down. Or tell us that curiosity killed the cat. Some parents may go even further and expect children to know the answers. We may become ashamed if we don’t know something, even if there is no reason for a child to know that.

Our typical educational process also contributes to our loss of curiosity. Only special schools such as Waldorf and Montessori reward kids for asking questions. Regular schools reward children for having knowledge. Having the answer when the teacher calls on you is applauded. High scores on tests are lauded. People notice when we know facts. And kids who don’t know or who ask inconvenient questions are pushed to the back.

When we lose our curiosity, we lose our ability to formulate questions. I’ve heard an academic lamenting that her graduate students didn’t know how to formulate the research questions that they needed for their dissertations. But the schooling that they had had up until then didn’t reward them for curiosity. It was an unused muscle.

We may also stop because we think we have enough knowledge. But we don’t know as much as we think we do. Psychologists call this the “illusion of explanatory depth.” Because this world is such a complicated place, we know a little bit about a lot of things, things we need to know to operate in this world. But we aren’t experts in everything. Until we realize the limits of our knowledge, we let that illusion get in the way.

Regaining our childhood curiosity is the magic ingredient that we can use to mend those fractured relationships. Accepting that we really don’t know but want to find out.

It’s magic because it affects our hormones and the functioning of our brain. When we are curious, we release the hormones oxytocin and dopamine in our brains. They make us feel good and create a sense of openness, by connecting our heart to our brain. That’s truly magical.

Be curious. Recapture your childhood, using the magic of your hormones and brain, so you can mend your relationships.

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Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
-Stephen Convey

Every time that I listen to someone speak about his/her feelings and start forming a reply before this person has finished talking, I realize I am not allowing the person the right or dignity of their own feelings. I do this when I am feeling hurt, angry, and fearful that my needs won’t be met, so I get defensive.

Recently my Higher Power chose to help me with this defect of “listening to reply” when a loved one was speaking with me. My loved one was hurt and quite defensive and, in return, I was defensive. I listened with intent to reply and when I replied, it went so poorly and I did not keep my side of the street clean. I was drained and emotionally exhausted by the interaction. I, later, approached this person with the intent to listen. And that’s what I did, I listened and nothing else. I allowed them the space to feel their feelings whether I felt it was right or wrong. And I made an amends for my part and my behavior in the situation.

Later, when I tried to express my feelings, the other person listened with the intent to reply. This, I think, was my Higher Power trying to teach me patience and compassion because I was now able to understand how it feels when I do that to others. And even though they replied, I was able to listen to their responses rather than try to be defensive and, therefore, able to keep my side of the street clean.

Finally, my Higher Power taught me understanding and sympathy. The same person that was angry about certain behaviors I engaged in later came to me and thanked me for being able to hold a space for their feelings and then discussed with me about a different situation. While my loved one spoke, I listened with the intent to understand. Though they didn’t realize, I heard them speak about how they engage in the same behaviors that they found so frustrating in me. In that moment, though my loved one didn’t make that connection between the two of us, I understood and felt sympathy. And simply by realizing that we are the same, my own pain at not being heard earlier, was healed. I realized connections are two-way streets.

I am so thankful for this experience. I learned how to not be defensive. I learned patience. I learned to understand. But most of all, I learned to listen because if I hadn’t been able to listen, I would never have been able to heal.

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• Volatile

• Uncertain

• Complex

• Ambiguous

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They then developed tools to help their soldiers and sailors be able to deal with the “fog” of war. The old style of leadership was to give orders and expect them to be carried out no matter what. That style led to massacres. The new one pushes down decision making to a lower level, trusting well trained people to make good decisions.

I see the similarities between war and what is happening now in our lives. The world has become more volatile and uncertain. This affects everyone, so it leads to conflict as we figure out how to interpret what is going on.

I once heard someone describe life as a “chaos lottery”. That’s a great phrase to capture some of this uncertainty.

Accepting that life is fundamentally uncertain is tough. We seem to be hardwired to want certainty, to know what the future will bring. Some of us more than others. But there are no guarantees. We extrapolate from the present. Our arguments in our relationships are based on how we interpret the present and the potential future.

Certainty in an ambiguous, complex world is impossible. Again and again, we fall for people who seem to know what the future holds. We use their presentation skills (or their charisma) as a marker of how well they know what they are talking about. But over and over again, they are proved wrong.

One approach: Stay rooted in the present and pay attention. Pay attention to the cues you get from what is going on around you so you will be able to respond more quickly when things do change. Be where your feet are. And don’t believe those who say they know what is going on, learn to trust the people who aren’t certain but have good ideas.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan for the future, you should. But also stay present to the now.

That way, you don’t have to argue about the future.

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• Equality

• Merit based fairness

• Equity based fairness

Equality is when we cut a cake into equal sized pieces. This might apply to group dinners when everyone agrees to pay an equal amount. But what if one person deliberately chose to order less food because they couldn’t afford to pay more than that amount? Then we might choose to split it by who ordered what – a more complicated way to split a bill but one that reflects what each person ordered - an application of merit based fairness.

This clearly comes up in inheritances which reflect on what the beneficiary is perceived to have contributed. A person who visited the deceased and took them to doctors’ appointments while other ignored the person might be favored in a will – is that fair? The others might not think so if they are using an equality-based form of fairness, but using a merit-based form of fairness, the person who did the work has earned more. And an inheritance which goes to someone who is disabled because they can’t support themselves is an equity flavor of fairness.

So, the squabble about money comes down to different perceptions of fairness. What if, instead of talking about the money itself, we talked about our different perceptions of fairness first? Would that help?

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But not all lying is gaslighting. Sometimes people lie once or twice but usually don’t do it routinely. Some people lie to make people like them, or because it’s easier. But the most serious is people who seem incapable of telling the truth.

People have four ways of reacting when someone lies:

• Ignore it, and trust them again

• Don’t trust anything from that person again

• Don’t trust anyone ever again

• Treat what the other person says with caution.

Which way is most useful depends on whether the person is a chronic liar and whether the person is gaslighting (i.e., trying to manipulate you.) I’ve written before about trust and gaslighting. Link: https://fracturedrelationships.substack.com/p/dealing-with-complexity-manipulation

The first thing to do is to recognize the lie and how often it happens. Is it a pattern or a one off? If it’s a pattern, you need to accept the reality of the situation. You can’t keep trusting this person if they have demonstrated consistent lying. If it’s a one-off lie, that’s a different matter. That’s no excuse to give up on the entire human race.

If the person doesn’t lie habitually, then ignore it and trust again is probably the best way to deal with it, as long as they have apologized. Or perhaps you can create a trust ladder, by starting by trusting them with small stuff before trusting them with important stuff.

I think that people who have the extreme reaction of not trusting at all or not trusting anyone probably had a chronic liar in their childhood and might benefit from therapy to deal with chronic lack of trust. This is beyond the scope of this newsletter.

I’ve noticed that it doesn’t take much to make people distrust. I think this is partially a result of the pandemic, where we have all been traumatized.

My personal reaction is a mixture of a trust ladder and to treat what a person says cautiously. What’s your style?

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The five things are:

• I’ve said everything I am going to say.

• I hear you.

• That’s not my experience

• I’m not going to argue with you about what happened.

• What is your goal of this conversation?

I see these as grace filled ways to get yourself out of a corner when you don’t know what else to say. As she talks about, the phrase “I hear you” is sometimes understood as agreement, but she doesn’t think it is, it’s just a way of acknowledging what is said.

The last one “what is the goal of this conversation” is magic. It changes the dynamic of the conversation totally! I can’t wait to try it!

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But I look at it as good practice, for myself, for training my brain to look for the good in people.

I figure if I do it when it’s easy to do, then maybe when it’s hard, when I am in a challenging conversation, then maybe I’ll be able to access that ability more easily.

Let me know if you try it and how it works.

Because our society is so polarized, many of us have chosen a side. (That’s a tautology.) It’s hard not to choose. The media you watch, the people you hang out with, all of that contributes to which side we pick. We become part of a tribe.

It’s normal and natural to form groups and have affinity toward them. After all, it’s because of our human ability to form groups that humans survived and thrived.

Our tendency to join a tribe is described by Jonathan Haidt as the moral foundation of loyalty to the group (as he calls it) or belonging and community (as I call it in my book, Persuade, Don’t Preach: Restoring Civility Across the Political Divide).

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Of course, I’m not saying that belonging to a group is bad. It’s good to have a group to belong to; it is part of what makes life a rich experience. But, as with almost anything in life, there is also a downside to it.

The downside is that we let what our tribe says influence how we think, without always really thinking about it. That feeds into something called “confirmation bias.” Knowing that we—just like all humans —have confirmation bias doesn’t help us overcome it.

Here’s a test: Consider an action by the other side that your side is critical about. What would your reaction to that be if someone on your side did it? Be honest. (Hat tip to Scott Alexander of the Star Codex newsletter for the test question and the insight that follows about the book The Scout Mindset.)

Another test: see if you can identify something that the president you didn’t vote for did that was good. Just one thing. If you can’t, then confirmation bias may be dominating your thinking.

When we focus on the differences between us and the people we disagree with, we’re leaning into the tribal identity, what author Amanda Ripley calls the “adversity instinct.”

One potential remedy to overcome confirmation bias is to become more rational, to adopt what author Julia Galef calls the “scout mindset” in her new book of the same name—to look for the truth and not just go along with what others say is right.

Another option is to use a different instinct that we all have, what Ripley calls an “instinct for solidarity” in her book, High Conflict. That’s also called “transcendence.”

How can we do that? We can try to break what Ripley calls the “binary” and foster that desire for solidarity. For example: One of the people Ripley profiles in her book, Gary Friedman, had entered into a high-conflict situation, a binary trap, and diligently worked to get himself out. Some of the actions he took were to rehumanize and recategorize his former opponents. He tried to revive the other identities that the people held. He asked about the garden that one worked so diligently on. When another’s mother had just died, he expressed condolences. He worked to see the others as individuals, one by one. That helped, a lot!

One of the actions I have been taking to try to understand others is to read and associate with other people who are also breaking the binary. On my website, I’ve created a list of resources I’ve read that have helped me. Reading my book, Persuade, Don’t Preach: Restoring Civility Across the Political Divide, is another way that you can gain insight about the other side. In order to personally continue to maintain that understanding, I also read sources that try to bridge the gap.

What are you already doing to break the binary? What else would you feel comfortable doing? Do you lean toward adopting the scout mindset or the solidarity instinct?

Let’s work toward encouraging our natural human instinct for solidarity and a scout mindset and break the binary.

But when I allowed myself to consider the information that didn’t agree, and why that was the case, my analysis always got deeper, better, and more interesting.

In the ideal analytical process, there should be three steps thesis (where you explore your ingoing assumptions), antithesis (where you consider the arguments against your hypothesis), and synthesis (where you incorporate the parts of the antithesis that make your original argument stronger). But we often skip the second and third steps.

When we ignore the thoughts that don’t agree with our prior ideas, we lose the opportunity to take our understanding deeper and make our hypothesis stronger.

I learned from Susan Mehrtens, a psychologist and coauthor of the book Credible?, that Carl Jung called this idea paradoxical truth. Jung noted that paradoxical truth “holds the tension of opposites and thus fosters movement, growth and change.” This also struck a chord with me; we learned a similar concept in seminary: “both/and.”

Two ideas can both be true, even if they appear to contradict one another. We need to look for the way to integrate them. Because all humans are context-bound, we’re limited in what we believe is true. When we encounter an opposing viewpoint, it’s coming from a different context, one that has a grain of truth in it. Jung tells us that doing so leads to growth and change.

In her podcast “Happier”, the author Gretchen Rubin often mentions the idea of paradoxical truth. In her words, “the opposite of a truth is often also true”.

How can we apply this idea? Try to approach this discussion as if you were an anthropologist studying the culture. Look for the truths behind the ideas that don’t agree with your preexisting ideas. When we allow for the truth behind two conflicting ideas to emerge, it can lead us to a deeper truth. This is synthesis. Others call it paradox. In seminary, we called this thinking both/and. The idea is that there can be truth in two different ideas, and if that is true, then resolving the conflict can lead to important insights. Look for the glimpses of truth.

Also, think about the issues separately from the values and from the people. You need to decouple people themselves from what they believe and from the issues that arise out of their values. This idea should help you separate them.

Like many others, my trust is eroding. I don’t trust the ads I see, I don’t trust the people on social media sharing something they just read are people and not bots or Russian assets, I even don’t trust the media itself to report things correctly. I don’t remember ever feeling this way.

I am not the only one feeling this way. The data show that trust in all institutions is eroding.

In our polarized society different sides are getting our information from different sources and they just don’t agree. Plus, the “mainstream media” is declining, and people are starting to not pay attention to the media they used to trust. This lack of agreement leads to arguments/discussions that don’t go anywhere because you don’t agree on the facts. It traces back to whom we trust to tell us the truth.

I am especially wary of ads these days. I listen to ads and wonder, why should I believe what you say? And mostly, I don’t. I have been burned a couple of times and now I don’t trust any ads unless I have already heard of the company. I am not even trusting that ad for an unrealistically low price for a brand I’ve heard of. Sorry, I am not buying what you are saying. I am scared it is a phishing technique to get my credentials.

I get the impression that many people don’t think about whom to trust and why they trust people. They just accept what someone tells them if the person matches what they already think. I heard one story of a person who resisted what her doctor recommended because someone on the internet with a stethoscope said something else. Was that person even a doctor? Who knows.

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I think a lot of people accept something as truth when it fits with their preconceptions. People don’t like it when they feel they are being challenged. So, they choose to trust people who reinforce what they already believe. That’s driving a lot of anti-vaxx sentiment and distrust of doctors.

I had an idea. What about if, instead of arguing about the facts, we asked the people we disagreed with to discuss how each of us decides who to trust and how they know it’s ok to trust.

I just used Google AI to get an answer for how to know who to trust, here’s part of what it said:

• Do they consistently behave in a similar way?

• Are they honest?

• Do they do what they say they will do?

Another set of questions comes from Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris on the podcast, You Are Not So Smart:

• What are they trying to get you to pay attention to?

• What beliefs of yours are they trying to exploit?

• Are they satisfying your expectations?

I would add questions like:

• Are they benefiting from what they say?

• Are they trying to sell you something?

• Or do they have another financial interest?

Let’s have conversations about how to trust instead of the usual arguments. Maybe it will move our relationships closer together.

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The first is from a person who claims to be conflict avoidant and was proud that her marriage didn’t have conflict. Until her partner asked her for a divorce. Obviously, there were things that they should have been discussing. Her advice was:

• Expect a conversation not a conflict

A different piece of advice came from someone dealing with an active alcoholic.

• Do nothing, say nothing

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The three areas you need to consider in deciding which advice to apply are:

• What is the situation?

• How are you and the other person feeling, mentally and physically

• How important is it to you to maintain the relationship?

First, importance. If the relationship isn’t that important to you, don’t say anything. Follow the “do nothing, say nothing” advice.

Second, if the situation is inappropriate for a deep conversation, then also follow the “do nothing, say nothing” advice. Save the conversation for another time. In fact, you can say that to the person something like: I want to talk to you more about these issues, but now isn’t the time. Are you available at (name a date and time)?

Third, don’t say anything if you (or the other person) are feeling hungry, angry, lonely or tired. It won’t go well. (I’ve written about this before.)

But if you have determined that the situation is right, both of you are in a good enough position to have a conversation, that’s the time to employ the skills which I write about in this newsletter.

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• Ask

• Listen

• Affirm

• Respond

• Ask for response

(each one is linked to the previous newsletter on this topic.)

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But I heard a podcast that helped open me up to an ever better idea, asking better questions. This is from Kelly Corrigan Wonders.

The story that caught my attention was about efforts that had been made for years in New Mexico to get approval for universal day care for young kids and kept running into roadblocks. The Governor finally did something different. She went to the person who was doing the blocking and asked different and better questions. Now, she didn’t get exactly what had been asked for all that time, but she got something.

Now, I’ve heard people try to ask different questions but not quite succeed. For example, I listened to a podcast that asks questions like “what’s your favorite cheese?”. Someone else I listen to dives deep into the person’s history and asks questions about that. Sometimes that is wonderful, but sometimes it fails, so there are no guarantees. But I think the best interviews I have heard always have someone who has put a lot of effort into asking interesting and different questions. One type of question you could try is: What would you support on the issue of ….?

Another option I heard for asking better questions is to ask the opposite question, paired with the question you would normally ask. For example, I heard one asking, not just, “why should I hired you?, but also “Why shouldn’t I hire you?” The story went that in the process of answering the “why not” question, she realized that she shouldn’t take the job. That pairing can open up a window into a different answer.

How could you change what you are asking that might get a different response?

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This particular person was referring to the evangelical churches and how good they are at creating activities and a sense of community for its members. Church can become your life in one of these churches.

But when someone has some doubts about the teaching of that church, the sense of belonging is used as a tool to keep people from doing their own thinking. If people don’t push down their doubts, they won’t belong any longer and they lose the people they thought were their friends. The strong sense of belonging is used as a weapon to keep people in line.

I heard a story of a mother whose adult son came out as gay. She had been active in her church in a small town but was shunned afterwards. She lost her church community, that she thought were her friends. Plus she was in a small town and continued to see these same people everywhere. It was a textbook example of weaponized belonging. They wanted to force her to choose the teaching of the church over the love she had for her son.

I have also recently run across some terms used to inoculate people from continuing to doubt:

• Put on the armor of God

• Faith like a child

• Don’t rock the boat

• Doubt your doubts

This whole topic makes my skin crawl, that such a powerful force would be weaponized and used against people.

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But change is hard and it feels uncomfortable. I’ve been given the advice to do it anyway, even if it feels weird, but that didn’t quite make sense to me until I was told the four stages of change:

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• Unconscious incompetence: This is when you are doing something that isn’t working but you aren’t aware of it.

• Conscious incompetence: This is when you become aware of that unproductive behavior, but you keep doing it! Darn! Feels frustrating and terrible.

• Conscious competence: This is when you try out a new behavior and it feels weird. This is where “Act as if” come in. Yes, it will feel weird, but you are practicing a new behavior.

• Unconscious competence: After you have practiced enough, it will start to feel normal and natural. You will be amazed at the things that you can do this way!

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Dear Friends,

I was not expecting my tour guide to be a former member of the IRA. But then again, those who were part of the paramilitaries are only in their sixties and seventies, and where would they be but living ordinary lives in ordinary places?

(There are, for the record, still paramilitaries in Northern Ireland and still active members to this day, but it's different in many ways.)

I liked him. He was personable. He had a sense of humor. He'd clearly told his story many times. He bears a visible injury from his encounters with violence. He spent many years in prison. He was honest and vulnerable and shared details that I'm not going to repeat, but suffice it to say his story became intensely human as it unfolded throughout the tour. He told us about a favorite uncle he grew up with. We learned his sister's name.

At one point, he took us to a garden with a monument that had names inscribed. I'd actually passed this garden before, and I had a basic idea what it was, but to hear him talk about it felt different. First he read several of the names and told their stories. They were people he knew personally. He said, "To me, this is a place where I honor the friends I loved. From my point of view, they were killed for who they were, killed fighting for our rights...but I want you to understand, if you lived one street over, you would see this as a monument to terrorism. And I know that, too."

Later, someone asked whether there was a Protestant equivalent of the Catholic-perspective tour we were receiving. He said, "Oh, yes, and let me tell you about the man who guides it. You see, years back, his father threw a petrol bomb into a cafe. That bomb, it killed my grandfather. My grandfather was seventy-three years old and having his breakfast. When I grew up, I joined the IRA. When he grew up, he joined up on his side. And now I run the tour on my side the gates, and he runs the tour on other side the gates. And you call me __________, and you call him __________. We share the same first name, isn't that something? Sometimes, on a tour, I'll take my group to the gates and we'll shake hands, him and I. We won't meet him today. His knee's gone bad. He'll need surgery. But when I can, I go, and I shake his hand. Because we know, both of us, that's important. It can't be allowed to happen again."

His worry is for the young people. They don't understand, he explained. They get angry, especially around certain holidays, because each side has those who deliberately provoke the other. And, he says, he will often put his body between the angry boys on his side and the angry boys on the other side. And there will be another man doing the same, a Protestant man, because they know. They know it can't be allowed to happen.

Halfway through the tour or so, I found myself walking beside this man, and he asked me who I was and what brought me to Belfast. I explained that I am a Quaker traveling minister. He stopped in his tracks to shake my hand.

"After the hunger strikes, and after I was let out of prison," he said, "I was invited to Quaker House. You know Quaker House? With the blue door?"

(I told him I did, though it no longer functions the same way it used to.)

"Well, anyway, I was invited to Quaker House to sit down in a circle with other men just released from prison. Men from my side and the other side. There was a rule there--I always loved this--when you went in the door, first you took off your coat and you hung it on a hook, and then you took off all your weapons and put them on a shelf. Couldn't carry a weapon into Quaker House. We all did the same.

"First time I met those men on the other side. There was a man there from London facilitating, and I think we scared him, at least at first. Because he asked us all to introduce ourselves, and we all did, and we'd all been in prison for blowing things up.

"The Quakers had us talking many years before the politicians got round to having a peace process. We knew by the time we were released from prison, there had to be a better way. We all did. But the politicians weren't ready to make peace. We were. Well, we wanted to go about things another way. The Quakers gave us a place to talk about that.

"But we went to Quaker House because it was quite natural to do that. You see, the Quakers had been outside the prison every day for a long time, serving tea to the families, families on both sides. We all knew the Quakers. So when they said 'come round and have another cup of tea at Quaker House,' we did that without a second thought. Perfectly natural.

"Well. And we knew our families would be safe with them. They would never hurt our families."

I've been thinking about that ever since. The Quakers were trusted because they'd been serving tea for many years and because they had left no doubt in anyone's mind that they would never hurt anybody's families. The Quakers were trusted because they had built a reputation. Not based on distant history, although that helped, but based on what they were known to do every day in the modern times.

These days, for whom are we making tea?

With love,

Emily

If you want to know more, she is doing a hybrid presentation on communities and political violence on May 31st at 2pm in Barnegat NJ.

To learn more and register, click below

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tBs4emA1RjCoh7EYZdMarQ#/registration

An example from Trumps previous presidency: CNN commentator Van Jones worked across the aisle to gather enough votes to improve prison policy. A more recent example: bipartisan legislation to release the Epstein files.

We have many issues that are not politically divided, such as the issues identified as the causes of our divide, in this post. What issue are you willing to work on?

Those science fiction novels might be feeding the AI itself. One recent development is the creation of a social media site for artificial intelligence models called Moltbook. People who have lurked on it say scary things about what the models are saying, but others have concluded that they are just parroting back what has been written in sci fi novels.

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On top of the AI concerns, then there’s the idea that the war with Iran will help bring about Armageddon. According to one complaint from a non-commissioned officer reported by The Guardian this idea has been propagated by some of miliary brass. According to the complaint filed: “He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”.

Finally, I just heard someone speculate that AI will become so expensive that very few people will use it. Right now, AI is being subsidized by venture capital, but they will want a return on their investment at some time, so prices will have to increase. This happened with ride sharing and food delivery services, so perhaps it will also happen here. What he didn’t take into account is that there may be a learning curve and the costs may come down.

To paraphrase what Noah Smith, one of my favorite economic writers on Substack, just said about this topic, we don’t know what the future holds with respect to AI. Could it mean mass unemployment? Perhaps. Could it mean greater prosperity? Perhaps. Who knows what the future holds? No one. We just have to live through it.

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But one of the problems with shame, as identified by researcher Brene Brown, is that it paralyzes people. Thus, shame can stop people from doing things but not help them figure out how to do things better.

Further, it has become clear that there are some people for whom shame doesn’t operate the same way as it does for others. Instead of allowing themselves to feel ashamed, they seem to feel defiant. It spurs them on to act even worse.

The lesson: don’t assume that shaming someone will change their behavior. Stop shaming, instead ask questions (and not bad questions!), listen, agree with what you can and then make comments. (Links are to previous newsletters, explaining more about each concept.)

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I have my own one of those now.

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There are two types of people, those who bring politics into everything and those that don’t.

I heard this story from someone I know who lives in Washington DC and has been involved with a parenting group in their neighborhood. This group holds events for parents and helps people get to know people who have children of the same age. Because they are located in the District, it is a very politically aware group. So, some people decided to use the messaging to this group to organize politically related events. The board decided that they didn’t want the group to be politically focused, which upset half of the group, and the group splintered. The Washington Post ran a long story describing what happened.

This story raises the issue of whether we can have organizations that are not political. I happen to belong to an organization that deliberately stays out of “outside issues”. I have to say it is restful to attend their meetings because I know no-one will raise political issues. I can’t be on alert 24/7, I need relief.

What do you think? Are you a person who believes everything is political or do you want a life outside of politics?

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