Society

Instead of dumbing down

October 16, 2016

So that’s what I suggest as an alternative to dumbing down: See if you can care about your listeners or readers enough to understand why they should want to know this and what direction they can approach it from. Then work on your own understanding of the subject until you grasp it well enough to approach from that direction yourself. In the short term, that may not be as satisfying as ridiculing their stupidity, but in the long term I think it works better.

~ Doug Muder from, Instead of Dumbing Down | The Weekly Sift

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An ideal conversation

June 28, 2015

Ideally, this is going to be an effective conversation. You have a topic you want to discuss that will likely result in a decision or two. You are confident in your version of the truth and you feel no matter what happens in this conversation, you’ll be able to adapt.

Problem is, there is another person in this conversation and from the moment they open their mouth, it’s no longer just about the topic, the conversation is now about how we are having it.

~ Rands from, An Ideal Conversation – Rands in Repose

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The individual and the herd

June 22, 2015

Here’s what it boils down to: Human beings are simultaneously individuals and members of society, not fundamentally one or the other. Some issues (like free speech) are easier to understand from the individual point of view, while others (like traffic) require a social point of view.

~ Doug Muder from, The Individual and the Herd | The Weekly Sift

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This is a long read and it’s *gasp* “thinky.” It’s also about *swoon* vaccination, but it’s really about individual rights and social responsibility. Repeat this phrase over and over, “an intelligent person can consider an idea without accepting it,” and give this a read.

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Language of lying

May 21, 2015

When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, “Hey, my world, our world, it’s going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized.” And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit.

~ Pamela Meyer from, The Language of Lying: Animated Primer on How to Detect Deception

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Less interrupting please

May 20, 2015

I have seen this happen more times than the number of yaks I’ve shaved. At nearly every job I’ve had, I’ve walked this fine line. I’ve had performance reviews where I’ve been called pushy, aggressive, assertive, abrasive, or bitchy simply for speaking up in a similar manner to that of my male colleagues, and on the other side of things, I’ve been interrupted and spoken over more times than I can count. I’ve worked at places where I was the only one being interrupted (backstory: I’ve been the only woman in a lot of engineering departments), which has bothered me. But I’ve also worked at places where everyone interrupts each other all the time. For a while, I thought that was better. “At least I’m not being spoken over because I’m the only woman; the guys get interrupted too,” I thought to myself. But everyone interrupting everyone else really isn’t that much better.

~ Katherine Daniels from, «http://beero.ps/2015/01/13/on-interrupting-interrupt-culture/»

For, let’s say, the first half of my life, I was always the one doing the interrupting. As I’ve begun to listen, I now realize how much everyone interrupts everyone else. When I’m relaxed and on my game, I try to have a meta-listening happening so I can tell when to stop talking to keep the conversation working. As best I can manage, when I’m interrupted, I simply stop talking.

But sometimes, just for fun, I like to toss this in quietly while the interrupter is still speaking…

Oh! I’m sorry, did the middle of my sentence interrupt the beginning of yours?

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Calm down and be civil

May 5, 2015

You laugh, and then you probably think to yourself (like I did), “oh crap…that’s me…many, many times.” Whether it’s a delayed flight, or slow service at a restaurant (where we’ll overeat and then complain about being full) it’s amazing what we can complain about just so we have something to complain about!

~ Steve Kamb from, Does It REALLY Matter?

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Instant gratification

May 3, 2015

Certainly, our march from one level of gratification to the next has imposed huge costs—most recently in a credit binge that nearly sank the global economy. But the issue here isn’t only one of overindulgence or a wayward consumer culture. Even as the economy slowly recovers, many people still feel out of balance and unsteady.

~ Paul Roberts from, Instant Gratification

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Dunbar’s number

April 27, 2015

Dunbar’s Number is a favorite blunt diagnosis for the pains that affect rapidly growing teams. The number, which is somewhere between 100 and 250 describes a point at which a group of people can no longer effectively maintain social connections in their respective heads. What was simple from a communication perspective becomes costly. What was a familiar family that you saw wandering the hallway becomes Stranger Town.

~ Rands from, The Old Guard

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Also, Dunbar’s Number on Wikipedia.

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The forsaken art of pedagogy

April 8, 2015

In other words, you actually belong to a wider group: you are one of the increasingly commonplace factions of society that takes pride in not bothering to make yourself understood. You feel entitled to let others worry about what you really mean, and even revel in the tribalism of `being in the know’ rather than letting others into your secret world, as if playing the role of an ignorant tourist in a foreign country.

~ Mark Burgess from, The Forsaken Art of Pedagogy

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Acceptable losses

March 22, 2015

In a pathological act of self-destruction, I bought Skyrim the same week that several hard deadlines were set on the sooner portion of my otherwise sparse schedule. Maybe life didn’t seem hard enough. Or I just have no ability to fight impulse buying. Or impulses in general.

~ Peter Welch from, Acceptable Losses

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Measuring our successes

March 15, 2015

It happens in homes, in our relationships and our jobs, in learning, and even in innovation (as ‘technical debt’): the sense of being trapped by circumstances.

Many have felt themselves in a situation of hopelessness, of not having time to claw their way out of survival mode, and get their head above water. Often conflicting interests stack up to trap you in indecision, and it’s when you are at your most vulnerable that others tend to attack rather than help.

~ Mark Burgess from, Poverty Traps

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Communities versus networks

March 8, 2015

Unfortunately, true community in our modern world is hard to find for soldiers and civilians alike. Instead, we increasingly live out our lives as members of networks. This transition from community to network life is truly at the heart of the increasing feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and anomie that many people experience in the modern age. We’ve never been so “connected” — and yet so isolated at the same time.

~ Brett McKay from, Communities Vs. Networks

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Fish don’t know they are in water

February 7, 2015

If you know a little history, you might see some of this, and think that today’s culture battles are part of a tradition that goes back to FDR …

If you know a bit more history, you might see that this culture war stems from North Eastern progressive tradition dating back to the US Civil War.

The truth is that our culture war does date to the Civil War. Just not the US Civil War in 1861. It’s the English Civil War in 1640s I’m talking about.

~ Clark from, «http://www.popehat.com/2014/10/10/strange-seeds-on-distant-shores/»

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Religious freedom turning into passive-aggression

February 6, 2015

To make this work, conservative Christians need to divert attention from the people they are mistreating by portraying themselves as the victims. And that requires cultivating a hyper-sensitivity to any form of involvement in activities they disapprove of. So rather than sympathize with the lesbian couple who gets the bakery door slammed in their faces, the public should instead sympathize with the poor wedding-cake baker whose moral purity is besmirched when the labor of his hands is used in a celebration of immorality and perversion.

~ Doug Muder from, “Religious Freedom” means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination

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The distress of the privileged

January 25, 2015

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens.

So I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.

~ Doug Muder, from The Distress of the Privileged

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