communication
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Most of the time the stuff we’re arguing about really is what we’re arguing about. It’s easy to play it out, to slide down that slippery slope, take it all the way to the inevitable conclusion. And stake a claim out there. For them. That what they’re saying is so unbelievably ridiculous. To assume we…
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We’re familiar with the phrase “comparing apples and oranges”. The problem with the phrase is that most of the time we aren’t trying to classify all the apples or all the oranges: we’re trying to classify fruit. Which means we think the difference between them doesn’t matter. But when “fruit” is defined as “red”, crisp…
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Trolling isn’t the same thing as debating. But we feel like we have to honor the troll’s arguments as valid. But we don’t.
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When Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, he was bringing us back from an extreme position. It is also really important to notice what that position is in extreme contrast to. I’m not into Freud, but anyone who has taken a psychology class knows why this phrase exists. Precisely because Freud…
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When your child asks why she should brush her teeth, do we ever simply say “because the science says to”? Of course not. That’s ridiculous. While your kid is really trying to get out of brushing her teeth, she is also doing so because she doesn’t have any context for oral health. She hasn’t seen…
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There’s something to the way we talk about the tit-for-tat of politics that deeply confuses us. The danger for us is how it narrows our understanding.