MIND READERS DICTIONARY : Mind Readers Dictionary

Qaddafi is a sociopath, a man impervious to any sense of self-doubt. His kind are all too common in positions of power. Sociopathocracy--government by sociopath is so common, the argument that the war in Iraq was a priority because it got rid of one such sociopath makes little sense. Yes the world is better off without Saddam, but for every deposed tyrant there are dozens more. Supposedly three percent of males and one percent of females are sociopaths. Among leaders the percentage is much higher. It makes you wonder what puts them in power. Information theory, the science that provides us such useful concepts as signal to noise ratio, gigabytes and bandwidth also provides insights into the prevalence of sociopathocracy. The key insight is in what's called "redundancy." You're at a large party with people talking all around you. You're in conversation with one person but the signal to noise ratio is low, meaning his voice, the signal, is quiet relative to the ambient conversational noise. Someone loud laughs in the background drowning out your conversational partner so you ask him to repeat what he said. You have to do that a lot actually. Claude Shannon the genius mathematician and engineer for Bell labs who founded information theory showed how redundancy-repeating the message-- compensates for noise. He imagined a channel in which information is sent at a steady rate. Noise in the channel, for example static on a phone line, means that bits of information get drowned out. But if you send the same information again, chances are different bits will be drowned out and you'll be able to piece together the information. Shannon noted however that the more message redundancy is required the less new information can be sent. Conversation at that party is less informative because you waste so much time repeating yourselves. Shannon was thinking about communication in which the listener is eager to hear correctly what the speaker is eager to convey correctly, but of course not all conversation is like that. Sometimes the listener would like to hear something else. At a party you might be done listening to a boring, repetitive guy but can't get away because he's filling your ears with stuff he's eager to say but you are not eager to hear. Or imagine that you're at a group strategy meeting and one guy is dominating, insisting over and over that he has the answers. Dissenting opinions aren't heard because the dominant opinion fills the information channel. The more redundancy; the less information, but also the less variety of information. Hitler's PR man Joseph Goebbels said "The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly -- it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over." Repeating himself he said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." A lack of self-doubt is, by definition a lack of variety. It's like drowning out dissenting opinions in one's own head with a redundant belief. Conviction, faith and confidence are contagious for all sorts of psychological reasons. We envy, are attracted to, and find charismatic the passionately insistent. Conversely, we surrender to them sometimes, as anyone with demanding children knows. You start to seek reasons why it's OK to give in to them just to get a little peace. Shouting matches and other conflicts are really doubting-matches. We argue by casting doubt on each other's opinions. Redundancy is how we dominate in doubting matches, and sociopaths can out-redundant non-sociopaths, hands down. The insistent fill our ears until we can't hear ourselves or anyone else think a dissenting thought. Sociopaths repeat reasons why their opponents should doubt themselves and so, in doubting matches, self-doubters always lose. I

Qaddafi is a sociopath, a man impervious to any sense of self-doubt. His kind are all too common in positions of power. Sociopathocracy--government by sociopath is so common, the argument that the war in Iraq was a priority because it got rid of one such sociopath makes little sense. Yes the world is better off without Saddam, but for every deposed tyrant there are dozens more. Supposedly three percent of males and one percent of females are sociopaths. Among leaders the percentage is much higher. It makes you wonder what puts them in power. Information theory, the science that provides us such useful concepts as signal to noise ratio, gigabytes and bandwidth also provides insights into the prevalence of sociopathocracy. The key insight is in what's called "redundancy." You're at a large party with people talking all around you. You're in conversation with one person but the signal to noise ratio is low, meaning his voice, the signal, is quiet relative to the ambient conversational noise. Someone loud laughs in the background drowning out your conversational partner so you ask him to repeat what he said. You have to do that a lot actually. Claude Shannon the genius mathematician and engineer for Bell labs who founded information theory showed how redundancy-repeating the message-- compensates for noise. He imagined a channel in which information is sent at a steady rate. Noise in the channel, for example static on a phone line, means that bits of information get drowned out. But if you send the same information again, chances are different bits will be drowned out and you'll be able to piece together the information. Shannon noted however that the more message redundancy is required the less new information can be sent. Conversation at that party is less informative because you waste so much time repeating yourselves. Shannon was thinking about communication in which the listener is eager to hear correctly what the speaker is eager to convey correctly, but of course not all conversation is like that. Sometimes the listener would like to hear something else. At a party you might be done listening to a boring, repetitive guy but can't get away because he's filling your ears with stuff he's eager to say but you are not eager to hear. Or imagine that you're at a group strategy meeting and one guy is dominating, insisting over and over that he has the answers. Dissenting opinions aren't heard because the dominant opinion fills the information channel. The more redundancy; the less information, but also the less variety of information. Hitler's PR man Joseph Goebbels said "The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly -- it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over." Repeating himself he said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." A lack of self-doubt is, by definition a lack of variety. It's like drowning out dissenting opinions in one's own head with a redundant belief. Conviction, faith and confidence are contagious for all sorts of psychological reasons. We envy, are attracted to, and find charismatic the passionately insistent. Conversely, we surrender to them sometimes, as anyone with demanding children knows. You start to seek reasons why it's OK to give in to them just to get a little peace. Shouting matches and other conflicts are really doubting-matches. We argue by casting doubt on each other's opinions. Redundancy is how we dominate in doubting matches, and sociopaths can out-redundant non-sociopaths, hands down. The insistent fill our ears until we can't hear ourselves or anyone else think a dissenting thought. Sociopaths repeat reasons why their opponents should doubt themselves and so, in doubting matches, self-doubters always lose. I

Let me tell you how spiritual paths should work from beginning to end. I know it's bold of me to claim to know, but I'm taking my cue from the many spiritual teachers out there who speak with just this kind of audacious authority. You ask the average Joe or Jo on the street, "Is it best to be invested in things, to really care, to really commit--or is it best to be divested, to let go, to be really detached?” and they’ll say, “Well, of course, it depends.” The average Joe and Jo know that there’s no universal answer to this question. What’s funny though is that you can hornswoggle Joe and Jo with rhetoric that implies that it doesn’t depend, that you should always commit or conversely always let go. Accuse them of being “attached” or “clingy,” “addicted” or any other pejorative that denotes investment, and you’ll get them all tangled in shame, foolishly wondering why they can’t comply with the universal law that you should always be divested. Conversely, accuse them of being “uncaring,” “insensitive” “cutting and running” or any other pejorative that denotes divestment and you can get them all tangled up in shame, foolishly wondering why they can’t comply with the universal law that you should always be invested. It’s sad. People who feel really ashamed for failing to live by either one of these ridiculous, opposite, supposedly universal laws can go find a spiritual teacher who will teach them how to live by it. One Joe tells a Jo that she was too uncaring. Ashamed for not caring she finds a teacher who claims to be able to teach her the power of faith, commitment, and investment. Another Jo tells a Joe that he was way too attached. Ashamed for not being flexible, he goes off to a teacher who claims to be able to teach him the power of non-attachment, acceptance and divestment. These seekers want the peace of mind that comes from finally complying with the recipe, the universal law that one should always be invested. Or conversely always divested. But there’s a problem. The teachings themselves, these supposedly pure truths are each self-contradictory. The recipe for investment says, “Surrender into faith. Let go into holding on,” and the recipe for divestment says “Commit yourself to flexibility. Hold on to letting go.” So Joe and Jo go back to their respective teachers and say, “There seems to be a mistake. The teaching contradicts itself.” And the teacher, with a twinkle in his or her eye says “No mistake. You just haven’t solved the deep, ancient, esoteric mystery yet. There’s nothing wrong with the teaching. Stick with it and someday you’ll Transcend and Discover The Secret.” “But how can you hold on and let go at the same time?” “There’s a way. You just haven’t found it yet.” So Joe and Jo go away and try to get it right. They practice Luther’s surrender to faith, or the Tao’s “doing not doing.” And they kick themselves for getting it wrong. Some never get it. They spend their whole lives trying to meet the standard, to achieve this perfect non-contradictory state where they are both completely committed and completely detached simultaneously always. And others never get it. They strive but do not achieve that perfect balance where they’re never out of bounds, over- or under-invested, never invested where divestment is called for, and never divested where investment is called for. And still others never get it. They decide that The Transcendent state is where there are no standards. Cling; let go, invest; divest, who cares? It’s all good. It doesn’t matter. In the cosmic scheme, the enlightened just laugh a wise spiritual laugh at the folly of trying to live by standards. But some Joes and Jos struggle on, looking at investment and divestment from every possible ang

Let me tell you how spiritual paths should work from beginning to end. I know it's bold of me to claim to know, but I'm taking my cue from the many spiritual teachers out there who speak with just this kind of audacious authority. You ask the average Joe or Jo on the street, "Is it best to be invested in things, to really care, to really commit--or is it best to be divested, to let go, to be really detached?” and they’ll say, “Well, of course, it depends.” The average Joe and Jo know that there’s no universal answer to this question. What’s funny though is that you can hornswoggle Joe and Jo with rhetoric that implies that it doesn’t depend, that you should always commit or conversely always let go. Accuse them of being “attached” or “clingy,” “addicted” or any other pejorative that denotes investment, and you’ll get them all tangled in shame, foolishly wondering why they can’t comply with the universal law that you should always be divested. Conversely, accuse them of being “uncaring,” “insensitive” “cutting and running” or any other pejorative that denotes divestment and you can get them all tangled up in shame, foolishly wondering why they can’t comply with the universal law that you should always be invested. It’s sad. People who feel really ashamed for failing to live by either one of these ridiculous, opposite, supposedly universal laws can go find a spiritual teacher who will teach them how to live by it. One Joe tells a Jo that she was too uncaring. Ashamed for not caring she finds a teacher who claims to be able to teach her the power of faith, commitment, and investment. Another Jo tells a Joe that he was way too attached. Ashamed for not being flexible, he goes off to a teacher who claims to be able to teach him the power of non-attachment, acceptance and divestment. These seekers want the peace of mind that comes from finally complying with the recipe, the universal law that one should always be invested. Or conversely always divested. But there’s a problem. The teachings themselves, these supposedly pure truths are each self-contradictory. The recipe for investment says, “Surrender into faith. Let go into holding on,” and the recipe for divestment says “Commit yourself to flexibility. Hold on to letting go.” So Joe and Jo go back to their respective teachers and say, “There seems to be a mistake. The teaching contradicts itself.” And the teacher, with a twinkle in his or her eye says “No mistake. You just haven’t solved the deep, ancient, esoteric mystery yet. There’s nothing wrong with the teaching. Stick with it and someday you’ll Transcend and Discover The Secret.” “But how can you hold on and let go at the same time?” “There’s a way. You just haven’t found it yet.” So Joe and Jo go away and try to get it right. They practice Luther’s surrender to faith, or the Tao’s “doing not doing.” And they kick themselves for getting it wrong. Some never get it. They spend their whole lives trying to meet the standard, to achieve this perfect non-contradictory state where they are both completely committed and completely detached simultaneously always. And others never get it. They strive but do not achieve that perfect balance where they’re never out of bounds, over- or under-invested, never invested where divestment is called for, and never divested where investment is called for. And still others never get it. They decide that The Transcendent state is where there are no standards. Cling; let go, invest; divest, who cares? It’s all good. It doesn’t matter. In the cosmic scheme, the enlightened just laugh a wise spiritual laugh at the folly of trying to live by standards. But some Joes and Jos struggle on, looking at investment and divestment from every possible ang

I've been concerned about climate crisis for decades, doubly concerned because I've been unable to find any action likely to make a big difference. Every little bit we can do, seems to add up to not nearly enough, because most of what we can do runs against political and economic currents and I haven't been able to find an art-of-the-possible way to align political and economic currents with what the climate requires. Recently I think I've found something that could align all currents. It is by no means a shoe-in but at least possible. It originates in the work of Peter Barnes. He called it the Sky Trust and then Capitalism 3.0. I'm re-framing it here as The Green Tea Party. Here's its mini-manifesto. I invite you to join my fledgling Green Tea Party Facebook group. JOIN THE GREEN TEA PARTY AND PUT MONEY IN YOUR POCKET The Tea Party is right about government. It no longer represents our best interests. The greens are right about business, which doesn’t represent our best interests either. Corporations fund, lobby, and control our politicians, leaving us citizens with a raw deal. If the family farm was killed by agribiz, our national family is being killed by Goverbiz, the unholy alliance of government and corporations. It’s naïve to believe either government or corporations will save us. Some of us hope that people will come to their senses and take back government, but realistically, the scale is tipped against ordinary citizens because corporations own the government. But there is a way to rebalance the scale. Collectively, we citizens own our nation’s public assets, for example our airwaves, rivers, and the sky above us. Naively, we trusted government to manage these assets for us, but instead they give them away free to corporations without compensating us. The Green TEA Party demands compensation to you and me for the private use of our shared assets. We call for the establishment of not-for-profit trusts to manage our shared assets, governed by trustees accountable to us and shielded from political and corporate influence. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays Alaska’s citizens an annual dividend from the sale of publicly owned oil, is an example. The Green TEA Party proposes to make polluting corporations pay for using our air, water and soil, and to share the proceeds equally among all of us. This will not only reduce pollution; it will provide economic security to American families, without expanding the size of government. Imagine, for example, a National Sky Trust established to manage our atmosphere in our long-term best interest. Every year it auctions to oil, coal and gas companies the right to dump polluting gases into the sky. Then it turns around and electronically transfers equal shares of the revenue into our bank accounts and debit cards. The results: cleaner air and extra income for all. In a real free market, corporations pay for what they use and therefore make responsible choices. If they have to pay to pollute, they’ll pollute less. And if we share the revenue, we’ll all benefit. This is a solution that works for everyone: liberals and libertarians, conservatives and conservationists, supporters of democracy and of capitalism. Spread the word: Make corporations pay to pollute and put money in your own pocket. Money that’s rightfully yours because you co-own our public assets. Join the Green TEA Party today. They’re Everyone’s Assets "Like" the Green Tea Party Facebook group. Download a free copy of Peter Barnes' book, Capitalism 3.0. Download a free copy of Capitalism 3.0 audiobook.

I've been concerned about climate crisis for decades, doubly concerned because I've been unable to find any action likely to make a big difference. Every little bit we can do, seems to add up to not nearly enough, because most of what we can do runs against political and economic currents and I haven't been able to find an art-of-the-possible way to align political and economic currents with what the climate requires. Recently I think I've found something that could align all currents. It is by no means a shoe-in but at least possible. It originates in the work of Peter Barnes. He called it the Sky Trust and then Capitalism 3.0. I'm re-framing it here as The Green Tea Party. Here's its mini-manifesto. I invite you to join my fledgling Green Tea Party Facebook group. JOIN THE GREEN TEA PARTY AND PUT MONEY IN YOUR POCKET The Tea Party is right about government. It no longer represents our best interests. The greens are right about business, which doesn’t represent our best interests either. Corporations fund, lobby, and control our politicians, leaving us citizens with a raw deal. If the family farm was killed by agribiz, our national family is being killed by Goverbiz, the unholy alliance of government and corporations. It’s naïve to believe either government or corporations will save us. Some of us hope that people will come to their senses and take back government, but realistically, the scale is tipped against ordinary citizens because corporations own the government. But there is a way to rebalance the scale. Collectively, we citizens own our nation’s public assets, for example our airwaves, rivers, and the sky above us. Naively, we trusted government to manage these assets for us, but instead they give them away free to corporations without compensating us. The Green TEA Party demands compensation to you and me for the private use of our shared assets. We call for the establishment of not-for-profit trusts to manage our shared assets, governed by trustees accountable to us and shielded from political and corporate influence. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays Alaska’s citizens an annual dividend from the sale of publicly owned oil, is an example. The Green TEA Party proposes to make polluting corporations pay for using our air, water and soil, and to share the proceeds equally among all of us. This will not only reduce pollution; it will provide economic security to American families, without expanding the size of government. Imagine, for example, a National Sky Trust established to manage our atmosphere in our long-term best interest. Every year it auctions to oil, coal and gas companies the right to dump polluting gases into the sky. Then it turns around and electronically transfers equal shares of the revenue into our bank accounts and debit cards. The results: cleaner air and extra income for all. In a real free market, corporations pay for what they use and therefore make responsible choices. If they have to pay to pollute, they’ll pollute less. And if we share the revenue, we’ll all benefit. This is a solution that works for everyone: liberals and libertarians, conservatives and conservationists, supporters of democracy and of capitalism. Spread the word: Make corporations pay to pollute and put money in your own pocket. Money that’s rightfully yours because you co-own our public assets. Join the Green TEA Party today. They’re Everyone’s Assets "Like" the Green Tea Party Facebook group. Download a free copy of Peter Barnes' book, Capitalism 3.0. Download a free copy of Capitalism 3.0 audiobook.

What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen from the cookie jar when you haven't. If you only reward yourself with the satisfying treat for doing careful investigation and interpretation, then the more confident you are, the more likely that you're correct. By this "confident-means-true" interpretation, when we say "I really believe that the meeting is on Thursday" the "I really believe" means "It must be true," as in "I did the necessary work to investigate it and thereby earned my confidence." But we can grant ourselves confidence, that delectable treat really any time we want it, subject only to our appetites and limited only by indigestion we might or might not experience when over-indulging in treats we didn't work to earn. So the "confident-means-false" interpretation suggests that the more confident you are, the more you have substituted confidence for thoughtfulness, and more closed-minded, bigoted, wrong-headed, stubborn, pigheaded, blind and ignorant you are. Confidence, which implies both "likely to be right" and "likely to be wrong," is therefore a "contranym," a word that means two opposite things, a word like "clip" which means both "fasten" and "detach." And how do we use this contranym in a sentence? Quite often as a double standard, sentencing others as closed-minded for their confidence while treating ours as a sign that we know what is true. Or to put it in a limerick: Why, is your sureness a sign that you're certainly right, and yet mine is a sign I'm closed-minded biased, and blinded Shouldn't the standards align?

What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen from the cookie jar when you haven't. If you only reward yourself with the satisfying treat for doing careful investigation and interpretation, then the more confident you are, the more likely that you're correct. By this "confident-means-true" interpretation, when we say "I really believe that the meeting is on Thursday" the "I really believe" means "It must be true," as in "I did the necessary work to investigate it and thereby earned my confidence." But we can grant ourselves confidence, that delectable treat really any time we want it, subject only to our appetites and limited only by indigestion we might or might not experience when over-indulging in treats we didn't work to earn. So the "confident-means-false" interpretation suggests that the more confident you are, the more you have substituted confidence for thoughtfulness, and more closed-minded, bigoted, wrong-headed, stubborn, pigheaded, blind and ignorant you are. Confidence, which implies both "likely to be right" and "likely to be wrong," is therefore a "contranym," a word that means two opposite things, a word like "clip" which means both "fasten" and "detach." And how do we use this contranym in a sentence? Quite often as a double standard, sentencing others as closed-minded for their confidence while treating ours as a sign that we know what is true. Or to put it in a limerick: Why, is your sureness a sign that you're certainly right, and yet mine is a sign I'm closed-minded biased, and blinded Shouldn't the standards align?

"Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, an increase in such pledges to feel a certain way "from now on" is a sure sign that a partnership is on the rocks. Such pledges are attempts to manually override intuition, and there's only so much hope for overriding intuition. The problem with manual overrides is that they require chronic, 24/7 will power, and will power isn't up to the task. Let me explain with an obvious example first: If my gut intuition is to eat Oreos and I have a pack lying around, I might be able to override my gut early and maybe even often. And still, those Oreos will be gone in no time. The Oreos beckon relentlessly: "Eat me C’mon eat me Oh do eat me Please You know you want to Come on!" Will power responds intermittently: "No...Absolutely not...Definitely no...OK one, but no more...Well, actually just one more, but then that's it for sure...Except OK, one more..." and the Oreos win. Compared to my gut, my will power is a weakling. By extension, in relationship if something is irritating me, then pledging to conscript will power to override my irritation is just not that promising. You can override all the gut impulses some of the time, but not all of the gut impulses all of the time. You may wonder if the gut impulse to eat Oreos has anything to do with intuition. Some of us define intuition as our higher self, the almighty gut that knows the right thing to do all the time. By this definition, if I eat too many Oreo's it's because I'm ignoring my intuition, which knows better. I have friends who claim that the only time they make mistakes is when they ignore their intuition. I don't think that's a realistic or practical definition of intuition. Sure, with selective recollection you can attribute all successes to listening to your gut and all failures to ignoring it, but really our guts, sixths senses or intuitions are a bit more unruly than that. Intuition is best defined as the source of our natural or spontaneous responses. They're not God or God given sources of genius and perfection. Still I don't mean to disparage them either. They're actually admirably keen in their modest wisdom, honed by trial and error in the school of hard knocks--eons of biological evolution, centuries of cultural evolution, and decades of personal learning from direct and vicarious experience. Still, as any student of human folly knows, there's room for improvement. Malcolm Gladwell is one such student of human folly, though you wouldn't necessarily know it judging his big book by its cover: Blink: The power of thinking by not thinking is an exploration of intuition. I suspect that a lot of people bought it because it promised to affirm their sense that their intuitions were God-smart. Their intuition told them that the word "power" in the subtitle was synonymous with genius, and Gladwell does indeed start the book with stories in which gut-sense proved right. By book's end though, it's clear that intuition's test scores are mixed. Power in the title refers to tenacity. Intuition rules. I respect intuition’s modest wisdom and its formidable tenacity. I think there are only two basic ways to reliably control a bad intuition. One is to steer clear of whatever triggers it. I don't bring Oreos into the house, and to some extent I steer clear of things that persistently irritate or anger me. The other is a slower process, not manually overriding intuition but retraining it with convincing evidence. The part of instinct I can retrain we sometimes call second nature. In other words, we can teach intuition-that old dog of ours--new tricks. Retraining intuition is what clinical psychology has been mostly about all along, from addiction management to me

"Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, an increase in such pledges to feel a certain way "from now on" is a sure sign that a partnership is on the rocks. Such pledges are attempts to manually override intuition, and there's only so much hope for overriding intuition. The problem with manual overrides is that they require chronic, 24/7 will power, and will power isn't up to the task. Let me explain with an obvious example first: If my gut intuition is to eat Oreos and I have a pack lying around, I might be able to override my gut early and maybe even often. And still, those Oreos will be gone in no time. The Oreos beckon relentlessly: "Eat me C’mon eat me Oh do eat me Please You know you want to Come on!" Will power responds intermittently: "No...Absolutely not...Definitely no...OK one, but no more...Well, actually just one more, but then that's it for sure...Except OK, one more..." and the Oreos win. Compared to my gut, my will power is a weakling. By extension, in relationship if something is irritating me, then pledging to conscript will power to override my irritation is just not that promising. You can override all the gut impulses some of the time, but not all of the gut impulses all of the time. You may wonder if the gut impulse to eat Oreos has anything to do with intuition. Some of us define intuition as our higher self, the almighty gut that knows the right thing to do all the time. By this definition, if I eat too many Oreo's it's because I'm ignoring my intuition, which knows better. I have friends who claim that the only time they make mistakes is when they ignore their intuition. I don't think that's a realistic or practical definition of intuition. Sure, with selective recollection you can attribute all successes to listening to your gut and all failures to ignoring it, but really our guts, sixths senses or intuitions are a bit more unruly than that. Intuition is best defined as the source of our natural or spontaneous responses. They're not God or God given sources of genius and perfection. Still I don't mean to disparage them either. They're actually admirably keen in their modest wisdom, honed by trial and error in the school of hard knocks--eons of biological evolution, centuries of cultural evolution, and decades of personal learning from direct and vicarious experience. Still, as any student of human folly knows, there's room for improvement. Malcolm Gladwell is one such student of human folly, though you wouldn't necessarily know it judging his big book by its cover: Blink: The power of thinking by not thinking is an exploration of intuition. I suspect that a lot of people bought it because it promised to affirm their sense that their intuitions were God-smart. Their intuition told them that the word "power" in the subtitle was synonymous with genius, and Gladwell does indeed start the book with stories in which gut-sense proved right. By book's end though, it's clear that intuition's test scores are mixed. Power in the title refers to tenacity. Intuition rules. I respect intuition’s modest wisdom and its formidable tenacity. I think there are only two basic ways to reliably control a bad intuition. One is to steer clear of whatever triggers it. I don't bring Oreos into the house, and to some extent I steer clear of things that persistently irritate or anger me. The other is a slower process, not manually overriding intuition but retraining it with convincing evidence. The part of instinct I can retrain we sometimes call second nature. In other words, we can teach intuition-that old dog of ours--new tricks. Retraining intuition is what clinical psychology has been mostly about all along, from addiction management to me

Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mumbling inaudibly at her age. It was how I coped with my fundamental uncertainty. I anticipated myself saying something stupid I'd want to retract. Once your foot is in your mouth though, there’s no getting it out gracefully so I’d speak half-heartedly and half-vocally. People would ask me to repeat myself. The mumbled, inaudible first pass was like a rehearsal, a half-inflated trial balloon floated low and wavery in the strong gusts of adult conversation. Tentativeness is a teen’s right of passage and mumbling is but one of a few strategies for coping with it. Another is to overcome it with brazen, dogmatic, self-certainty as in the teen who compensates for tentativeness by declaring as absolute fact that his parents are loser-idiots. Still another strategy is irony: Put what you say in quotation marks as though it were said by someone else. That way, if what you say turns out to be stupid you can disclaim it. Really, you were just making fun of people who say things like that. Sometime in the last decade irony peaked, was criticized as corrupting a generation of youth, and then fell into disrepute as a trendy, hip, too-easy formula for hovering cynically above and outside reality. Irony was seen as a sub-species of sarcasm, saying the exact opposite of what you really mean, for example saying “My, isn’t this nice!” when you mean it’s awful. With irony, defined this way, you play-act as though you’re some other dork who would say “My, isn’t this nice!” when it’s obvious that, to hip people like you, it’s not nice at all. Irony was seen as a sign of the next generation’s exceptional lack of self-discipline. Why can’t they speak forthrightly the way we do? As such, the criticism was our generation’s contribution to a traditional campaign of frustration with the young, a campaign that goes back at least as far as Plato (429-327 B.C.E.) who is quoted as saying, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” This is a hard campaign for baby boomers like me to pull off convincingly. In all of history, my generation will go down as the pinnacle of slouchiness. In the service of irresistible convenience we burned roughly half the fossil fuel accumulated over eons. Comparatively, ours was a time of extraordinary freedom and opportunity. Many of us floated trial vocational balloons, decided against them and managed to launch successful second and even third careers, a sign of the extraordinary opportunities we had. We worry for our ambitiously artsy children because we know their opportunities are slimmer than ours. We fear they won’t get a second chance the way we did. Yes, they’ve joined us at the party, enjoying the unprecedented party favors of our fossil fuel and resource rich post-war economy. But we know. We’ll be leaving the party just as the fuel and economy are spent. They’ll be left to clean up after us. They know too, and are confused by their more limited ambiguous options. From this perspective irony or any coping strategy teens might adopt is a natural and appropriate response. Think of how much uncertainty my hitchhiker has to cope with. It’s a hard time to know what to do. Not for some, of course. These days we’re seeing the surge of that other coping strategy, the brazen, absolute, dogmatic self-certainty in fundamentalists of all stripes from Tea Party activists to Hard-line Muslims. The fundamentalists claim to have been provoked to it by

Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mumbling inaudibly at her age. It was how I coped with my fundamental uncertainty. I anticipated myself saying something stupid I'd want to retract. Once your foot is in your mouth though, there’s no getting it out gracefully so I’d speak half-heartedly and half-vocally. People would ask me to repeat myself. The mumbled, inaudible first pass was like a rehearsal, a half-inflated trial balloon floated low and wavery in the strong gusts of adult conversation. Tentativeness is a teen’s right of passage and mumbling is but one of a few strategies for coping with it. Another is to overcome it with brazen, dogmatic, self-certainty as in the teen who compensates for tentativeness by declaring as absolute fact that his parents are loser-idiots. Still another strategy is irony: Put what you say in quotation marks as though it were said by someone else. That way, if what you say turns out to be stupid you can disclaim it. Really, you were just making fun of people who say things like that. Sometime in the last decade irony peaked, was criticized as corrupting a generation of youth, and then fell into disrepute as a trendy, hip, too-easy formula for hovering cynically above and outside reality. Irony was seen as a sub-species of sarcasm, saying the exact opposite of what you really mean, for example saying “My, isn’t this nice!” when you mean it’s awful. With irony, defined this way, you play-act as though you’re some other dork who would say “My, isn’t this nice!” when it’s obvious that, to hip people like you, it’s not nice at all. Irony was seen as a sign of the next generation’s exceptional lack of self-discipline. Why can’t they speak forthrightly the way we do? As such, the criticism was our generation’s contribution to a traditional campaign of frustration with the young, a campaign that goes back at least as far as Plato (429-327 B.C.E.) who is quoted as saying, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” This is a hard campaign for baby boomers like me to pull off convincingly. In all of history, my generation will go down as the pinnacle of slouchiness. In the service of irresistible convenience we burned roughly half the fossil fuel accumulated over eons. Comparatively, ours was a time of extraordinary freedom and opportunity. Many of us floated trial vocational balloons, decided against them and managed to launch successful second and even third careers, a sign of the extraordinary opportunities we had. We worry for our ambitiously artsy children because we know their opportunities are slimmer than ours. We fear they won’t get a second chance the way we did. Yes, they’ve joined us at the party, enjoying the unprecedented party favors of our fossil fuel and resource rich post-war economy. But we know. We’ll be leaving the party just as the fuel and economy are spent. They’ll be left to clean up after us. They know too, and are confused by their more limited ambiguous options. From this perspective irony or any coping strategy teens might adopt is a natural and appropriate response. Think of how much uncertainty my hitchhiker has to cope with. It’s a hard time to know what to do. Not for some, of course. These days we’re seeing the surge of that other coping strategy, the brazen, absolute, dogmatic self-certainty in fundamentalists of all stripes from Tea Party activists to Hard-line Muslims. The fundamentalists claim to have been provoked to it by

Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man." Ernest Becker. We are mirror mortals, the first known species with the capacity to imagine the full arc of life and to know in definitive detail that we die.  We get on the boat; we row with great enthusiasm knowing that no matter our destiny, our real destiny is the inky deep.  We invest in our journey, conscious that we must eventually divest. And it isn't just the one death.  Getting on a boat that is about to sink is a fractal experience played out in the arc of minutes, hours, years, eras, epochs and millennia. Every day something dies.  You lose your glasses, your friend snubs you, you realize that the thing that thrilled you yesterday isn’t great after all.  Over the months, too, the people and joys come and go.  Then each of us dies.  Our families die.  Our civilizations fall.  Our species.  The universe itself is terminal. Everything we embrace as exciting and new comes with its time-release aging, decay, and breakdown.  When you buy a pet dog you buy a pet dog’s death. None of this would matter if we never got on the boat.  But here we are. We care. When we fall in love, investing, it’s like a taste of heaven—joy eternal. When we break up, divesting of each other, it’s a little taste of hell—dissolution eternal. The deeper you go in the more it hurts to come out. Whether we choose to divest or divestment is thrust upon us, there it is, the inevitable, looming no matter where we go. This view of life fits with disconcerting snugness.  Because we throw our lot in with the garden, we grieve when we’re cast out of it.  Because we accelerate into what enthuses us, our brakes squeal and our wheels shudder when we are forced to stop.  Union is sweet, disunion is sour.  Yes, no one gets out alive, but also no one gets out without great grief and loss, and here we are, knowing we’ll be evicted eventually. And what can we do about it? I’ve had a hard time with the word “Spiritual.”  Powerful but ill-defined words make me wary.  Since I can’t find much consensus about what it means, I feel at liberty to offer my own definition.  Spirituality is one’s overall strategy for coping with the challenge of investing, knowing that one must eventually divest.  Spirituality is a kind of preparation, a pre-grieving. Defined this way, I see three main spiritual paths, each with myriad variations, but still ultimately just three: Make One Eternal Investment: Build a pillar of belief to hold onto, one thing from which one never divests for all eternity, something that can’t be credibly challenged or tested and proved wanting, something that explains why people leave and people die and why there has to be so much pain and disappointment and letting go, a belief perhaps that explains how it will all make sense by and by or will be made equitable in the world beyond, a belief that makes the world beyond—the eternal realm--one’s primary focus, aiming us toward its purpose ever after and toward the happily ever after that we expect to come from serving its purpose ever after. 2.     Let Go Into Thin slices: Since letting go is the hard part, make a practice of divesting.  Practice divesting by being present in every instant. Excise memory (of what's lost) or projection (to what's in store). Be here now, quieting the hungry ghosts of intellect and conception.  Become one with nature which doesn’t think, theorize, speculate or foresee, but just is.  Return to animal simplicity. In pain, simply say “ouch.” In pleasure simply say “ah.”  Don’t general

Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man." Ernest Becker. We are mirror mortals, the first known species with the capacity to imagine the full arc of life and to know in definitive detail that we die.  We get on the boat; we row with great enthusiasm knowing that no matter our destiny, our real destiny is the inky deep.  We invest in our journey, conscious that we must eventually divest. And it isn't just the one death.  Getting on a boat that is about to sink is a fractal experience played out in the arc of minutes, hours, years, eras, epochs and millennia. Every day something dies.  You lose your glasses, your friend snubs you, you realize that the thing that thrilled you yesterday isn’t great after all.  Over the months, too, the people and joys come and go.  Then each of us dies.  Our families die.  Our civilizations fall.  Our species.  The universe itself is terminal. Everything we embrace as exciting and new comes with its time-release aging, decay, and breakdown.  When you buy a pet dog you buy a pet dog’s death. None of this would matter if we never got on the boat.  But here we are. We care. When we fall in love, investing, it’s like a taste of heaven—joy eternal. When we break up, divesting of each other, it’s a little taste of hell—dissolution eternal. The deeper you go in the more it hurts to come out. Whether we choose to divest or divestment is thrust upon us, there it is, the inevitable, looming no matter where we go. This view of life fits with disconcerting snugness.  Because we throw our lot in with the garden, we grieve when we’re cast out of it.  Because we accelerate into what enthuses us, our brakes squeal and our wheels shudder when we are forced to stop.  Union is sweet, disunion is sour.  Yes, no one gets out alive, but also no one gets out without great grief and loss, and here we are, knowing we’ll be evicted eventually. And what can we do about it? I’ve had a hard time with the word “Spiritual.”  Powerful but ill-defined words make me wary.  Since I can’t find much consensus about what it means, I feel at liberty to offer my own definition.  Spirituality is one’s overall strategy for coping with the challenge of investing, knowing that one must eventually divest.  Spirituality is a kind of preparation, a pre-grieving. Defined this way, I see three main spiritual paths, each with myriad variations, but still ultimately just three: Make One Eternal Investment: Build a pillar of belief to hold onto, one thing from which one never divests for all eternity, something that can’t be credibly challenged or tested and proved wanting, something that explains why people leave and people die and why there has to be so much pain and disappointment and letting go, a belief perhaps that explains how it will all make sense by and by or will be made equitable in the world beyond, a belief that makes the world beyond—the eternal realm--one’s primary focus, aiming us toward its purpose ever after and toward the happily ever after that we expect to come from serving its purpose ever after. 2.     Let Go Into Thin slices: Since letting go is the hard part, make a practice of divesting.  Practice divesting by being present in every instant. Excise memory (of what's lost) or projection (to what's in store). Be here now, quieting the hungry ghosts of intellect and conception.  Become one with nature which doesn’t think, theorize, speculate or foresee, but just is.  Return to animal simplicity. In pain, simply say “ouch.” In pleasure simply say “ah.”  Don’t general

Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a world that doesn't seem to offer a final logical authority, no highest possible perspective from which we can discriminate between right and wrong on all lower levels.  Regardless the standard we might claim is the most all encompassing and ultimate, someone can come along and claim an even more encompassing and ultimate standard. And even if they're wrong there's no way to prove they are without claiming a higher standard that they can again claim to trump with a still higher standard. It leaves us all at risk of being swept up into escalating games of oneupsmanship or, reversing the metaphor, it makes us all prone to falling into bottomless pits, arguing about the proper depth at which to find bedrock foundations of morality that don’t exist or if they do, we can’t agree on them. For every declaration that “X is moral” the declaration can itself be challenged. We crave something solid to rest our assumptions upon, but that something doesn’t exist. We can pretend it exists but it doesn’t. We can surround ourselves with people who believe it exists where we say it does, but it doesn’t.  We know it doesn’t exist, because other people say, “Ah but don’t you see, you’re missing something crucial--a higher principle; a deeper truth that proves you’re wrong.” Of course, the hell with them, right? Except that they’re saying the hell with us.  So where does that get us? This is a particular kind of one-upmanship.  It’s not just “I’m better than you.”  It’s, “I’m better because I’ve got a bigger perspective, a higher overview.  I’m taking more into consideration than you are.” Uplevelsmanship is claiming to be holier than thou by being highly-er than thou. It’s an escalation in power by escalating in perspective.  It’s an arms race in which the build-up is in ladder rungs to look down from critically. I won’t burden you with the logic here. (I have plenty of articles at my site describing the logic, for example here.) Instead I’ll provide some intuitive examples of the general logical problem: 1. You probably know what it’s like to feel regret for not having taken something into consideration: “Ah, if only I had factored in THAT. That changes everything.”  Such regret is a reason to take more into consideration, but can you ever take everything into consideration? If not, where should you draw the line?  How much due diligence is really due?  It depends on the situation. The higher the stakes the more one should take into account, but only up to a point.  Even on the highest stake decisions, you can’t take everything into account. There’s still a chance that you’ll have missed something that changes everything. This is why leaders capable of decisiveness have to be comfortable with ambiguity, the ability to place big bets, knowing as they do it, that they may be missing something that changes everything. 2. I want to hire an investment advisor. I meet a few and I notice that I’m having a hard time figuring out who’s best.  So I decide to hire someone to guide me about which investment adviser to hire.  But even that’s not an easy decision. So I decide I should hire an advisor to advise me on which advisor to advise me on which adviser to hire. But then how do I know who to hire for that? 3. I remember it to this day--the time my parents disagreed about what I should do.  Until that time they had always agreed with each other and I just had to follow their unified advice.  Suddenly, to defer to one was to defy the other.  I had to decide between them.  I asked my friends what I should do. Trouble was some friends said I shoul