Bing spent more time acknowledging and validating people’s feelings. Humans typically responded by sharing a seemingly related experience from their own lives. Basically, the chatbots made the exchange about the person; the humans made it more about themselves.

Chatbots are effective in these situations not because of something they do that we can’t, but because of the mistakes humans make and they avoid. When we see someone is in pain, or when someone we care about shares a problem, we instinctively want to help. We offer advice, suggest solutions and rattle off how we once dealt with something similar.

When people adopt similar strategies, their connections strengthen. Consider “looping for understanding,” a technique in which a listener repeats what someone else says in their own words, then asks if their summary is correct—“Do I have that right?” Chatbots are natural loopers. When humans are taught to do the same, they do a better job of understanding what the other person is feeling and helping them feel heard.

People don't want their problems solved. They just want to be heard. Glad I'm not married to or working with anyone who commented.

In other words:

User wants to do X.
User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
User doesn't know how to do Y either.
User asks for help with Y.
Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y was a dead end.

3. I need you to play on your own for some time.
4. Let's compromise.
5. I need you to do this first. Then, we can do X.
6. While I trust your judgment, I still need you to follow some rules. We can discuss them together.
7. I cannot agree to this. You have to meet me halfway on this issue.
8. I need some more time to process this. Let’s revisit this later after I have had a chance to think about it.
9. We know you mean well, but we are different. Can you respect the difference?
10. This is what I need.
11. I respect what you want, and I understand it. Unfortunately, I am not comfortable yet saying yes.
12. I need you to help me.
13. I understand you are doing something, but I need you to X.
14. I understand you need my help, but I cannot work on this right now.

You have to be willing to step into the unknown if you want to be creative.

The will to do things that haven’t been done before.

When we’re creating things that have not been done before, uncertainty is inevitable.

The willingness to stay in the question long enough for the dots to connect.

My inability to make decisions is frustrating, but it also allows me to stay in the question longer. I’m not rushing to find a quick fix but rather twisting and turning problems. I often find the need to go back and research some more. To make sure that the path I’ve decided to take is the right one. It wasn’t until I got more comfortable in my role as a designer (I wish I could say that my imposter syndrome went away, but it still surfaces in every project) that I discovered the benefit of this. When it comes to solving problems with creative solutions, we must first spend time figuring out the right problem to solve. Then make sure that the solution we propose is helping more than hurting.

It’s never too late to control your own fate

In my way of thinking, radical agency involves finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion.

The idea of finding real edges, rather than eking out wins by grinding harder than everyone else, clicked for me when I started playing poker. Pros spent nearly as much time studying as they did playing, using solvers to seek out tiny mathematical advantages. I noticed a massive edge that was almost entirely ignored: physical reads, or tells.

Court rejection

Seek real (anonymous) feedback

Increase your surface area for luck

Assume everything is learnable

Learn to love the moat of low status

Don't work too hard!

Every year I ask myself these 40 questions. I’ve shared this list with my family and closest friends, and always enjoy discussing answers as we reflect on th...

These questions are available in Markdown format

See also my 40 questions to ask yourself every decade.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this simple idea: The person who aligns themselves with the general principles of the world goes further and faster than the person who doesn't.

Here’s the trick to seeing things differently: put your energy into being right, not feeling right. While that sounds simple, it’s far from easy.

Feeling right, on the other hand, often requires you to believe you are an exception.

rather than tell yourself you made a mistake you chalk it up to the world not working as it should. It’s as if that little voice in your head says, “You’re not wrong; the world is.”

David shares a compilation of the best links from his newsletter Friday Finds. Read here.

When you're chasing a big goal, you're supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy a third of the time. If the ratio is off and you feel good all the time, then you're not pushing yourself enough. Likewise, if you feel bad all the time, then you might be fatigued and need to dial things back.

Learning the Rule of Thirds was life-changing for me as a person in general, because it made me believe in the days that didn't feel great. In fact, I relished them.

_The perdocent exploits the claim of not having been taught how to do something, as a means of not understanding, of taking control, or to avoid doing any actual work.

As a management professional, no matter their appeal to credential, never let a perdocent take control. Always seek to maintain familiarity with the perdocent's tactics…_

Evidence for Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis

In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.

Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.

How a Phone-Based Childhood Breeds Passivity

Liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media. Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends.

It can be challenging to express your thoughts clearly. Alan Alda recommends three rules of three for effective and empathic communication.

1. Make no more than three points

Research suggests that short-term memory is far less robust, maxing out at a meager three to five items.

2. Explain difficult ideas in three different ways

3. Make important points three times

In some close-knit relationships, spaced repetition is a phenomenal tool. Teachers, parents, psychiatrists, or team managers can use it to return to and reinforce difficult ideas across many conversations.

As stated before, Oogoo is simply a mixture of clear silicone caulk and corn starch. It can be mixed anywhere from 5 to 1 to 1 to 2 silicone to corn starch by volume. Up to a point, the more corn starch you add the faster it will set up.

A good starting mixture to try out is 1 corn starch to 1 silicone by volume. It is easiest to mix it in small quantities so as to have plenty of time to work it. To see how it works, you could start with 1 tablespoon silicone caulk to 1 tablespoon of corn starch. You can reduce the amount to as little as 1/4 tablespoon corn starch to 1 tablespoon silicone if you want more time to cast it or sculpt it. I rarely mix up more than 3 tablespoons of silicone at a time.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/life-moves-pretty-fast-why-gen-x-got-it-before-the-rest-of-you-kpkn/

Look, we have heard all the jokes. We know how you talk about us. And now you are saying there might never be a Gen-X President (as if Donald Trump did some sort of credit to his generation in that…

We were the last generation to have a technology free childhood and to learn patience waiting for Saturday morning cartoons or a favorite song to come on the radio.

We were the first generation to write papers on computers and the last generation to use typewriters. We were the last generation to know a time when a missed call was a missed call and the first generation to play video games. We were the last generation who spent a largely unsupervised childhood on dangerous playground equipment.

Everyone! It’s almost the end of the year. It’s nearing that time when we arbitrarily decide we’re going to turn over a new leaf; start a new great habit. But so many of us embark on this process…

Using either the plus, the minus, or the forward arrow, you assess nine different categories:

Health and Fitness
Work and Business
Personal Life
Friends and Community
Learning and Knowledge
Travel and Culture (how much did you explore?)
Hobbies and Creativity (how did you nurture your creative side?)
Emotions and Spirituality (how did you connect with your inner self?)
Money and Finances

Here is not a bad article from HBR about “unleashing overlooked talent,” and I’ll just direct you to the part that matters before we get into this more deeply:

https://hbr.org/2022/07/unleash-your-organizations-overlooked-talent?ab=hero-subleft-1

WHY does talent get ignored?

• Most managers are busy, with “busy” supposedly meaning “productive” (it does not, truly) and usually “busy” also meaning “I get a lot of email, most of which I could delete, but I don’t delete it so I can complain about the volume of email.” You just say “It’s the busy season!” or “Everything is so crazy right now!” and you’re good. That allows you to not notice talent.

• Everything about white-collar work is tied to tasks. All that matters to most managers is people completing tasks. Tasks tasks tasks. Most places are barely “strategic” whatsoever. When you are largely being judged on tasks, it is nearly impossible to be seen for talent. Your managers can only look at you as “x-amount of deliverables this cycle,” etc.

• Talent actually scares a lot of managers, because it represents someone potentially coming for their perch, and that’s terrifying to them. It’s oddly in the incentive structure of most managers to suppress new talents in the name of personal relevance and income earning potential, even though the company claims to care about “innovation” and “world-shifting ideas.” Funny, no?

• It’s easier and more comfortable to put people in boxes. A security guard is a security guard. He’s not a docent. That’s fucking crazy, Janet. Go get me a burrito for lunch.

It’s the secret to high-performing teams — and strong marriages.

The average ratio for the highest-performing teams was 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). The medium-performance teams averaged 1.9 (almost twice as many positive comments than negative ones.) But the average for the low-performing teams, at 0.36 to 1, was almost three negative comments for every positive one.

Only positive feedback can motivate people to continue doing what they’re doing well, and do it with more vigor, determination, and creativity.

Mistake-proofing or Poka-Yoke is a process analysis tools that either makes it impossible for an error to occur or makes the error immediately obvious once it has occurred.

More broadly, the term can refer to any behavior-shaping constraint designed into a process to prevent incorrect operation by the user.

"Idiot-proof"