Can We Learn This Skill?

Intro

I get a lot of book recommendations from my friends, colleagues and connections in LinkedIn. It's wonderful to watch how even strangers can provide so much value doing as little as sharing a book they liked...

With that thought in mind, I decided to come to this issue of my newsletter and share about "Talking to Strangers", a book by Malcom Gladwell.

A recommendation from someone who was not at all a stranger but a great friend and mentor. And a very special edition I have kept, as it is a gift from someone equally special to me.

Ok, the story behind how I got the book would be worth a post in itself.

But what about the book itself?

????♀?A Book Full of Stories

When it comes to non-fiction, there are very many ways to write a book. Those from Malcolm are, by far, the type that I enjoy reading the most.

In a book of 400 pages, he will go and walk us through dozens of human stories. Real people who found themselves in rather difficult situations, mostly because they didn't know how to handle this art of dealing with strangers. Or because they knew, and yet that was not nearly enough.

Like the stories he share about the Mountain Climber and CIA double agents back in the cold war times, and how such a powerful agency, with all resources and so much skills and information, could consciously get their agents turned without ever noticing it - well, at least not until a lot of damage was done.

Once and again, the author will show us several cases, of different scales, involving different cultures, of different contexts, were human judgement about strangers performed consistently... horrible.

?? Stories of AI

While many believe that AI happened yesterday, this book (from 2019) talks about a curious research done back 10 years ago, where AI was used to evaluate defendants to be released while awaiting for trial and compared the results with the effective releases done by (human) judges and then comparing with actual results, i.e. crimes committed by those defendants while waiting in freedom.

More than 500,000 cases were evaluated, over four years, contributing to a statistically relevant analysis. The outcome?

Machines would have avoided 25% of crime.

Consider this for a moment: judges are usually highly intelligent (IQ) people, very experienced with dealing with interpersonal situations and with tons of evidences at hand based on previous trials, even the ones from themselves. People who make decision about when to trust other people every day.

There are some cool research done with and by humans, too. The experience with the filling the gaps for words and how people could "read" each other so much better through this than actually through meeting the people is an eye opener, and fun to read.

??♀?Some Controversy is Good

Chapter 8, The Fraternity Party Case, deals with a very complicated case of rape under the influence of alcohol.

I remember when I read the book, I always do a little research AFTER to see what people are talking about it, to see if I missed something, and that chapter popped up.

It deals with so many complex discussions like, what consent is, and what is the role of alcohol, what are the effects, why does it work differently for different people and in different cultures, how we trust people, what are boundaries, when/how to establish them and the list goes on.

The reactions to the chapter... worth reading it. Worth reflecting on it. And not just from one angle, but from all of them.

That experience reminded me of how often we are allowing problems to persist, even to grow, because we are less willing to have empathy with strangers (people other than us). Because we fail to understand them, to know when to believe them, to trust or not trust them. Then we focus on attacking and defending instead of finding solutions. Because we are human.

And we make so many mistakes.

?Why We Make Mistakes

There is a passage in the book I really like, as it accepts reality for what it is instead of judging it too much. I call it a great start.

The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers.        

Then to make things worse, we usually don't understand the importance of context. And Malcolm works very well with data-rich analysis on suicidal behavior, which demonstrates how suicide is coupled. It was not the first time I cam across similar research, and beyond being interesting reading, it helps understanding - again - where our failure in understanding strangers comes from.

These are really the three key concepts... errrr mistakes... I felt we are supposed to take from the book: transparency problem, default-to-truth problem, and coupling problem (context).

What is the silver line? What is the happy ending?

Sorry, there was none. The story that arcs the entire book doesn't end well, to anyone. Well, except to the point the author is trying to make.

It serves, therefore, as a good reflection.

How are were behaving when we talk to strangers?

How much aware are we, of how flawed we are at this?

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Observations

This is a pleasant and difficult book to read, at the same time, in the very same lines. I was often suffering readings those stories while at the same time feeling how much wisdom there were in every single one of them.

Will this book make be better at talking to strangers? Most possibly, not. It will, however, remind me of how little skilled I am compared to how much I would think I am... And, the ratings:

• Easy of reading: 5 stars. Plain language, kind, explaining everything in the context that is necessary for a non-American to understand what is going on there.
• Learning something new: 3 stars. Not the kind of loads of information book, it's more about reflecting.
• Interesting and Engaging: 5 stars. It's impossible not to read each of the stories till the end and I don't even know how I managed to have breaks from it!

Maybe I'd add to it something from my previous book summary ("Scary Smart"): humans are arrogant. If we could remind ourselves more often of that, we would probably have better chances to develop, to find peace, and even to get better at talking to strangers.

What is one story about talking to strangers that you could share and enrich this experience?