Recent Clark medalist Roland Fryer gave a fascinating lecture for the inaugural Buchanan Speaker Series event at George Mason University towards the end of last year. The topic was “Education, Inequality, and Incentives.” Fryer has done impressive work on education, heading the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University. The need for education reform is real. In the conclusion of his lecture, after pointing out the long-term effects for children who got into the Harlem Children’s Zone (i.e. 5x reduction in pregnancy for girls and 3x reduction in incarceration for boys), he movingly says,
Do know how frustrating that is for a guy like me who grow up in these [low-income] neighborhoods? It’s almost maddening. It’s the lottery. We’re by random coin flip deciding who is going to have a 5x lower probability. And no, we don’t do it directly because that’d be mean. We do it indirectly by not doing what we know works. We talk about “no-excuses” schools. It’s time to have a no-excuses society. What other excuses do we have? We’ve seen the stuff from charters, we’ve seen the stuff from meta-analysis, you put it into the traditional public schools, the test scores go up. When the test scores go up using similar interventions, we get better social outcomes! What else!
…These are our children. It’s not a philosophical debate anymore…I got lucky. People look at me a lot and say, “Well, see! It can happen.” Well, shit, you can also drive a car with your feet, but it doesn’t make it a good idea…We know what works…The question is do we really have the courage and will to do it. Or deep down do we really not think this is possible.
Image by Flickr user Jeff_golden. Cropped to fit blog dimensions. Click for original on Flickr.
I love books. A lot of my happiest memories are of whiling away long summer hours reading in the backroom of my grandfather’s book store.
Covers like this one by John Berkey defined my childhood daydreams.
But for a few years in grad school, I didn’t read very much. At one point I realized it had been several months–maybe a year!–since I had read a book cover-to-cover. I decided that simply would not do, and I started reading again. (I believe that was about the time I got into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.) The only other period in my life when I wasn’t reading was the time before I knew how.
I stumbled upon Goodreads at about the same time, and I’ve been tracking my reviews on there ever since. I don’t really go in for the social networking aspects of Goodreads. I basically treat it as a convenient reading journal. The best part is being able to look at a chronological timeline of the books I’ve read over the last couple of years. Individual titles or covers will bring me back to places where I was–literally and metaphorically–when I read those books. And all it takes is a glance at my bring the books back to life for me, little anchors that keep me from forgetting all the places that I’ve been.
But by far the greatest change to my reading life has been my subscription to Audible.
Getting sick was never quite as bad when I knew I could stay home from school and listen to this.
I have always loved audiobooks. As a kid, my go-to for getting through the flu was a dramatization of The Hobbit on cassette tapes stored in a small, wooden box. Later on, I acquired a CD dramatization of The Lord of The Rings (way before the movies were out) that I also listened through a couple of times. The first few Harry Potter books (this was before the last ones had come out) also helped me get through hours of tedious desk work back in the day. But back in the day, an audiobook could set you back $50 or more, easily, and there was no way I could afford that as a replacement for used books and $7 paperbacks.
Audible has changed that, however. For $15/month, you get one audiobook. That’s good, but it’s not great. In addition, however, you can buy 3 credits for about $36 (so, more books for about $12/each.) Best of all, however, are their promotions. They send out a daily deal that offers a random book for $3-5 and frequently have other sales at $5 each. Most of these books will probably not suit your fancy, but even if only 5%-10% of them do, then you’re going to be picking up at least a couple more books every month for basically pocket change. Now, the economics of buying audiobooks being to make sense!
This is the secret to how I “read” over 100 books last year, and how I plan to get through about 120 in 2016. But you might have some questions, so let’s talk about how to get the most out of your Audible subscription (or similar) along with some unexpected pros and cons.
First: learn double-speed, love double-speed
You might not even realize this, but most audiobook apps (including Audible and iTunes) have the ability to increase narration speed while keeping the narrator’s voice at a level pitch (so you don’t end up listening to chipmunks). The math here is pretty obvious: faster narration means you get through books faster. Right now, the longest book in my Audible library is Brandon Sanderson’s monstrous Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The), which clocks in at over 48 hours, followed by Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (almost 32 hours) and then Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World (about 27 hours). Most books fall in a more normal range of about 12-16 hours each, however, which means that double-speed means it takes only 6-8 hours to get through a typical book. And that’s an amount of time most people can probably find in one week.
Now, if you try to skip straight to double-speed, you’re going to get frustrated and give yourself a headache. It didn’t even occur to me to speed up the tracks until a friend suggested it. I started at about 1.25x and for a while that was all I could do. Once that was natural, however, I moved up to 1.5x and, after getting used to that, I finally went all the way up to 2.0x.
It says “Speed 3x,” but it lies. It is only double-speed.
Unfortunately, that’s the fastest you can go. Don’t get me wrong, if you look at the app you will see a button that claims you can also do 2.5x and even 3.0x, but it’s a lie. They don’t actually speed up the narration beyond 2.0x. I tested this myself back in December 2014 with the iOS version and a stopwatch to confirm, and it’s true. There are no speed increases after 2.0x.
Second: when to listen
The conventional time to listen to audiobooks is in the car, and that’s a great one. I often have to travel in from Williamsburg, VA to Richmond, VA which is about a 1-hour trip (one-way), so every time I get four hours of listening done (remember: double speed). That’s about half a novel. Not bad! But I also work from home many days, and then I’m not in the car at all. So, what are some other good times to listen? Walking the dog is a great one, especially ’cause your dog will appreciate the extra time if you’re not in a hurry to get back. Doing chores is another great one. A lot of annoying things that have to get done (like folding the laundry) become a treat if they’re also your excuse to return to a great book. One of my favorites has also been long-distance runs.
There’s a caveat here, however. Audiobooks can be addictive. I’ve gotten in trouble on more than one occasion because I’ve got headphones in my ears (while I’m doing the chores) and my wife wants to talk to me. This, as you can imagine, is a bad scenario. Anything in life can be taken too far, and audiobooks are no exception. Be sensible about it.
Third: what to listen to
I have the most fun listening to enjoyable fiction, but I’ve also found that picking up books for $2-$5 / each makes me interested in things I wouldn’t otherwise be. I’ve gotten into a lot of history this way (most recently: a biography of the Dulles brothers, another of T. E. Lawrence, and also a history of the Plantagenets). You can also get a lot of Great Courses through Audible, so there’s a ton of great material on anything from quantum physics (I recently listened to a short one on the Higgs Boson) to marketing or music appreciation.
Here’s another caveat, however. When I listen to really, really interesting non-fiction I often like to enter notes into Evernote. And this is where audiobooks are less than amazing. Few things in the world frustrate me more than transcribing 40 or 50 notes from an Audiobook. I’ve done this a lot, and so here are some tips.
When you want to take a note, you can just add a bookmark with a note in the Audible app. Always type a note. Often you will think that it will be obvious when you come back, but the timing of the bookmark is not exact (especially on double speed) and if you have a lot of notes or a very long book, then by the time you come back to get your notes you might have to listen to rather long portions to remind yourself of exactly what you wanted to make a note of. In fact, if the quote is short, you should just try to write the entire quote out in the note field. If it’s not short, at least write the first phrase of the quote. That will make it easy to find.
As for transcription: good luck. For a while I tried reducing the speed to 1x, putting the phone on speaker, holding up to my mic, and trying to let Dragon: Naturally Speaking transcribe it. Results were mixed. Dragon could pick up on a lot of the words, but not everything. It was basically a toss-up whether manually transcribing the whole thing or fixing the mistakes in Dragon’s transcription was faster. Either way, it took about 2 minutes on average for a single note, which–if you have more than a few notes–will get very frustrating.
In other words: if you have something to listen to that you suspect is going to involve a lot of underlining, highlighting, or brain-waves: get it in paper and do it the old-fashioned way.
This doesn’t mean that audiobooks have to be light. I have listened to some great literature this way, books like Angle of Repose or Gilead, but it does skew towards fiction for me and away from the most interesting non-fiction, which I still prefer to get in hardcopy (or Kindle).
One word of caution, however. The rise of self-publishing has an impact in the Audible ecosystem as well. There’s really no easy way to separate self-published books (which are often abysmal in quality) from traditionally published books (which are only sometimes abysmal in quality). My recommendation is this: If you see something that looks interesting but you don’t recognize it, look up the book on Amazon and check out the editorial reviews. NOT the customer reviews! The first thing you want to look for is not what the reviews say, but who they are from. Best case? Prominent newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Next best case? Super-famous authors. Worst case? Authors you have never heard of and/or outlets you have never heard of. It’s not a perfect way to gauge quality–obviously–but it will help you avoid the worst of the nonsense that is out there.
Fourth: did you learn anything?
Some folks will tell you that listening to audiobooks isn’t really reading. Well, sure, literally it isn’t. But I did find a Forbes article that tackled the question: Is Listening to Audio Books Really the Same as Reading? According to the article:
So on an intellectual level, is listening to a book really just as good as reading it?
Pretty much, but it depends on the type of book. Studies on electronic media consumption are still relatively limited, and the audio book genre has been “woefully unaddressed by the academic community in general,” wrote philosophy professor William Irwin in a 2009 essay.
However, even research that predates CDs suggests that reading and listening are strikingly similar cognitive processes. For example, 1985 study found listening comprehension correlated strongly with reading comprehension – suggesting that those who read books well would listen to them well, also. In a 1977 study, college students who listened to a short story were able to summarize it with equal accuracy as those who read it.
“The way this is usually interpreted is that once you are good at decoding letters into sound, which most of us are by the time we’re in 5th or 6th grade, the comprehension is the same whether it’s spoken or written,” explained University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham.
That matches my experience, and so does the rest of the article which qualifies this a little bit by pointing out that some complex text can benefit from being literally read because it lets you easily skip back to re-read difficult sections. However, in my experience, it’s also true that some books are actually better when read. This really worked for Gilead, for example, because as an epistolary novel the narration was a perfect fit.
Speaking of notes, I really do recommend using Goodreads. Trying to go back and re-enter books you already read is a rabbit hole I suggest you don’t try to go down, but writing out reviews of everything you read–and recording the start and end date for each book–is a fantastic project that starts to really pay dividends within a couple of years of starting. Give it a shot.
So, have I sold you on Audible yet? Well, first let me point out to alternatives that might save you some cash. First, check with your local library to see if they let you digitally check out audiobooks. Mine does, and I was really excited. At first. Unfortunately, the particular app I had to use with my local library was the worst-designed thing imaginable. Most egregiously? No option to increase playback speed. That was a dealbreaker for me, and the library’s selection was also pretty meh. Still, you might have more luck. (I’m going to try again when we move to a new area.) Second, you can also check out iTunesU. I listened to some really great courses several years ago when that was getting started (including a fantastic overview of modern cosmology), but eventually these courses started to rely more and more heavily on video which, you know, defeats the entire purpose of an audiobook. There’s probably still a lot out there, however, and a lot is free, so you might want to check that out.
If you are interested in Audible, however, then let me make a suggestion: join Audible.
If you use that link just above to join, I get a little commission. Which is nice. But the real reason I decided to post this today is that Audible is also having a great members-only sale: $4.95 for the first book in a series. I don’t get a commission for that particular sale, by the way. I was just looking through the options, and saw some great ones. If you like sci-fi, then there are some fantastic deals. The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo last year, and it deserved it. Leviathan Wakesis the first book in a great sci-fi series that is currently running on SyFy as The Expanse.. Golden Son is my favorite book of 2015. It’s not on the list, but it’s also #2 in a trilogy and the first book–Red Rising–is on the list. There are lots of other legitimate books on there as well. Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) took the Hugo in 2015, for example. Revelation Space, Ringworld (A Del Rey book), and The Memory of Earth (Homecoming) are also all very good sci-fi (or, at least in the case of Ringworld, very famous sci-fi).
So, if you haven’t joined Audible yet, now might be a great time to try. And if you’re already a member, check out that sale.
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith for the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Public Domain)
That’s the thought that I had as I read this article from the Washington Post: ‘Eyewash’: How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operations. Prior to this article, I was already something of a skeptic. For one thing, the CIA doesn’t seem to have actually done us a lot of good, historically speaking. High-ranking double agents like Kim Philby (actually in British intelligence) meant that in the early days of the Cold War the only limits to Soviet supremacy were their own suspicions. When it comes to the CIA’s biggest operations, the CIA either bungled them horribly (like the Bay of Pigs Invasion), succeeded only to bring serious blowback on the United States (like Operation Ajax) or–perhaps worst of all–never bothered to show up at all (as with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956). Then there’s the plain old villainy of Project MKUltra. Altogether, this is not a track record to inspire either trust or gratitude.
One of the problems that run through these examples is the fact that the CIA brings intelligence and operations under one roof. As I understand it, this is considered a bad idea by most national intelligence agencies. It is why, for example, the British have both MI5 (operations) and MI6 (intelligence). The main problem with merging the two functions into a single organization is that it creates a conflict of interest: operations folks have the ability to interfere in research gathering and analysis to support their plans (ahead of an operation) or obscure mistakes (after an operation).
The idea of splitting the CIA might seem crazy. Don’t we have enough intelligence agencies already? Why yes, we do. We have an “intelligence community” of 17 distinct federal agencies that are supposed to coordinate to handle national intelligence. But note that that’s all intelligence. We could certainly use some streamlining and consolidation of intelligence agencies, but merging intelligence and operations is precisely the wrong kind of merger.
The one thing that has kept me sort of on-the-fence about the CIA is the notion of trust. I don’t think of myself as an overly trusting person, but I do think of myself as fairly pragmatic. As a conservative, I have the tragic vision of the world. That’s the idea that the world, in its natural state, is full of limited resources and conflicting incentives. It doesn’t go as far as Hobbesian paranoia, but it is a view of the world where most choices require tradeoffs and where conflict with other players is something that has to be managed and navigated but cannot be entirely avoided. George Orwell’s statement resonates with me: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would do us harm.” A nation state needs an intelligence apparatus and it needs some covert operational capabilities as well.
Most importantly, the declassification of early Cold War era documents served to me as a kind of delayed verification of what the CIA was up to. Even though declassifying something decades after the fact may not provide the kind of immediate public scrutiny that is important for other government action, it seemed like a good balance of the need for secrecy with the need for public oversight. After all, the incentives of a typical member of an organization are to not only look after their own needs and desires but–to at least some degree–to those of the organization they belong to. This is where concepts like loyalty and legacy and prestige all come into play. If CIA leadership knows that eventually the public will find out what they have done, I think that’s a useful incentive.
And so we come back to the WaPo article:
Senior CIA officials have for years intentionally deceived parts of the agency workforce by transmitting internal memos that contain false information about operations and sources overseas, according to current and former U.S. officials who said the practice is known by the term “eyewash.”
OK, so that sounds kind of bad, but you could see how that would actually be an important counter-intelligence strategy. If you want to know where a leak is, then you give different information to different suspects and you see what gets turned over to the other side. And obviously if you can dole out fake information this makes it easier to come up with different “facts” to check against more leaks and it also prevents the betrayal of real operatives and real operations. You could see how it could be abused, but also how the CIA would need the flexibility to do this from time to time. But then I read this:
Officials said there is no clear mechanism for labeling eyewash cables or distinguishing them from legitimate records being examined by the CIA’s inspector general, turned over to Congress or declassified for historians.
And that’s when I threw my arms up in the air and thought to myself, “We probably need to dismantle this entire institution and start over.”
If the false information is not documented somewhere, then the one and only reason I had for hoping the CIA could be kept in check–eventual declassification, scrutiny, and some form of (perhaps watered down) accountability–is gone. If the leadership of the CIA gets to release false information in official documents without any distinction between the lies and the truth, then the potential of abuse seems basically limitless and the opportunity for accountability (even indirect accountability through ideas like reputation and legacy) disappears.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of honor and about the important of principle not just in an idealized world, but in a very practical one. I think our country has made a fatal mistake in our abandonment of these concepts in favor of real politik. The amount of goodwill that the United States has squandered all around the world is incalculable, and it’s not just about feelings. It has real impacts on our safety, our foreign policy, our economy, and global stability. If we had traded that for real and tangible benefits, you could make the case that it’s a tough but necessary tradeoff, but I just don’t believe we can rely on that anymore.
If the CIA has license to lie to the people of the United States indefinitely and without recourse, then in what conceivable sense does it remain an arm of government by, for, and of the people?
The other day I was eating lunch with a friend and we started talking about the idea of perfection and how we understand it and approach it within our culture. He believed it to be impossible to be perfect, but that it is possible to be perfect in regards to small and simple things.
I conceded his point, agreeing that yes, there are some things that can either be definitively done or left undone. For example, I could attend all three long hours of church (which would be quite a feat) every Sunday of every week and accomplish perfect attendance. I have now been perfect at a small task.
So I agree that there are some things that can simply be checked off – achieved or omitted. But I believe that perfection is far more intricate and goes beyond the mere scope of completing a task with wonderful consistency. I believe perfection cannot be found except as a product of an accumulation of many things – virtues and connections with those around us. And ultimately, perfection isn’t about avoiding sin, but rather, I think, that holiness and perfection deal more with that which we include in our lives opposed to that which we exclude from them. Avoiding sin can be done by any lump on a log. It bespeaks safety, inaction, timidity, even cowardice in the face of life’s challenges. The gospel invites us to expand, not contract, our realm of experience and knowledge. The atonement hasn’t been given to only be used in cases of dire emergency like a “get me out of jail card”, rather the atonement has been given to consistently and constantly give us life and draw us closer to Christ AND our fellow man. It is to be used every day to alleviate the suffering from sin and to help us gain knowledge and, even more importantly, compassion and love. From the parable given by the Savior in Luke chapter 7, we learn that he who is forgiven much feels an even deeper love for the Savior than he who has been forgiven less. It is critical, I think, to recognize that the woman is forgiven because “she loved much”.
However, it is important to juxtapose this parable with that of the man who was forgiven a great debt by his king in Matthew 18. In this story we do not see an outpouring of love following forgiveness, but rather anger as the forgiven man refuses to excuse the meager debts of those around him. Sin by itself is never beneficial – but sin accompanied by the repentance and the healing grace of the atonement leads to more compassion and, what one friend taught me, “mercy of the fallen”.
Recently I learned a saying with which I wholeheartedly agree: the path to happiness is not found in the path of avoiding unhappiness. I believe that just as trials and sadness are necessary precursors for joy, so is sin a precursor for perfection. Sin teaches us by experience the beauty of purity, cleanliness, and being whole. Through sin we learn how beautiful our Savior’s atonement truly is – that we, despite however wretched we may be (we are all sinners), can truly be made whole after having experienced such pain of heart and soul. In that space of forgiveness, we in turn learn to forgive and to love. In essence, we cheat ourselves if we simply try to avoid sin, but we perfect ourselves when we seek to incorporate godliness and learn better how to respond to the inevitable sin in our lives.
And that’s the point – whatever it is we endeavor or seek to do, we will be found wanting in some regard. No matter how much we do or how well we perform, we can’t earn heaven. Heaven is a place reserved for those of a particular divine nature and the tasks we have been given serve as possible catalysts or stepping stones to help shape us into such a person which I feel is shown in the Lord’s statement in D&C 29, “I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.” I believe those who will be best prepared in the heavens to come are not necessarily those who lived a life more devoid of sin than the other, but rather those who have learned best how to repent.
There’s a strange perverted obsession with the notion of perfection and it eats away at many of us as well as a syndrome of “sin-aversion” (but that’s a topic for another time). If not careful, such a desire to be “perfect” can lead to a sense of entitlement which one might infer from the hymn “Come, Come ye Saint” when it says, “Why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight?” In “The Great Divorce”, C.S. Lewis talks of the wonderful mercy that we are not given that which we rightfully deserve – we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of our God and have earned hell for ourselves. Yet, despite our wickedness before Him who is most pure, we are offered mercy and forgiveness upon the condition of change and repentance – sin cannot stand in the presence of God, but repentant sinners can.
It is my wish that we would seek less to become perfect and focus more on improving ourselves – our relationships with our families, friends, and communities. Just as it says in D&C 128:18, “we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect”. I don’t believe this is speaking solely in reference to our deceased, but to the relationships of the whole human family. That isn’t to say we should simply give up on the goal of perfection – but that perfection itself shouldn’t be the goal, rather, better emulating the life of Christ and His endless charity in all facets of our lives.
Now I wish to speak plainly and clearly so as not to be misunderstood. Perfection does not include sin – in the words of C.S. Lewis there can be no compromise for hell in heaven. But I think too much of our mental capacity is spent on avoiding and distancing ourselves from certain elements of this world which causes us, inextricably, to also distance ourselves from our loved ones who might be struggling, or cause others to distance themselves from us when we are struggling.
Hong Zicheng said within the Ts’ai Ken T’an, “Soil that is dirty grows the countless things. Water that is pure has no fish”. CS Lewis writes, “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to him and bad when it turns from him”. Perfection isn’t found in the absence of sin, but the seeds of perfection are found in the presence of compassion and mercy which have stemmed from sin and steered us further on to love and forgive those who will one day compose our heavenly family.
I kept thinking of the above research as I was reading through Mark E. Peterson’s October 1971 talk on honesty. What is so troubling about Dan Ariely’s research is the fact that most people are dishonest in small, incremental ways, yet still think of themselves as good, honest people. As Peterson states, “Honesty is a principle of salvation in the kingdom of God. Without it there can be no salvation. Just as no man or woman can be saved without baptism, so no one can be saved without honesty. As we cannot advance in the kingdom of heaven without a resurrection, so we cannot move into celestial realms without honesty. As God condemns immorality, so he denounces hypocrisy, which is one of the worst forms of dishonesty.” The list he provides next is thought-provoking:
The lie of the drug peddler that tempts a child to indulge.
The lie of the seducer that persuades a girl to surrender her virtue
The lie of the shyster that traps his victim in the fraudulent deal.
The lie of the tax evader that puts him behind bars.
The lie of the student that turns him into a cheat at school.
The lie of the child—and too often also of the parent—that creates the generation gap.
The lie of the shoddy workman that hides a faulty repair.
The lie of a husband or wife that leads to infidelity.
The lie of the embezzler that makes him falsify his books.
The desire to lie and cheat that turns a mother into a shoplifter.
The child who assists her into a potential criminal.
The lie on the lips of the neighborhood gossip that brings character assassination to many innocent victims.
The dishonest one who seeks to take advantage of or to humiliate or to deliberately injure a fellow human being.
It is dishonesty in a householder that persuades him to cheat a little newsboy out of his collections for delivering his newspapers.
The lie of a clergyman teaching premarital sex as a type of trial marriage that persuades a girl to lose her virtue.
The lie of the hypocrite who berates his wife and belittles his children and is a beast in the home that persuades him to assume a pious role on Sunday and sing in the choir and partake of the sacred emblems of the Lord’s supper.
The lie of the infatuated girl who deceives her parents as she enters a life of sin with a boy who would only drag her down.
Honesty is an act of vulnerability, humility, and love. According to Peterson, “Dishonesty is directly related to selfishness, which is its origin and source. Selfishness is at the root of nearly all the disorders that afflict us, and man’s inhumanity to man continues to make countless thousands mourn. If all mankind were honest, we could have heaven here on earth. We would have no need for armies or navies, nor even a policeman in the smallest community, for there would be no crime, no invasion of other people’s rights, no violence of one person against another. There would be no grounds for divorce, nor would we have errant husbands or unfaithful wives. Conflict between children and parents would disappear, and juvenile delinquency would come to an end.” Think about the list above. While there is greed and enmity involved, there is also shame and disconnection. How many cheat in school or work out of fear of not being enough? How many gossip with others in an attempt to create connection, no matter how counterfeit? How many crimes are committed in hopes of gaining acceptance, through status and the like? The sad thing is that dishonesty erodes trust and trust is vital to deep, lasting relationships. This is why no one is saved without honesty because no one is saved in isolation. Dishonesty is a form of betrayal. Psychologist John Gottman, one of the foremost experts on relationships and marriage, has emphasized the importance of trust in relationships. He uses the acronym ATTUNE:
Awareness of your partner’s emotion;
Turning toward the emotion;
Tolerance of two different viewpoints;
trying to Understand your partner;
Non-defensive responses to your partner;
and responding with Empathy.
He shares a personal story to demonstrate what he means:
John Gottman
But how do you build trust? What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner. Let me give you an example of that from my own relationship. One night, I really wanted to finish a mystery novel. I thought I knew who the killer was, but I was anxious to find out. At one point in the night, I put the novel on my bedside and walked into the bathroom.As I passed the mirror, I saw my wife’s face in the reflection, and she looked sad, brushing her hair. There was a sliding door moment. I had a choice. I could sneak out of the bathroom and think, “I don’t want to deal with her sadness tonight, I want to read my novel.” But instead, because I’m a sensitive researcher of relationships, I decided to go into the bathroom. I took the brush from her hair and asked, “What’s the matter, baby?” And she told me why she was sad. Now, at that moment, I was building trust; I was there for her. I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think only about what I wanted. These are the moments, we’ve discovered, that build trust. One such moment is not that important, but if you’re always choosing to turn away, then trust erodes in a relationship—very gradually, very slowly…By contrast, the atom of betrayal is not just turning away—not just turning away from my wife’s sadness in that moment—but doing what Caryl Rusbult called a “CL-ALT,” which stands for “comparison level for alternatives.” What that means is I not only turn away from her sadness, but I think to myself, “I can do better. Who needs this crap? I’m always dealing with her negativity. I can do better.” Once you start thinking that you can do better, then you begin a cascade of not committing to the relationship; of trashing your partner instead of cherishing your partner; of building resentment rather than gratitude; of lowering your investment in the relationship; of not sacrificing for the relationship; and of escalating conflicts.
To ignore his wife’s sadness and avert his eyes would not have been a lack of awareness, but an act of dishonesty. It is within these small moments that we lie the most and thus miss out on the chance for connection. To love and reach out is one of the most vulnerable and honest things you can do. “In the most emphatic and urgent meaning of the word,” write Terryl and Fiona Givens, “love reveals truth. It does not create the impression of truth; love does not merely endow something with a subjective truth–love is the only position or emotional disposition from which we become fully aware of the already present reality of the other person as more than a mere object among other objects in a crowded universe. Love alone reveals the full reality and value of the other person.” Peterson notes that Christ “knows that the sinful life is the costly and miserable life, and that wickedness never was happiness. He invites us to bear a lighter burden, one of joy, relief, and deep satisfaction[.]”
And this joy, relief, and satisfaction comes through honest, vulnerable, loving relationships.
One scripture has been on my mind more than any other over the last several years. That scripture is Alma 31:5. This takes place just after the story of Korihor (who met his end in Alma 30) and successive Lamanite invasions led by Amalekites (in Alma 25 and 27-28). No sooner have the Nephites survived that war, then then apostate Zoramites threaten to lead the Lamanites into starting a new one. So it is a time period of great uncertainty and danger for the Nephite people, with divisive threats inside their lands and betrayal and invasion lurking on the borders. This would have been a dark, dangerous, and confusing time.
This is how Alma reacts to the impending crisis:
And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God.
The idea that the “preaching of the word” could have such an impact was one of those things I just had to take on faith when I read the Book of Mormon as a young man. To me, it seemed that the arc of history was largely dominated by soldiers and spies, by politicians and inventors. That even seemed to be the message of the Book of Mormon at first, with Captain Moroni’s brilliant strategies and defensive innovations.
The longer I’ve read, however, and the more I’ve lived I realize how superficial that perspective is. All of the things that we usually pay attention to—the wording of laws, the exact structure of government, specific inventions, or individual leaders—none of them matter compared to the sum total of a million individual, every-day decisions by ordinary people. We just don’t like to pay attention to that because it’s almost impossible to measure, quantify, or incorporate into formal models and theories. But in the long run, I believe that’s what really matters. And so the biggest influence on the course of nations and cultures is not found in momentous events, but in the accumulation of the lives of the individuals who make up those nations and societies. And those lives are themselves most heavily influenced by what people believe in. What they want. What they hope for. What they work for. And that is where the “preaching of the word” has such a profound impact.
It’s something to keep in mind as we head into another contentious election season. I am not saying that it doesn’t matter who is president, but I am saying that the character of the voters in the years leading up to an election have a much, much greater impact on the nation than the outcome of any particular vote.
This was all brought to mind in reading Elder Mark E. Peterson’s talk, Honesty, a Principle of Salvation. He begins by making a claim I have never heard before:
Honesty is a principle of salvation in the kingdom of God. Without it there can be no salvation. Just as no man or woman can be saved without baptism, so no one can be saved without honesty.
He then goes on to list all the ways in which dishonesty, that relatively minor offense (at least, that’s how we often think of it relative to murder or rape or even theft) leads to huge cumulative impacts: drug addiction, fornication, fraud, infidelity, theft, all come down to dishonest. Even the generation gap—a frequent topic in these talks—comes from “the light of the child—and too often also the parent.” An individual lie may indeed be a small thing, but in the end, “to resort to dishonest practices is to apostatize from the Christian way of life.”
The most important line in the talk, for me, is one that doesn’t at first seem connected to honesty. Elder Peterson says that “if we are interested in the gospel in the least degree, we should live it wholeheartedly.” Of course there is a connection. What we say we care about should mesh with what we actually care about. What we say and believe with what we do. And this, too, is a kind of honesty, although it often goes by the expression “integrity” as well.
And that is a message that resonates deeply with me. I’ve started two personal blogs in my life, one in 2006 and then this one as a reboot in 2012. In both cases, one of my first blog posts was a recap of that very idea: pursuing integrity—honesty—between what we think we care about and what we actually care about, between what we want to be and what we actually are. Here’s the 2012 version, if you’re curious: Mind the Gaps.
These are small things. An individual lie in a person’s entire life, an individual honest person in a whole society, but the big things—the life, the society—aren’t made of anything else.
, which clocks in at over 48 hours, followed by Neal Stephenson’s 
(almost 32 hours) and then Susan Wise Bauer’s 
(about 27 hours). Most books fall in a more normal range of about 12-16 hours each, however, which means that double-speed means it takes only 6-8 hours to get through a typical book. And that’s an amount of time most people can probably find in one week.
or 
, but it does skew towards fiction for me and away from the most interesting non-fiction, which I still prefer to get in hardcopy (or Kindle).
If you use that link just above to join, I get a little commission. Which is nice. But the real reason I decided to post this today is that Audible is also having a great members-only sale: 
is the first book in a great sci-fi series that is currently running on SyFy as The Expanse.. 
is my favorite book of 2015. It’s not on the list, but it’s also #2 in a trilogy and the first book–
–is on the list. There are lots of other legitimate books on there as well. 
took the Hugo in 2015, for example. 
, 
, and 
are also all very good sci-fi (or, at least in the case of Ringworld, very famous sci-fi).
