My dear wife Allee is one of the most meticulous and intelligent people I know, and recently she was bemoaning her own lack of clarity: She had composed an email to a friend and on receiving a response that had obviously misinterpreted her message, realized that what she had sent was understandably confusing. I was reminded of a button or banner (back when these were fashionable in the 1970s) that said, \u201cI know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure that what you heard was what I meant.\u201d <\/p>\n
I responded to Allee that some self-forgiveness was appropriate because all in all she was one of the more clear communicators\u2014most people being more muddy. I said that my imaginary friend Zordak (who travels among the planets and galaxies sort of like the folks on Star Trek) said that earth-people are only about 10-12% evolved as conscious beings, compared with other life forms he had visited. So we should cut ourselves some slack. She responded that this was not an excuse for the lack of intellectual rigor that pervaded our species, and even among our erstwhile bright youth in our culture. There is a slacker-\u201cwhatever\u201d mentality that fails to even realize that sharper, more critical thinking, clear writing and speaking, and the like are worthwhile, very much needed, and have meaningful payoffs. I replied that I agreed, and there is a fine balance among the activities of forgiveness, compassion, and yet not using this as an excuse. <\/p>\n
So there are two themes here: First, clear communications deserves to be recognized as a value and a category of behavior worth attending to. There are component skills and tendencies to lapse into lower levels of rigor. Indeed, miscommunications are frequent and often not the \u201cfault\u201d of the recipient for \u201cnot listening.\u201d Many people\u2014including folks with significant levels of higher education under their belt\u2014are dismal in the ways they communicate. (\u201cToo busy\u201d is the middle-aged equivalent of the teenagers\u2019 and college-age young adults\u2019 use of \u201cwhatever.\u201d) <\/p>\n
Second, while a measure of forgiveness is appropriate for lapses, this should not be allowed to blind us to the need for efforts at being meticulous. We need a 14 – 22% level of intellectual humility\u2014not enough to tie us into knots of self-doubt or self-consciousness (that\u2019s too obsessive), but enough to check out with others whether what they heard was indeed what we meant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My dear wife Allee is one of the most meticulous and intelligent people I know, and recently she was bemoaning her own lack of clarity: She had composed an email to a friend and on receiving a response that had obviously misinterpreted her message, realized that what she had sent was understandably confusing. I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-follies","category-literacy","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}