Mind Readers Dictionary : Mind Readers Dictionary

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 mum...

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 des...

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 whi...

IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining a fact, and therefore not a matter of humble opinion? In the acronym IMHO, the H is redundant. IM...

I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recognizable to most Americans as proto-fascism, a self-confirming, untestable ideological faith that dema...

As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Left, religious vs. secular--maybe these divisions are symptomatic of the underlying difference, but t...

"You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have said that to me about my respect for likes of Obama, Reid, and Boxer, and I've said that to them abou...

I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? He designed it out of frustration with agenda drift. As a meeting conversation would overheat, sid...

We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big picture anyway? The phrase "forest for trees" is especially apt because it originates in forestry and...

Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms are two words that describe the same behavior, but prescribe opposite responses to the behavior. I ...

Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to morality but I've never met a moral principle I could trust. I can illustrate this best by example....

"I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from finishing that project that already has you underpaid, over-budget and behind schedule, to coming u...

It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don't know exactly what. Now you're arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thin...

Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint at a parallel between new-age niceness and Tea Party libertarianism that will be the subject of a lat...

What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if they were only educated in the dharma (spiritual teachings). He traded a prized possession of mine f...

He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, you muster all the spiritual benevolence you can, and for once you don't counter-attack. You say so...

Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or sheer doggedness, we can't simply agree to disagree. Something has got to give, preferably our oppone...

About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research question for me, which translates to lofty yet practical conundrums about the alternative to buttheadedne...

Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't nece...

Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightside...