there are only a few types of asks.
1) Help me identify a problem.
Something is not quite right. I’ve observed the following concrete things, and I sense an issue but am having a hard time putting my finger on it. I’m looking to leverage your experience to help me identify the problem.
2) Help me frame the problem.
I’m looking to solve the following problem. I’m inexperienced when it comes to framing possible options, and I could use your help.
Ideally, you’d take the initial crack at this one. This blog post describes a simple technique. If it’s your first time or you’re really struggling, ask for help.
3) Review my analysis.
I’m looking to solve the following problem. I’ve spent some time framing possible solutions. I’d like to discuss the options with you and hear your critical feedback so that I can improve the options and make an informed recommendation.
4) Sanity-check my choice.
I’m looking to solve the following problem. I’ve developed a few options and identified my preferred path forward. I’d like you to sanity-check my preferred path.
5) Heads up.
I just wanted to give you a quick heads-up. I’ve made the following decision and am planning on implementing it on the following date.
6) Just Venting
I need to vent about something. I don’t need anything solved for me, just a sympathetic ear.
The smartest and most talented people don’t have all the right answers. They just excel at asking the right questions to the right people.
A Better Way to Argue About Politics
Liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different moral codes, which makes arguing about policy complicated. Many people have found themselves locked in debates surrounding the now-suspended travel ban, with little success in convincing the other. “One reason it’s so hard to reach across the ideological divide is that people tend to present their arguments in a way that appeals to the ethics of their own side, rather than that of their opponents,” says Atlantic writer Olga Khazan in this video. However, there’s a psychological trick that goes a long way to changing peoples minds. According to the Moral Foundations Theory, liberals are more likely than conservatives to endorse fairness-based arguments and are more concerned with principles like care and equality. So, when discussing a contentious topic, liberals should reframe their arguments to appeal the the moral values of conservatives, and vice versa. “At the very least, you can avoid making things worse,”
How to Break an Illusion
The obvious next move for the Master Persuader involves asking Pence to “evolve” to Trump’s positions on all LGBTQ matters. Everyone expects a VP to pretend to be a full supporter of the President’s policies. That gives cover for Pence to update his LGBTQ views because…
– Religious conservatives will dismiss it as mere politics, believing Pence privately holds views that match their own.
– Anti-Trumpers will see a major violation of the monster frame.
.. He has lots of levers. Expect him to push one lever after another until the monster framing cracks. By summer the story will be that he’s the most flexible and centrist president in our history.
.. It is worth noting that Trump and Clinton had very different unframing challenges. If Clinton had won, her job would have been to convince the public she isn’t crooked. But you can’t do that simply by doing some honest things in public. We expect that even crooked people do honest things when watched. Clinton literally had no path to remove her “crooked” label.
.. In summary, you can’t prove you are honest by NOT stealing something in public. But you can prove you are not a monster by saving a kitten from a tree in public.
Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?
In the heat of a presidential campaign, you’d think that a story about one party’s nominee giving a large contribution to a state attorney general who promptly shut down an inquiry into that nominee’s scam “university” would be enormous news. But we continue to hear almost nothing about what happened between Donald Trump and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.
.. Trump paid a penalty to the IRS after his foundation made an illegal contribution to Bondi’s PAC.
.. And the comparison with stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation is extremely instructive. Whenever we get some new development in any of those Clinton stories, you see blanket coverage — every cable network, every network news program, every newspaper investigates it at length. And even when the new information serves to exonerate Clinton rather than implicate her in wrongdoing, the coverage still emphasizes that the whole thing just “raises questions” about her integrity.
.. The story of something like the Clinton Foundation gets stretched out over months and months with repeated tellings, always with the insistence that questions are being raised and the implication that shady things are going on, even if there isn’t any evidence at a particular moment to support that idea... The end result of this process is that because of all that repeated examination of Clinton’s affairs, people become convinced that she must be corrupt to the core. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day... But the truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering
- According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
.. the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.