How do you persuade people? It’s not always by presenting the facts.
nytimes.com
David Brooks / NYT:
[excerpts]
[excerpts]
This is where Alan Jacobs’s absolutely splendid forthcoming book “How
to Think” comes in. If Thaler’s work is essential for understanding how
the market can go astray, Jacobs’s emphasis on the relational nature of
thinking is essential for understanding why there is so much bad
thinking in political life right now.
Jacobs makes good use of C. S. Lewis’s concept of the Inner Ring. In every setting — a school, a company or a society — there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.
Jacobs makes good use of C. S. Lewis’s concept of the Inner Ring. In every setting — a school, a company or a society — there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.
There are always going to be people who desperately want to get into
the Inner Ring and will cut all sorts of intellectual corners to be
accepted. As Lewis put it, “The passion for the Inner Ring is most
skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad
things.”...
Back when they wrote the book of Proverbs it was said, “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.” These days, a soft tongue doesn’t get you very far, but someday it might again.
Back when they wrote the book of Proverbs it was said, “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.” These days, a soft tongue doesn’t get you very far, but someday it might again.
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