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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (19041)	9/1/2010 9:32:46 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

OT Don't reply word-by-word on posts. Reply on the essence The problem with this is determining the essence. You cannot help but make inferences when you do so and those inferences add bias more than they clarify meaning. Words aren't precise, either. Some people are more articulate than others or more deliberate in their word choices than others. And even when words are chosen carefully, words have multiple meanings. But words are better than inferred essence. It's rare to know someone well enough to gather his essence. It's only through words that we can communicate in this medium. If you need more clarity, ask for an explanation, which involves more or different words. If you think that your words are misunderstood, volunteer more or different words. I was trained by an outfit called Interaction Associates in facilitating group consensus. I have a lot of experience using it in both internal and public/private group problem solving. (It's surprisingly effective if you are rigorous about applying it.) One of the very first and most important lessons from my training was to always use the exact words of the participants. You know, when the recorder writes points from participants on those sheets taped to the walls of the meeting rooms? It's important to always use their words rather than rephrasing. This is in part because it's disrespectful to the participant to suggest that you can frame his thought better than he can and in part to avoid introducing the bias of the facilitator or recorder, which will eventually come back to bite you. Logic doesn't always apply, experience or judgements are vital and important. Sure, there are lots of ways of arriving at a position. There's merit to all of them, with two caveats. In the first place, some approaches are more valid for certain questions than others. You can't use Wikipedia to determine whether or not your neighbor is honest. You need experience and/or intuition. You can't use logic to determine the size of Albania. You need to measure it or find where it has already been measured. Whether something is right or wrong always involves a value judgment although other approaches might factor in. If you use an inappropriate approach to come to your position, it's worthless. The second is knowing which path was taken. It's not helpful to the quality of your position to be under the impression that you arrived there via logic when it was actually wishful thinking or via experience when it was actually a value judgment. If you can't explain how you got there, you haven't thought it through let alone be in a position to support it.