In the excerpt from Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, Dr. Redelmeier asks “everyone to slow down. To wait. Just a moment. Just to check their thinking—and to make sure they weren’t trying to force the facts into an easy, coherent, but ultimately false story” (215). Explore this recommendation for Joy, Ofri, or Baker, the TED Talk we watched in class. Where might the author slow down and check their thinking? Or where might you, the reader, slow down and entertain a bit more doubt about what the author is saying?
I did entertain a bit of doubt at times when I listened to Aspen Baker’s TED Talk. Baker describes interaction or conversations between people saying that “Empathy gets created the moment we imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes.” She goes further to say that it is comforting and empowering when people point out that they have experienced something similar to the situation that is being described to them. When I consider this topic, I think of times when listeners are too caught up in relating their own story or just a certain phrase that the story-teller uses. This makes it so that the listener often misses a point that the other makes or they listen to respond and not just to listen, which is often what people need. Later she explains that it was nice to here “been there” when talking about her pregnancy but she wishes that other topics could be discussed in this way but also that just listening is most important, even if a person does not agree. These two topics go together but can seem contradictory at first, leaving the reader wondering whether it is better to relate to the speaker or just listen. So if the reader takes the first of these topics and believes that to be totally true, the other idea will get lost.
