Stephen Dubner

I would rather go surfing, go read a book, go play golf, go hang out with friends and do something.

And live a life that is of rather than be an observer and think this is what that is about.

Right.

For a lot of people, including myself, one thing that's hard to not do or that comes naturally, at least to me and many other people, but not all people, that I've tried to just diminish a lot is the impulse to judge.

The impulse to judge is, I think, a very, very smart, healthy evolutionary process.

trait because everything from life on the Savannah, is that one going to eat me?

So you have to make judgments, you know, Danny Kahneman, I'm sure you guys have dug into that, thinking fast and thinking slower, two viable ways of assessing things.

But often when we make a consequential decision that should be thought through slowly, we make it fast.

So that's really bad.

And I feel we do that all the time.

internally, but then externally too.

And when your first response is to judge something as literally on a spectrum, positive or negative, versus...

And this is what I try to do, but don't always succeed.

Just observe and figure it out.

Because I'm a writer and because I was very shy as a kid, I've always been very comfortable just being on the edge of the back wall and just watching and listening and taking it and trying to figure out who loves who, who hates who, who's mad at who, who's trying to impress who.

And I feel like if you do that, at the very least, what you're going to do is you're going to start to empathize.

And by empathize, I don't mean sympathize.

I mean, you can feel yourself in that person's position a little bit.

And that, for me, at least changes the calculus.

I agree.