Talking to Strangers

A book about how hard it is to read people, even for someone paid to do so and expected to be able to do it professionally, such as the judges or even secret agents.

Key Ideas

Frameworks

Topics to Explore Next

Quotes

Anecdotes

Intersections

Notes

20210619 - ✩ The Friends Fallacy
20210623 - ✩ The Amanda Knox Case
20210630 The Fraternity Party
- The chapter open with a testimony from a college student who find a woman being sexually assaulted outside of the fraternity party building. The rest of the chapter discusses about consent. Consent
20210703
- A crime investigation is already complicated, what would happen if we throw alcohol to the mix? Consent, Alcoholism
20210713
- The chapter told a story about an anthropologist who visited a small town just to find out that alcohols was not actually causing people to do violence. Many studies later, scientists seem to agree that alcohols was not agent of inhibition but agent of myopia. Alcoholism, Anthropology
20210715
- Breaking down the theory of ✦ Alcohol Myopia as the effect of alcohols. It makes the drinker ignore the long term consequences and at the mercy of their environment. It’s not a revealing agent — because it was perceived that under the influence of alcohol, someone will reveal their true self — but a transformative agent. Alcoholism
20210717
- The chapters show how Alcoholism leads to a blackout, which makes understanding Consent difficult due to failure to recognize ✦ Emotional Transparency. The blackout phenomenon was explained in great detail, which is a little bit funny. People can function properly and perform complicated tasks such as holding a conversation and even buying an airplane ticket while having a Blackout. It’s just the capability to retain memory was lost, even until the fifth day later.
20210721
- A closing section of this chapter, discusses the dichotomy of rape vs drunk, in which it shouldn’t be separated because the two event was connected.
20210722 KSM P. 235–239
- Wrapping up learnings from previous chapter by telling us story about talking to a stranger, which also a terrorist. What are the interrogator gonna do?
20210725 P. 240–249
- First few chapters describing how the CIA tried some torturing methods to extract information from the terrorist. There are several methods including waterboarding (to give a sensation of drowning), walling (banging heads on a wall), and sleep deprivation (interrupting the sleep for 72 hours max).
20210726 P. 249–256
- The chapter posit that information collected from people under stress might be inaccurate or misleading. Related to the interrogation technique that use stress-inducing treatment towards the interrogated.
20210730 P. 256–261
- Last section of part four, examines how interrogation can lead to faded truth in an effort to understand strangers. Maybe there are certain limits in our effort to understand strangers, or maybe we should approach strangers with compassion and care to be able to understand them.
20210730 Sylvia Plath P. 265–267
- A horrible chapter retelling a story from a young poet who got depressed and killed herself by putting his head in an oven.

Type #Media/Book

Author @Malcolm Gladwell

Related to ✶ Understanding People

Link Kindle