yoheitan

People do things, we say, "out of the blue," "all of a sudden," "out of nowhere." These phrases support the popular myth that predicting human behavior isn't possible. Yet to successfully navigate through morning traffic, we make amazingly accurate high-stakes predictions about the behavior of literally thousands of people. ...So here we are, traveling along faster than anyone before the 1900s ever traveled (unless they were falling off a cliff), dodging giant, high-momentum steel missiles, judging the intent of their operators with a fantastic accuracy, and then saying we can't predict human behavior. Wow. Really impressive, and everyone should read it - GdeB was systemizing intuition way before it ever occurred to Malcom Gladwell, and with way more useful results. He runs his own personal safety and crime-solving consulting firm (I guess is the best way to describe it), and after hearing his clients say for years "I don't know how it happened. . . . . . . . . . Well, there was this one thing that seemed a little off..." and seeing things escalate (or not, and why) with thousands of stalkers and disgruntled ex-employees, -lovers, -partners, -you-name-its, here is all of that information put together in almost a how-to book, so that we can do everything in our powers to keep ourselves and people we love out of bad situations. Think of someone you know whom you might call a control freak. That person, like most violent people, grew up in a chaotic, violent, or addictive home. At a minimum, it was a home where parents did not act consistently and reliably, a place where love was uncertain or conditional. For him or her, controlling others became the only certain way to predict their behavior. People can be very motivated to become control experts because an inability to predict behavior is absolutely intolerable for human beings and every other social animal. (The fact that most people act predictably is literally what holds human societies together.) I've successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear "no," and teach young women that it's all right to explicitly reject. GdeB on TV news sensationalism (you may remember him strolling down a street in South Central LA with Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine"): Soon it will be "Robbers who hide out in your purse until you get home!" followed by a checklist of warning signs to look out for: "Purse feels extra heavy; purse difficult to close; unusual sounds coming from purse..."

2022-11-14 18:39