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Agreements Be Damned!

20 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by danielwalldammit in Irritation Meditation, The Bullet Point Mind

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Agreements, Communications, Decisions, Group Dynamics, Management, Manipulation, Public Relations, Speech, Work

It has become fashionable to begin open discussion sessions and training seminars by going over a list of agreements with those present. The idea here is to elicit agreement from the audience for certain ground rules of discussion. Things like; “Be constructive,” “Be present,” or “Listen for understanding,” are commonly entered to a list of agreements. Each of these rules are supposed to encourage good speaking and listening behavior, and to help people get a sense for what is expected of them in the meeting to follow. The point of calling these principles ‘agreements,’ and for beginning to meeting by discussing them is, of course, to get some buy-in for the rules of engagement from those present in the session.

As these principles are almost always worded in nice positive terms, I imagine they also serve as a kind of comfort; a way of encouraging people to participate in what follows by encouraging them to act in good faith and to believe that others present will do the same.

It all sounds quite wonderful.

Frankly, these things always make me want to vomit.

Why?

First, this is fake buy-in culture at its worst. Like focus groups, an agreement list is often a means of disguising an executive decision as a group agreement. In this case the executive is often a facilitator, but the principle is the same; the group present is being asked to place its stamp of approval on a decision that has already been made. When a facilitator in a large meeting hauls out a list of ‘agreements,’ and invites people to say whether or not they support each individual agreement, they do so in a context ripe with group-think dynamics. Someone might get by with objecting to one or another item on a list of agreements, but they are just as likely to brand themselves the resident trouble-maker, and this is going to happen at the start of the whole meeting. Not to mention, everyone wants to get on with things. Voice enough objections and it’s likely to become a problem. Under such circumstances, there is a strong expectation the agreements brought into a meeting by facilitator are going to be, well, …agreed to. Hence, the notion that these are terms arrived at by a group process is often a thinly-disguised pretense for a set of rules fostered by the facilitator.

There may be room negotiation, but some of the participants have a lot more room to maneuver than others.

What does the facilitator get out of this?

They get the ability to say that all those present agreed to the terms in the list, but that assumes the agreements were ever really open to negotiation in the first place, which often as not just isn’t true. Serious input is particularly unlikely in unfamiliar settings and with unfamiliar people, and it is even less likely in the workplace wherein people may have been directed to participate in meetings, often with their bosses present. Either way, the prospect of saying ‘no’ to a given agreement is loaded with unnecessary stress, and most importantly, that stress is unconnected to any standing interest. Somebody who is prepared to voice an opinion about an actual policy will think twice before picking a fight about an issue that will be over at the end of a meeting. So, the tendency is to pass on the invitation to weigh in on the agreements and see how things go.

Yes, people can say ‘no’ to an agreement, and no, they cannot do so without at least some concerns about how their disagreement will affect their role in the meeting or even in the workplace at large.

A facilitator need not come with prepared agreements to get what she wants out of a group. She can disguise her agreements fairly easily. In true focus group fashion, a good facilitator just asks people what they think the agreements should be. She doesn’t need to show them a list of agreements or even tell them what she thinks should be on it. She can just ask them what they think. She will almost certainly get a number of suggestions about being respectful and constructive, etc. If others present in the meeting are familiar with these lists, they may even chime in with a few more of the current standards. Ask a couple leading questions, and someone in the group may just supply any missing items a facilitator really wants. If all else fails, a facilitator won’t be blamed for suggesting one or two herself, especially not if she waits till the end. It will look like she put others views before her own. They won’t realize that this item or two completes a list that the facilitator was ticking off from the very beginning. Do this right, and folks may actually think the resulting list of agreements are actually the result of a group process,

…well, except for that one item.

…and that other one too!

The positive nature of the principle can also be quite deceptive. I once attended a meeting in which people were told to take off their hats. Sitting there with my literal hat in my literal hand, I wondered what this meant. We were told that it meant people should forget their role in the work organization; that they should speak freely and without fear of consequences. I remember thinking that if this were true, none of us would have been there.

…most anyway.

And yes, I am quite serious about that. This particular meeting was scheduled an a terribly inappropriate time and many of us were stressing over the work we were not getting done while in this meeting, work that needed doing immediately.

More to the point, this was an incredibly naive thing to say, recklessly so, given that the point was made by an outside consultant who would soon return home while the rest of us went back to worth with each other, and with our bosses

…remembering who said what about whatever.

The potential for serious negative consequences was very real in this instance, and it was completely irresponsible for this facilitator to suggest otherwise. It’s one thing to encourage good behavior, and it is quite another to provide false assurance that such behavior can be expected of others.

In the end, the problem with agreements is all to simple; they represent a kind of two-faced use of authority. On the one hand, a speaker is using agreements to lock down the rules of engagement for a discussion. On the other hand, they are trying to distribute authority for those rules among all those present. It’s one of the many ways in which people uncomfortable with their own authority try to hide it from themselves and others, even as they use that very authority to control others. Some are more heavy-handed than others, and not every agenda is anything to be afraid of, but there is little positive to be gained from disguising an actual agenda or the authority used to advance it.

Frankly, I would rather a facilitator just told us what they expect from a group rather than pretend we are all making the decision together. The rest of us can like it or we can lump it, but I figure a facilitator ought to do us the courtesy of acknowledging their own authority when exercising that very authority over us.

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Eight Tips for Writing an Eight-Tip Advice Post (Crazy Uncle of A Bullet Point Mind)

31 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in The Bullet Point Mind, Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Advice, Blogging, Counting, Creative Writing, Internet, Nonsense, Numbers, Satire, Writng

IMG_20160215_142830

If you make sense to people, they will only make sense back at you!

The internet is full of pages providing us with numbers.

Numbers and tips!

Numbers OF tips.

That’s right. The internet is full of posts containing a designated number of little advisatory gems. I don’t know how much use there is in reading these lists, but I’m convinced there must be a point to writing them. I reckon the wisdom must reside in the numbers. So, the secret to providing advice online must be to put the advice in the form of a list of useful tips. Most importantly, you have to number them. Then put the number in the title. Netizens love numbers. They will read all the tips you want to give them as long as you put them in a well-numbered list.

…I think.

Anyway, I’m gonna give it a try. I do have a list of my own. It’s totally full of good advisings too. At least I will have such a list when I type out a bit more of this post. Here are my tips! My, …um, [INSERT NUMBER HERE)-point list of how to do [REPEAT NUMBER]-point lists. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t even know the number of points on my list, but I will have a number when I’m done writing my list, and you’re gonna read it to.

The number anyway. You’ll probably skip the rest. Dog knows, I would. Anyway, here goes…

OneFirst! Number one! The main, first-most, and totally beginning number on my list list of numbered things on the list that is totally numbered. The point of that number is to, …um …Number you tips! Yep. You gotta totally number them. Otherwise people won’t know the count, or maybe they will forget your advice as they read through it. Plus, it might be that your advice really sucks, but at least the numbers will make sense, so if you give bad advice, you can at least give good numbers. That’s why you gotta make sure you give people tips and make sure you number them so people can count as they read your tips.

And anyway, numbering your tips makes them way more important.

“Look before you cross the street?” …Meh!

“Number 1: Look before you cross the street.” …Dude, that is so totally profound!

Trust me, numbers profundify the lamest advice, and if that isn’t enough for you, then I just don’t know what else to say. Just fricking number your tips, okay dude!?!

TwoTwo: At least half your advice can be totally obvious or completely meaningless. In fact, it’s probably better that way, because it leaves less for people to disagree with. You just have to use the right words. If you are giving advice on how to do a bang up blog, for example, then be sure to tell people they should produce ‘quality content’. That may sound to you like an obvious call to write good stuff, but that’s because you haven’t grasped the full nuance. See, words like “quality content” are just so qualitative, they will make people feel all somehow, and then they will think you’ve actually said something, and they will respect you more. Plus, think how important that advice really is. Your readers were probably planning to write something that sucked, but you totally steered them in the right direction with that advice. Isn’t that cool?

Oh, what do you care? It’s a hit to your website one way or another!

IMG_20160223_143321Drei: Use your advice to drag people by the nose through your website. This isn’t hard to do. You just add all sorts of links to each piece of advice, hinting each time that they can learn more about whatever they’ve just read if they click the link. This way the vacuous nature of your not-so-helpful advice will work to your advantage. People will think; “Oh, I just haven’t found the real information yet. I have to go to that link where I will learn everything I need to know about this and it will finally make sense.”

If you’ve figured out that nothing at the link has to actually make sense, then you are catching on. The point is that this practice will generate extra hits on your website, which will totally drive up your search rankings. Your readers won’t learn a damned thing, but fuck them anyway, right? Your advice is good because it’s good for you, good for your rankings, and good for your blog. It’s probably also good for Jesus, all of your fellow countrymen, and if you can swing the suggestion, starving children somewhere in Africa.

…don’t forget to shed a tear as you write that last one. Also finish your dinner.

SusieQuatroQuatro: Try to include at least one useful piece of information. It doesn’t have to be original. It doesn’t really even have to be all that relevant. Hell, you can steal it shamelessly from someone wiser than yourself. The point is that you want your reader to have something to hold on to. That way when they remember your post and can’t remember all the other stuff you said, because – CAN THE CAN, HONEY – after all you really didn’t say anything in most of your advice post, but when they think about that, they will hopefully remember that one thing, which probably didn’t come from you anyway, but they’ll remember it just the same. Then when their buddies ask why anyone should go visit your site, they’ll say; “Oh I learned that one cool thing and some other stuff. If you go to the site, you’ll see that one thing and all the other stuff too, and then you can remind me about all the stuff I forgot.” …which is of course totally cool for you, especially if their friends start following the links. No-one will remember the useless non-advice, but they’ll remember the one good point and think there were others that they forgot. If your lucky, they will even come back to check.

I know, I know. You’re worried that you may not have any really good advice to give, right? Don’t worry about it. All you have to do is find someone else who is worth listening to and use them as a source. The advice they give will be the one that matters. So, just pick something that seems superficially relevant to the topic. Don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be actually relevant, just as long as it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb and make people think it doesn’t belong in your post at all. Then you’re sunk.

Ashdla’: Be sure to write in short sentences. Also make sure that your grammar is nice and standard. It’s best to avoid run-on sentences. For instance, most of what I wrote in bullet point Suzi needs a red pen. That kind of writing is right out! (Seriously, don’t write like I do. It’s bad for the economy.)

Now you might think that the point here is to communicate more effectively, but you would be wrong to think that. The real reason is that your 8th-grade English teacher will haunt your fricking dreams if you don’t follow this advice. You don’t want that, now do you? I know I don’t. Seriously, Just leave me alone Mrs. Lawrence, will you please just leave me alone!

20160331_1311305) Some bullet points can be really brief. People won’t mind the break. Reading is hard.

…dammit!

…

…

…

20160331_131502Tallimat) Oh, brevity? That’s a good one! Reading is hard. Remember that point when you write stuff. People don’t like to read, which is one of the reasons that writing is hard. Writing is hard, because reading is hard. Maybe writing is actually hard, because reading seems hard, or maybe there is a lesson about laziness here, but the point is writing is really rude. I don’t know about the rest of this paragraph, but I am totally serious about this point. Writing is definitely rude. When you write something, you are asking someone to read it, and no-one wants to do that. So, don’t write anything, you rude mother-fucker!

…Alternatively, remember that whatever you write, your readers are just waiting for an excuse to stop reading. Why they started reading in the first place is a mystery to me and to you, and probably to them as well, but they are just waiting to bust away from your damned blog post and go do something fun. So you have to keep it brief, and you have to do stuff to keep their attention. Words like ‘fucker’ help with the last part. When I figure out how to keep it brief, I’ll write another post to let you know. I’ll probably even add it as a link to this post.

Seven SamuraiVII: Promise them money. I don’t mean that you should offer to pay your readers, though that might work. …No, it wouldn’t. (No-one wants to read.) Anyway, my point is that you should allude to financial success. Hint that people will earn a lot of money if they just follow your advice. Ideally, you should get that hint into your title as well, and into every other bullet point. In fact, you should probably get it into every bullet point, just to be on the safe side. Just keep suggesting that you’re offering people the keys to a successful career in whatever, and you’ll be fine.

Now you might think the point of this advice is to get readers to think they can make money by following your advice, but that is totally not the point. Seriously, no-one is that stupid! The point of doing this is to convince other internet advice-bloggers to think that you are in the same business they are, and hopefully that you are really good at it. If you can sell that image to them, then those guys are totally gonna start coming to your blog, commenting, and hopefully referencing you on their own blogs. That will totally drive your hint count up, at least as long as you do the same for them. You won’t make any money off any of this, but it’ll be a gas to think that people came to your blog, even if most of them only did so in the hopes of getting you to come to theirs. They didn’t read your posts. Don’t forget that. No-one reads blog posts. But they will count as hits, and that’s cool.

See, no-one really believes advice on how to make money online, but some people evidently believe that others believe you can make money online. THAT, my friend, is your target readership!

20160331_133916восьмой: Wrap it up and hit the ‘Publish’ button. Seriously, just get on with it!

No seriously, just hit the damned button.

***

***

…No fair, using this advice for 10-point lists. It’s only meant for 8.

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Son of a Bullet Point Mind: Cold Reading the Textbook

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, The Bullet Point Mind

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

bluffing, cold reading, College, con artists, Education, Learning, psychics, Reading, School

20151104_095016[1]It was a few years back. I had a couple students I had agreed to help with a reading. Since I didn’t think they were reading at all, I thought I would begin the session by simply giving them time to read. We would discuss the article after they had had a chance to read part way through it, or at least that was my plan. But there I was, not a full minute into the reading session and one of the students had already commented on the point of the article. He finished with rising tone, as if inviting me to confirm or deny the validity of his point. His overall demeanor seemed to suggest that he was ready to begin the discussion.

I asked this student to just read for a little while, explaining that we would discuss the article afterwards. If he had specific questions about the meaning of words in the text, I would be happy to answer those, but I wanted to save the general discussion until he had had a chance to read the material.

It wasn’t another minute before he asked me a question about the point of the article. And another before he made another point about a random line on the page. Each time, he seemed to be trying to kick off the full discussion. I decided to compromise and agreed to discuss the matter after he’d finished one page.

He never made it through that one page.

I should point out that this was a college student, and a rather bright one at that. But it was very clear to me that he didn’t read. I wouldn’t say that he couldn’t read, because I’m pretty sure that he could parse any reasonable sentence you threw at him, but perhaps the effort to concentrate on a full reading was too much. Anyway, the specific reasons for not reading in this case are beside the point. What interests me most about this example is what the student was doing INSTEAD of reading. He was working me, lifting a word or a phrase off the page and inviting me to elaborate on his own contributions. Whether phrased as a question or a comment, his every utterance was an effort to put the ball back in my court and get me started explaining the material. The one thing that was never going to happen that semester was him reading a text, but if he could pull it off, I would never realize he hadn’t done the reading at all. After all, he had so many thoughts about the reading.

…the reading he didn’t do.

On some level, this is simply a bluff. We’ve all done it, partly because we’ve all been caught with our pants down so to speak. At some point in our education, we’ve all been asked a question about readings we didn’t do. You can admit you didn’t do the reading or you can say something in an effort to sound like you know a thing or two about what you were supposed to have read. Most of us have probably tried the bluff a time or three. It’s not that unusual, at least not as a single instance. But what was unusual, or at least very striking to me in this case was the realization that this was standard operational procedure for the student in question.  Near as I could tell, this was how he handled all his teachers and all his readings. And why not? It worked.

Most of the time anyway.

What made that particular circumstance unusual, and awkward, was my own determination to get this student to read something on that day, even if it was just a single page. Had we not been meeting outside the classroom, and had I not made it a point to ask him to read then and there, the painful impossibility of my expectation that he actually read something might never have given us both cause to regret each others’ company that evening. I might have come away suspicious, but in this case it had become unusually clear that this student didn’t read, and that at least one of the reasons he didn’t read was that he never needed to. All he had to do was field an observation or two and let the imagination of his instructors fill in the gaps for him. It’s how he learned what was in all of his books.

This is exactly what psychics do, or at least one variety of them, the ones who do cold reading. Ostensibly ‘picking up a vibration’, or ‘getting an impression’, a psychic may ask you if there is someone important in your life, someone having trouble, and since of course all of us have someone like that in our lives, we will happily fill in the details and confirm that they are right. Soon we will be talking with the psychic about cousin Ernest and his heart problems. And if we’re not very careful, we may just think it an amazing thing that this psychic somehow knew about cousin Ernest without us ever telling her about him. We’ll come away from the experience thinking it’s amazing, and amazing of course is exactly what the psychic wants us to think about the whole experience.

Perhaps she wants to think that way about it herself.

Not the cold reading student though. The cold reading student doesn’t want their powers of divination to be noticed at all. He wants you to think his contributions to classroom discussion are perfectly normal, his errors understandable, and his proper calls exactly what one would expect of an individual working his way through the material. He may be hit or miss on tests and other assignments, but as long as he is talking about the classroom materials, he has an angle, and that angle is the imagination of the instructor. If he can land a comment in the ballpark, so to speak, he can rely on the instructor to pick that ball up and carry the game forward.

…perhaps without ever realizing that the student hasn’t a clue.

This is why some students specialize in so many one word answers. You can give them an essay by an abolitionist and ask them what the authors main point is in that essay and they will tell you it was ‘slavery’? What they are expecting you to do at that point is say something like; “yes, he is talking about slavery and what he has to say about…” If instead you insist on asking the student to explain what the author actually says about slavery, then the whole thing is just going to get very unpleasant. Since no-one wants to experience an unpleasant conversation, and since most instructors are dying to get to the interesting details of whatever they happen to teach, odds are quite good that the instructor isn’t going to be that fussy. So, students can just toss a word out and watch what happens, a bit like giving a broken machine a kick in the hopes it will restart.

***

I once had a one-on-one session with a student who had been asked to read an essay by John Stuart Mill. This was admittedly pushing the envelope for this student’s reading abilities, but it was actually one of the more user-friendly readings in the textbook my college (in its infinite wisdom) made me use that semester, so I figured I’d do my best and ask the students to do the same. So anyway…

I thought I would work through the first paragraph of the essay with her and see how things went. She looked at the first sentence and found the words ‘freedom’ and ‘will’ in there. She then looked up and thought about it a moment before explaining that we have freedom of the will. That’s what she thought Mill was saying. She had pulled two words off the page and thought her way to the connection between them. What she hadn’t done was to read the actual sentence in front of her.

We repeated this process for an hour, and she approached every sentence the exact same way, pulling a few keywords off the text, looking up, and imagining the connection between them. This approach yielded an interpretation nearly the polar opposite of the one Mill had been trying to convey. I carefully explained Mill’s actual position, watching her eyes widen as I did, and upon completing that lesson, I risked a comment on her reading strategies. I asked her to read each sentence in turn, each full sentence, and to do that for the full article. She looked at me like I was insane. That’s not how reading was done! She proved even more surprised to learn that this is what I wanted whenever I handed out readings in any of my classes.

And at last, I understood why she never got anything out of the other textbooks.

I can just imagine the number of readers now thinking of this or that tool or technqiue to help this student learn the necessary skills, or to motivate them to learn, and I myself wish the college where this occurred had more in the way of persistence and retention facilities, but all of that misses the problem. The problem in this instance is that this isn’t a problem, at least not to the student. It’s a problem to me, and to anyone who thinks reading is an important skill, and it would be easy to think that since this was a college class and I was the instructor that value ought to have controlled the situation, but that just isn’t the case. What this student was doing worked!

…at least as far as she was concerned.

This was not a young girl with a few Freshman skills to learn. This was a middle-aged woman with a white-collar job and a family, and this was how she read. Most importantly, her reading was NOT simply a function of her own inability; it was also an adaption of sorts, and one which she had been using successfully throughout her adult life. I reckon it suited her purposes for any number of tasks wherein a reader might be expected to have thoughts similar to those of an author. Her knowledge of the written documents in her life had thus been cobbled together from words and phrases off the texts and the verbal exchanges occurring around her.

Where this woman fell flat was in the encounter with an alternative point of view, one which happened to use a vocabulary familiar enough to suggest all the wrong things to her imagination. Did she care about such things? I doubt it. Today, she probably tells the story of her asshole teacher and that insane book that said all the wrong things about something important. Hell, her approach probably even handled quite a number of errors. If she misread a document, someone would correct her, perhaps without ever thinking twice about. Most of the time, I expect she was just fine.

But I do wonder what disasters might have followed when she wasn’t.

My point isn’t that these are mistakes. They are not. They are coping strategies, and they can be damned effective, at least insofar as these approaches can get a student through a discussion and perhaps even an essay. Students employing these strategies as a way of life may well accept that they will take a hit on exams and assignments, but when it comes to conversation, they will often be just fine. All they need is an instructor willing to fill in the details for them, to imagine that one word answers are the tip of a thoughtful iceberg, and to give a student the benefit of the doubt on ever so many moments of silence.

It really does work.

But of course the real question isn’t how this works in education. It’s how it works everywhere else?

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A Bullet Point Mind

17 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, The Bullet Point Mind

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Communications, Critical Thinking, Education, Power Point, Public Speaking, Slideshows, Speech, Visual Presentations, What not to do

Irrelevant Image! ...or is it?

Relevancy – Perhaps Paradoxical

I still remember the first day I learned to dread the power point presentation. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve seen good ones. I have at times been well pleased to take in a well designed power point presentation. If only I could have more of those days, and fewer of the kind that I have so often grown to expect.

Anyway…

I was sitting in a lecture hall many years ago listening to a colleague do a training for the rest of the faulty at our college. She was trying to teach us something about assessment techniques for accreditation, but the fact is that this particular colleague had nothing to say about the topic, and she was painfully slow in the way she was not saying it. The overall effect was a lot like a sedative and one of Pink Floyd’s longer and slower songs. Every point this woman made began with a new slide that added a phrase or quick sentence. She would stop talking, click a button, wait to see the new phrase appear and then pause long enough for us to read the phrase ourselves (twice). She would then read the phrase and give us a little more time to let it sink in. In a rare moment of personal empowerment, our illustrious lecturer would add a comment or two about the phrase before moving onto the next one. Mostly, she just let us take in the power of each individual bullet point. So, I’m sitting there watching this and trying desperately not run screaming from the room as I study the slide-show and wonder why I hated it so much. Of course training days are often a painful experience, but this was a special kind of heck, and the source of my particular sorrow on that day wasn’t immediately apparent. Eventually, I come to a realization.

It’s her outline!

What my colleague had chosen to pass off as a power-point presentation was nothing more than the outline for her speech, exactly the sort of outline we had all learned to write in our Freshmen Composition and Speech classes. There it was, unfolding there on the screen, one line at a time, as if it were some sad librarian’s version of dramatic tension.

Far from enhancing the presentation, this visual was slowing the speaker down and enabling her to avoid the responsibility even to explain the connections between the points of her talk. The speaker didn’t need to decide how each individual bullet point related to the major themes of her discussion; all she needed to do was read them at us. The visual served to occupy our attention and help us to forget that she had crammed a whole 5 minutes of information into an hour-long presentation. In effect, the presenter had looked into the heart of her software and found a new and improved means of bluffing.

…Would that this was a unique experience!

This technique also seemed to lend an ontological claim to the individual bullet points. Things that a person might just say offhand, or as part of a larger argument often seem to acquire a objectivity all their own, standing up there on a screen. A list of bullet points might contain causes, effects, and side comments to a larger heading, all quite unmarked in the visual. The verbal presentation did nothing to clarify matters. I grew slowly to realize the presenter did not herself know exactly how each sub-point of her presentation related to the main themes. She knew only that the topics traveled in a pack together, so to speak, and she wanted us to know that too. The visual solved this problem by telling us exactly how each point related to the next.

…mainly vertically.

This was the secret of the power-point visual, it lent the illusion of mystic substance to each individual point while undermining the need to explore rational connections between the. Each individual point on the screen in front of us looked terribly important in its own right, certainly more important than the explanations that connect each point to the others. Those connections didn’t appear on the screen. the bullet points did. They mattered more.

…and critical thinking wept!

71.271549
-156.751450

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