Book Review-Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Robert Bogue October 6, 2025 No Comments

It sounds like heresy. In Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, Bart Ehrman explains why what we think was said may not be the exact words that Jesus spoke or even that was originally written by the authors of the text. While Ehrman directly challenges the idea that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, he does so with the conviction of a Christian looking for the truth.

Inerrant Word

The Bible underpins the belief system of Christians – as it should. However, the foundations that we are standing on may be more like shifting sand than solid rock. If we focus on the New Testament, as Ehrman does, there are things we know without a doubt.

We know (with reasonable certainty) that Jesus spoke Aramaic. We also know that none of the New Testament is written in Aramaic. From this simple fact, we must accept that we’re not reading the inerrant words that Jesus spoke.

One could argue that not much could be lost in translation. However, in the Old Testament, the word for “sin” means “separation from God;” the Greek word chosen has more a connotation of personal failure. This is just a single word – albeit an important one – that has a major shift when converted from Hebrew or Aramaic into Greek.

Divergence

Challenging for the idea that what we have now is what was first written is the reality that there are different versions of the text. In other words, one of them could be unmodified writings (which are still different than what was spoken as explained above), but they can’t all be unmodified writings. There’s very little way to determine which are the pristine copy of the original. Ehrman, a scholar in this space, does expose approaches designed to increase the chances of knowing the original writing but always with qualifications of the limitations.

To understand how we could end up with multiple copies of the same manuscript, we have to recognize that manuscripts were copied by hand. This meant that human error could (and often would) be introduced in the process. Because this process happened repeatedly through multiple generations, we have few clues where errors were introduced or when. Just because we have ten times as many copies of one version of a text compared to another doesn’t certify it’s right.

Church-Based Alterations

Ehrman also makes the point that, in some cases, it seems the Church may have shaped changes into the New Testament to suit their purposes. Certainly, the Church chose what to include – and exclude –in the New Testament, further shaping what was and was not there.

Ultimately, even if we can believe that Jesus existed (as Ehrman’s other works attest to), we can’t necessarily be sure that we’re not Misquoting Jesus.

Book Review-How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

Robert Bogue September 29, 2025 No Comments

There are some friends that, when they suggest a book, you read it. Such was the case with How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. I wasn’t disappointed. For context, one of the most challenging things that I believe we’re faced with today is our inability to stay in a conversation until we can understand each other. It’s particularly difficult with people who hold radically different views than we do – but it seems challenging even when our perspectives aren’t that different.

Quoting Hugo Mercier from The Enigma of Reason, David McRaney explains that we evolved to reach consensus. However, a long list of authors have shared how this fundamental feature of our evolution is under attack. Cass Sunstein in Going to Extremes explains how we’re moving to more divisive beliefs. Ezra Klein explains Why We’re Polarized. Buster Benson asks Why Are We Yelling? Harriet Learner questions Why Won’t You Apologize? Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen try to help us learn how to have Difficult Conversations.

Forms of Verbal Communication

There has been a lot of work on changing the minds of people. Therapists try to do this every day to serve their patients. The Heart and Soul of Change illuminates how some of what therapists do works and some doesn’t. Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology similarly speaks about what is supported by science and what isn’t. Motivational Interviewing exposes how an effective tool for encouraging personal change works.

There are other guides for parents, including How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk and Parent Effectiveness Training. John Gottman in The Science of Trust speaks about how to create conversations that foster continued connection and influence in an intimate relationship context. Among other challenges, he cautions against a harsh startup.

Consistently, a curious stance is helpful to engage in conversation and get the discussion going. Even in negotiations or debate, a soft, open, and friendly approach is generally called for at first.

The best possible case for face-to-face communication is Dialogue, which William Isaacs describes as an elevated state. Too often, we find ourselves convinced of our righteousness to a point that we can’t create the conditions that encourage changing of minds. Entering from an open, curious stance is a good starting point for helping change minds – whether it’s our mind or someone else’s.

Post-Truth

1+1=2. 1+2=3. These and other truths are ones I learned in elementary school or even earlier. There were some bedrock truths that we all believed in. However, in the world today, we are willing to believe whatever we want. We’ll accept our feelings as facts whether or not they contradict reality. I tend to use the Flat Earth Society and its members as my prototypical example for believing the ridiculous. I didn’t know at the time that David McRaney (the book’s author) had contributed to the documentary, Behind the Curve. In the documentary, flat Earthers prove the Earth is not flat – yet continue to believe that it is flat.

It’s not that they don’t believe in the scientific method – they use it themselves to conclusively prove the Earth isn’t flat. They distrust the organizations that claim the Earth isn’t flat. While we describe the era we’re in as “post-truth,” the truth is that we’re in an era of post-trust.

Chuck Underwood, in America’s Generations, makes the point that Generation X grew up in a time where it became apparent that institutions couldn’t be trusted. From church and scout sex scandals to corporate collusion, the sense that institutions could be trusted collapsed into a pile of rubble around our feet. Even secrets we expect, like hidden bunkers to protect our representatives in the federal government, hit us like a ton of concrete below a hotel in West Virginia. (See The Cold War Experience.) From then on, the foundations of our trust in all institutions, relationships, and even ourselves has eroded to the point of being unable to protect against the onslaught of opinions.

Our brains had been overwhelmed with information for decades. We relied on institutions to help us cope by filtering, summarizing, and condensing information into little packets we could handle. Daniel Levitin in The Organized Mind, Clay Johnson in The Information Diet, and Laura van Dernoot Lipsky in The Age of Overwhelm, among other works, tell us that we’re consuming more information in a month than our grandparents did in their lifetimes, and we’ve not evolved for that.

Trust is complicated. That’s why I wrote two master posts, Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy and Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy, Revisited. It’s unlikely we’re going to regain trust in institutions easily or soon. It’s more likely that our trust in institutions has been permanently damaged. It’s like we’re walking between bombed-out buildings that once held simple answers. Now, things are complicated in ways that we have no desire to comprehend.

Goose Trees

“Nature texts going back to the 1100s describe mysterious goose trees with odd fruits from which, they said, birds would form, hatch, dangle, detach, and fly away.” What, to us, seems patently ridiculous was a popular belief for hundreds of years. Why? On the expert side, no one understood migrations, and they had no better explanation for how a bird came to be when they never saw a nest. They just assumed there had to be a tree somewhere. The general public had no reason to doubt the experts. It didn’t really matter. It didn’t impact their daily lives.

The goose trees represent a belief – but not knowledge. Beliefs aren’t necessarily true, but knowledge should be. If we want to change someone’s mind, we’ve got to help them see how their beliefs may be true – but there are reasons why they may not be true.

The real problem is that most people don’t “know” they’re right. They “feel” they’re right. Just like how Lisa Feldman Barrett misinterpreted illness for love, we can mistake a feeling of knowledge for actual knowledge. (See How Emotions Are Made for her story.) In my review of The Enigma of Reason, I explained how people believe they know about automobiles until you start asking detailed questions. We can feel we know something or are better than we really are, just like Thomas Gilovich explains in How We Know What Isn’t So. Robert Burton in On Being Certain directly tackles the issue that what we know and what we think we know are very different.

Dogma and Distortions

Dogma can be anything. It can be that terrorism doesn’t happen on US soil. It can be very difficult to confront these beliefs because they’re undiscussable. Undiscussable items are relatively impervious to change. Discussing terrorism on US soil on September 10, 2001, would have been difficult. It hadn’t ever happened. On September 12, there was no question. The Black Swan event happened, and in doing so, it destroyed the dogma. However, we don’t want to have tragedies for people to change their dogma.

The whole point of How Minds Change is to discover not how weakly-held beliefs change but rather to understand how persistent beliefs change. It explains that it’s often the most deeply held beliefs that change rapidly. By looking at different approaches that seem to change these beliefs, we can find commonality and tools that can be used to drive change regardless of the situation or how deep the beliefs go.

One of the possible explanations for why dogmatic beliefs change so quickly is that normally dogmatic beliefs distort the perception of events around them. We accept experiences that confirm the beliefs – and the related beliefs – while rejecting experiences that disagree – until we can no longer do so. This is, as I described in my review of Going to Extremes, “Mount Must.” The view from there is different.

We no longer can accept views that aren’t true. We can no longer ignore our literal blind spots. (See Incognito for more.) The distortions melt away when we can accept core truths. However, getting to the core truths isn’t easy, as A Manual for Creating Atheists explains.

Self-Sealing Arguments

Anosognosia is real. It’s where one condition hides awareness of the condition itself. The clinical accounts are striking. From the mild explanations generated by Michael Gazzaniga’s subjects with a severed corpus collosum to more intense experiences, it’s a real thing. (See Noise, Incognito, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty for more about Gazzaniga’s experiments.) The relatively distressing phantom limb syndrome is another variant of this problem, where people struggle with sensations from limbs that are missing. (See The Tell-Tale Brain, Descartes’ Error, and Capture for more.)

One argument used to imprison people in psychiatric hospitals is that they’re unable to understand their own illness because of anosognosia. (See Insane Consequences and Your Consent Is Not Required.) The problem is that often there is no evidence presented for anosognosia. An “expert’s” testimony is all it takes for a judge or a medical professional to decide that the anosognosia is real, and therefore the person isn’t able to make decisions for their own care.

Self-sealing arguments are often caused by dogmatic beliefs and the surrounding distortion, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, the arguments are just self-sealing because that’s how the person has learned to create arguments.

Protecting Our Psychological Selves

We protect ourselves instinctively. We’ll take actions to protect our physical selves, like bracing for impact in ways that happen too fast for conscious thought. However, these defenses operate not just for our physical selves but for our psychological selves as well. In The Ego and Its Defenses, we learn of 22 major and 26 minor psychological defenses. Others in the psychoanalytical tradition, including Anna Freud, came up with different lists and counts, but the plurality of our defenses and the automatic nature with which we deploy them is universal. Leadership and Self-Deception calls it being “in the box,” and our defenses are the tendency to bring others into the box.

When we threaten thoughts that are dogma, we can activate these defenses. Dogmatic beliefs are beliefs that have no basis in fact. We believe them because others believe them without the need for direct evidence.

Persuasion

Much of helping people change their minds depends on context. If you’re trying mass media, then The Hidden Persuaders speaks of marketing approaches – as do books like Demand and Guerrilla Marketing. Robert Cialdini in Pre-Suasion and Influence and the authors of Split-Second Persuasion, Changing Minds, and Nudge speak about techniques to change peoples’ minds – but their focus isn’t on the deep-seated beliefs. It’s about preferences and things that are more malleable to gentle persuasion.

Sometimes, the belief or behavior is a bit more stubborn. Motivational Interviewing is a tool used by substance abuse counselors to help people break free from harmful addiction. This technique forms the underpinning of the approaches recommended – along with the work of another.

Leon Festinger’s A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance moves into the world of disconnects between attitudes and behavior and a place where sometimes deeply held beliefs live. (See also On Being Certain and Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values.) Festinger provides techniques and approaches to place a wedge between the belief and the behavior.

Comfortably Uncomfortable

There’s a delicate balance that we need to find to help people change their minds. We’ve got to get them comfortable enough to be open to listening. That means a psychological safety, like Amy Edmondson describes in The Fearless Organization. This enables them to move from precontemplation to contemplation in the transtheoretical model. (See Changing for Good and the Stages of Change model.) However, a certain degree of discomfort is needed to induce change. This is the challenge that Marsha Linehan directly confronted in the development of dialectical behavior therapy. (See Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder).

Approaches

McRaney studied and recommends three strategies that work for deeply held beliefs.

Street Epistemology

It’s the study of why people believe what they do – and often there’s a desire to change their beliefs. Though this work started with Peter Boghossian, McRaney didn’t learn from him directly. I mention this, because Boghossian is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists and co-author of How to Have Impossible Conversations. The community and Boghossian seem to have different views. While Boghossian is acknowledged as its founder, the community appears to have evolved in a different direction.

So, what are the steps of street epistemology (SE)? They are:

Build and Establish Genuine Rapport
Identify a Specific Claim to Explore
Gauge Confidence
Explore Reasons
Examine Quality of Reasoning

You’ll notice that there’s no explicit challenge to a person’s belief. The objective is to plant the seed of doubt around a core belief rather than directly converting someone’s beliefs – even if that is the real objective. Deep canvassing (DC) takes SE to the next level.

Deep Canvassing

With SE, a claim is picked based on the interests of the person you’re speaking with, since the goal is simply to understand their thinking. DC has a specific, targeted issue it wants to address – and thus the issue itself is set. Also, DC is focused on moving the person’s position on an issue if possible.

The focus allows for the development of a targeted, personal story that lays out an emotional reason that supports the desired point of view. The story is then used as an icebreaker to see if they’re willing to move their perspective.

The basic framework for DC is:

Establish rapport.
Ask how strongly they feel about an issue on a scale of one to ten.
Share a story.
Ask a second time how strongly they feel. If the number moved, ask why.
Ask, “Why does that number feel right to you?”
Once they’ve offered their reasons, reflect back your summary and ask if you got it right. Repeat until they are satisfied.
Ask if there was a time in their life before they felt that way, and if so, what led to their current attitude?
Listen, summarize, repeat.
Briefly share your personal story of how you reached your position, but do not argue.
Ask for their rating a final time, then wrap up and wish them well.

As you can see, it has many of the same key concepts as SE, but it has more details because of the explicit focus on changing perceptions.

Smart Politics

Started as a framework for liberal and conservative politics conversations, smart politics follows a familiar pattern. Using the example of vaccine hesitancy, the steps are:

Build rapport. Assure the other person you aren’t out to shame them and then ask for consent to explore their reasoning.
Ask: On a scale of one to ten, how likely are they to vaccinate?
If one, ask: Why would other people, who aren’t hesitant, be higher on that scale? If above one, ask: Why not lower?
Once they’ve offered their reasons, repeat them back in your own words. Ask if you’ve done a good job summarizing. Repeat until they are satisfied.

As with SE and DC, the goal is to build rapport and ask for a rating on an issue and then get them to progressively explain – and therefore expose any logical inconsistencies and resolve them. It’s like Leon Festinger’s (A) Theory of Cognitive Dissonance meets James Pennebaker’s work of writing things out. (See Opening Up.) By listening empathetically, people will often start to become more open to change, and that is How Minds Change.

Copilot Studio: Power on the Power Platform

Robert Bogue September 23, 2025 No Comments

Everyone is talking about agents and how you can get large language models (LLMs) to do work for you. From chat-based experiences to agentic workflow automation, Copilot Studio allows you to design experiences for users and organizations. As a part of the Power Platform (including PowerApps and Power Automate), Copilot Studio allows you to leverage your existing investments in the platform to create and deploy automation using traditional and LLM-based flows.

Major Pathways

When designing your agent, there are three major components that you’ll need to understand:

Knowledge – This is information that you’re making available to the agent.
Tools – These are built in functions and tools as well as external resources that you’ve plugged into the platform.
Topics – These focused workflows are designed to connect on a focused area.

Knowledge

One of the most powerful ways to leverage LLMs is to use a strategy called retrieval augmented generation (RAG). This approach takes the generically trained LLM and adds content that may be relevant to the interaction, which the LLM can then use to respond. Done through search, the LLM first processes the language of the interaction and forms a query that it believes is likely to return relevant information. The search engine returns the information, the LLM adds it to the context, and then the LLM responds.

It means that the LLM can respond from an employee handbook, a policy, or other proprietary resources. It can be the factor that helps organizations differentiate themselves in the market by making the knowledge they own more practical and useful.

If you want to more deeply understand how knowledge can be transformative, see the white paper I did with AIIM, “Organizational Readiness for Generative Artificial Intelligence.”

Tools

As the generic name “tools” implies, a tool can be almost anything. However, they break down into five categories:

Internal Functions – These are necessary for basic operation or simple things like performing calculations. They include creating variables and other basic functions necessary to coordinate work. Some of these are expressions of the functions available on the platform.
Built-In Tools – Beyond the basic internal functions, there are a set of built-in tools that Microsoft has made available. These include free services, like MSN Weather, which can be used to do more complex, but still free, things.
Third Party Tools – Third parties make free or paid services that can be plugged into your Copilot Studio agent.
Custom Tools – You can connect services yourself using either a OpenAPI Specification for REST APIs or Model Context Protocol (MCP) for newer AI-enabled services.
Flows – Additionally, flows that you’ve defined will appear as tools. Flows inside of Copilot Studio can receive and return values through special triggers and end activities.

Topics

Topics allow you to connect phrases used during the interaction to a set of steps that are the response. They can also be used for separate sub-processes that are useful inside of processing other topics. Consider a weather agent that can respond with current weather information as well as forecasts. Both responses need to know “where” the information is for. A separate topic for capturing location and converting it into the latitude and longitude that the backend API expects is a good topic that, rather than being triggered by interaction phrases, is triggered by a tool in another topic. In this way, both current weather and forecast can behave similarly when responding to the user – and they can assume the same location.

Topics are a limited workflow experience without the capability to do loops and limited calling capabilities for tools. To accomplish loops topics, use the topic transfer capabilities to transfer to themselves. This allows Copilot Studio to monitor loops and transfer to an escalation topic when the user appears caught in the loop during their interaction.

The other limitation of topics is that they may not be able to call all tools. Some features that tools can support aren’t supported in topics. The work around is to place the tool in a flow and have the topic call the flow rather than the tool directly.

Platform Power via Custom Connectors

Copilot Studio was built on Power Automate Power Virtual Agents. It’s no surprise that this was built on the experience with Power Automate. Rounding out this lineage, Power Automate itself is built on top of Azure Logic Apps, which is somewhere around the fifth iteration of designing workflow platforms going back to Biztalk through Windows Workflow Foundation and Microsoft SharePoint. That is to say that the workflow engine is built on rich experience.

As a part of the Power Platform, Copilot Studio utilizes the custom connector framework to make external services available to the platform. A custom connector created for PowerApps, for instance, works with Power Automate and Copilot Studio. These connectors are developed using the OpenAPI Specification. The standard allows for the definition of API endpoint and parameters.

At the time of this post, the current version of the standard is 3.1 and Microsoft is in the process of rolling out support for 3.1.1. This specification evolved from Swagger. Internally, the Power Platform still uses the Swagger 2.0 standard and an extensive set of extensions that allow the platform to use the API and to display appropriate prompts to designers in the various Power Platform interfaces.

If you want a comprehensive guide to developing custom connector specifications, you can get the free eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Power Platform Custom Connectors.

Connecting to Power

There is one final step that is required after defining the custom connector before it can be used. That is, a connection must be established. The connection is the binding of authentication information in the form of a key, username and password, or authenticated user credentials to the framework created by the custom connector. You can have multiple connections to the same connector using different authentication, and you can choose which connection to use while designing your solution.

How to Create Your Agent

Creating an agent when the knowledge sources exist is easy. You can specify locations for the knowledge sources or even upload the resources directly into your agent. There is broad support public websites, SharePoint, Azure Search, Dataverse, Dynamics, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more. Getting knowledge is, in most cases, easy.

More challenging is the problem of connecting data sources to help make decisions and provide knowledge that doesn’t exist in the standard repository types. But the power of Copilot Studio is that it is possible to bring together both types of data.

Book Review-How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide

Robert Bogue September 22, 2025 No Comments

Most people don’t know how to have the tools to have difficult conversations. How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide seeks to provide those tools. By having the tools, we can hope that more conversations happen – and that we reach greater consensus.

It’s important to realize that this is the second book written by Peter Boghossian. The first was A Manual for Creating Atheists. This book was cowritten with James Lindsay but follows the same general theme and continues to reinforce the tools that Boghossian uses in the work he calls “Street Epistemology.”

After the Ball

There’s a context of social and societal change that underpins the work here. Conceptually, the idea is that society has some aspects that can be improved. Long ago, there was another book that was focused not on atheism, as Boghossian is, but on improving the acceptance of homosexuality. After the Ball focused on strategies for changing the overall narrative. While this may seem strikingly different from a strategy that’s focused on individual conversations, there are many parallels, particularly as it relates to listening, being normal, and avoiding extremes.

You Can’t Change my Mind

There are some conversations that are, in fact, impossible. In the context of the stages of change (or transtheoretical model), people can be in a precontemplation state that is impervious to conversation. Here, the goal is to move people from precontemplation to a state of contemplation – but that isn’t necessarily possible. (See Changing for Good for more on the transtheoretical model and precontemplation.)

The tricky part is that you cannot know whether someone is in a state where they can be shifted to contemplation until you’ve engaged with them. Sometimes, an opportunity for a conversation only leads to a brick wall.

The techniques that appear here are designed to improve your chances of helping people become more open to alternative ideas – but nothing is guaranteed.

Wason Test

It’s important to recognize that people naturally resist testing their own conclusions. It’s why the failure rate for the Wason test is so high. (See The Enigma of Reason.) It’s no surprise, then, that people don’t want to examine how they could be wrong. They might rightly be concerned about how much energy would be required if they were willing to challenge their core beliefs. It could be both exhausting and unsettling.

Anger

A point of direct disagreement with the book comes in the way that anger is framed. I wrote a specific post, Conflict: Anger, to explain my perspectives and cite sources about why anger is disappointment directed. It’s framed that anger come from frustration or offense – which isn’t wrong exactly, it’s just not helpful. It doesn’t move to the point of being able to do something about it. It’s one thing to say not to tweet while you’re angry, it’s quite another to give a pathway for resolving the anger.

Altercasting

Pulled from 1963, the concept of “altercasting” involves projecting an identity on someone else where the identity should lead to the person’s goals being met. There are a few pieces in play, but the outcomes are simple. As an example, many years ago, I attended an airport board meeting where my brother was being unfairly persecuted. In that meeting, I explicitly told the board that I knew they were reasonable, honorable people. The point of doing so was to make these aspects of their identity more salient and thereby shape their responses in a way that led to a better conversation. (Whether I believed these statements or not isn’t really the point.)

Conceptually, this builds on Goffman’s work, including The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, as people seek to impress upon others their identity. If they accept the altercast identity, then they should attempt to behave in ways that are consistent with that identity. It also builds on Leon Festinger’s work around cognitive dissonance. When people hold a belief about themselves (i.e. identity), then they’ll tend to behave in ways consistent with it to avoid the cognitive dissonance of behaviors not matching beliefs. (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory, and Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology.)

While they call this an ethically murky approach, I don’t have any particular concern with it. It’s a motivational (and therefore manipulative) technique, but because of its reliance on identity, it’s not as murky as other approaches. (See Pre-Suasion and Influence for motivational techniques and approaches.)

The Lists

What appears below are some of the many lists that appear in the book – as one would expect with the subtitle of being a practical guide. Where I think other reviews I’ve written are relevant, I’ve included them in brackets.

Seven Fundamentals of Good Conversations

Goals – Why are you engaged in this conversation? [see Start with Why]
Partnerships – Be partners, not adversaries
Rapport – Develop and maintain a good connection [see Motivational Interviewing]
Listen – Listen more , talk less [see De-Escalate]
Shoot the Messenger – Don’t deliver your truth
Intentions – People have better intentions than you think [see Thinking, Fast and Slow]
Walk Away – Don’t push your conversation partner beyond their comfort zone [see Dialogue]

Nine Ways to Start Changing Minds

Modeling – Model the behavior you want to see in others [see Introducing: Psychology of Success]
Words – Define terms up front
Ask Questions – Focus on a specific question [see Humble Inquiry]
Acknowledge Extremists – Point out bad things people on your side do [see Going to Extremes]
Navigating Social Media – Do not vent on social media
Don’t Blame, Do Discuss Contributions – Shift from blame to contribution [see The Right Kind of Wrong]
Focus on Epistemology – Figure out how people know what they claim to know
Learn – Learn what makes someone close-minded
What Not to Do (Reverse Applications)

Ways to Model Better Conversation

Say “I don’t know” when you don’t know.
If you ask someone a direct question and they obfuscate or refuse to answer, ask them to ask you the same question.
Model the behavioral traits that are key to effective, successful conversations: listening, honesty (especially admitting ignorance), sincerity, curiosity, openness, fairness, charity (not assuming bad intentions), focusing on justifications for belief, humility, humor, give-and-take, and willingness to change your mind.
From admitting you don’t know enough to hold a firm position on a topic, ask for explanations, in as much detail as possible, about your partner’s beliefs.
Expose your own Unread Library Effect. [Belief that you know things from books you’ve not read because you own them.]
Model clarity; avoid jargon.
Do not model bad behavior.

How to Get on the Same Verbal Page

Define words up front [see Words Can Change Your Brain].
Try to understand the context in which a word is being used.
Go with their definitions.
Be attentive to a word’s moral implication.

How to Ask Calibrated Questions in Any Conversation

Once you’ve selected a topic, narrow it down and clearly state it in question format.
If the conversation goes astray, bring it back to the original question.
Be authentic.
Do not disguise statements as questions and avoid leading questions that carry an agenda.
Ask calibrated “How…?” and “What…?” questions.

Disavowing Extremists

Identify how “your side” goes too far.
Do not bring up extremists on “their side.”
Never defend indefensible behavior.
Identify extremists as “fanatics,” “zealots,” and “radicals.”
Treat their side charitably.
Check yourself for extremism and keep it out of your conversations.

Best Practices for Engaging Conversation on Social Media

Remember: when a post is “deleted” it still remains on servers (this is true for Facebook, Snapchat, and even your text messages).
Never post (or answer emails or even enter online conversations) when you’re angry.
You do not owe a response to anyone on social media because they’ve engaged you.
Never argue on Twitter [or X.com].
Avoid religion, politics, and most philosophy on your personal Facebook page.
If you absolutely, positively cannot control yourself, set up an anonymous Twitter [X.com] account and rage at the ether.

How to Shift Away from Blame and Toward Contribution

Use the word contribution.
Avoid saying, “X caused Y,” for example, “Right-wing media caused Republicans to vote for Trump.”
Don’t say “both sides do it” when bad behavior is pointed out about your side.
If you reach a point where you just cannot avoid introducing blame into the conversation , whether to blame the person with whom you’re speaking or the political group with which they identify, ask your partner, “Because I feel strongly tempted to blame the Democrats for this problem, can you please help explain the logic the Democratic side uses to justify their actions?”

Simple Ways to Discuss How People Know

Make a brief, positive statement before probing someone’s epistemology.
Ask “outsider questions.” [see The Ethnographic Interview]
Start your conversation in wonder.
If someone’s reasoning makes no sense, there’s a good chance they reason that way to justify a (moral) belief that cannot otherwise be justified.
Try to derive other conclusions from their reasoning process.

Conversational Techniques to Shift into a Learning Frame

Learn your conversation partner’s epistemology.
Be explicit.
If civility is your primary goal, or if productive conversation is impossible, make learning your go-to.

Effective Skills for Changing Minds (Including Your Own)

Let Friends Be Wrong – It’s okay if someone disagrees with you, even about a cherished conclusion
Build Golden Bridges – Find ways for your conversation partner to avoid social embarrassment if they change their mind
Language – Avoid “you,” switch to third person or collaborative language like “we” and “us”
Stuck? Reframe – Shift the conversation to keep it going smoothly or to get it back on track
Change Your Mind – Change your mind on the spot
Introduce Scales – Use scales to gauge effective interventions, figure out how confident someone is in a belief , and put issues into perspective
Outsourcing – Turn to outside information to answer the question , “ How do you know that?”

How to Reframe a Conversation When You Get Stuck

Reframe the conversation around commonalities.
Reframe the question to be less contentious.
Figure out what you need to say for them to respond, “That’s right.”

How to Bring Numerical Scales into Your Interventions

Ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that X is true?” at the beginning and end of the conversation.
If you find yourself arguing with someone in a “Yes, it is!”/“No, it’s not!” pattern (for example, “The United States is racist”/“No, it’s not!”), put it on a comparative scale.
Bring in scales that compare the importance of issues during sticking points.
Use scales to help your partner reverse their thinking.
Here’s how to use an even more advanced version of Introduce Scales: If they’re above a 6 on a 1 to 10 scale, ask, “I’m 3 on that 1 to 10 scale that X is true. I’m not sure how I’d get to where you are, at a 9. I want to see what I’m missing. Would you help walk me through it?”
Keep a log of your conversations.

Best Practices for Bringing Outside Information into Your Conversations

Use Outsourcing toward the end of a conversation.
If you’re stuck mid-conversation, ask, “How would an independent, neutral observer figure out what source of information to trust?”
Here are a few alternative ways to phrase Outsourcing (and disconfirmation) questions:
- “What specific evidence could we find that might settle this?”
- “What evidence should be sufficient to persuade an independent observer?” “What evidence is there that could persuade every reasonable person?”
- “What’s the best counterargument for why one should question conclusions drawn from that evidence?” Followed up by asking, “What’s the best argument of two well-known experts and why are these arguments incorrect?”
Combine Outsourcing with building Golden Bridges.
If, in an attempt at Outsourcing, you invite your partner to present evidence for her beliefs, and she responds, “There’s no point in seeking evidence because there is no evidence that would change my mind,” then her belief is not based on evidence.
Outsourcing only works with empirical questions.
Ask, “Whose expert opinion can I read to gather more information?”
Ask, “Who are the three best experts who disagree with that position?”
If your conversation is stuck, say, “We seem to be stuck. How about we only use statements/information/evidence both sides would agree upon?”

How to Rethink Your Conversational Habits

Keep Rapoport’s Rules – Re-express, list points of agreement, mention what you learned, only then rebut
Avoid Facts – Do not bring facts into a conversation
Seek Disconfirmation – How could that belief be incorrect?
Yes, And… – Eliminate the word “but” from your spoken vocabulary
Dealing with Anger – Know thyself

Breaking Through Conversational Barriers

Synthesis – Recruit your partner to help refine and synthesize your positions
Help Vent Steam – Talk through emotional roadblocks [see Emotional Intelligence]
Altercasting – Cast your partner in a role that helps her think and behave differently
Hostage Negotiating – Apply cutting-edge research on hostage negotiations [see Hostage at the Table and Getting to Yes]
Probe the Limits – Engage someone who professes a belief that can’t be lived
Counter-Intervention Strategies – What should you do if someone is attempting to intervene in your beliefs?

How to Move Unmovable People

How to Converse with an Ideologue – Switch to moral epistemology
Moral Reframing – Learn to speak moral dialects

In Sum

There are many tools, techniques, and approaches that lead to a better understanding of How to Have Impossible Conversations.

Book Review-A Manual for Creating Atheists

Robert Bogue September 15, 2025 No Comments

If the title were real, A Manual for Creating Atheists would have failed with me. However, the title isn’t what’s really happening in the book. The real goal is to get people whose minds are closed to open them to other ideas. It happens that the author, Peter Boghossian, is most interested in this in the context of religion – but the passion is broader. It’s a passion about how we can encourage people to think about the way they form and retain their beliefs.

Defining Atheist

Boghossian states, “ ‘Atheist,’ as I use the term, means, ‘There’s insufficient evidence to warrant belief in a divine, supernatural creator of the universe. However, if I were shown sufficient evidence to warrant belief in such an entity, then I would believe.’ ” The challenge is, of course, what could be defined as sufficient evidence.

He also says, “The introduction of facts may also prove unproductive because this usually leads to a discussion about what constitutes reliable evidence.” Effectively, he asserts that sufficient evidence suffers from a reliability problem.

The Religion Disclaimer

Throughout the rest of this review, I’m going to side-step the religious context that is the central reference point for the book. I believe it detracts from the more important points. However, before doing that, I must acknowledge the evils that have been done in the name of organized religion and religious beliefs. I cannot take issue with the concern about people being closed-minded, because I’ve seen it – and continue to see it. I see religious beliefs used to harm others – and I don’t care what moral compass you use, that’s wrong.

I also need to acknowledge the fundamental truth that not all religions can be right. They contradict one another. For instance, if Mohammad (Islam) was the last prophet, then Joseph Smith (Mormon) can’t be a prophet. Boghossian points out they can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong. I’ll make a slightly stronger statement that they are all wrong. I do not, however, know whether their errors are material or not.

I can acknowledge that my belief in God can be wrong. Unfortunately for both Boghossian and I, neither of us can prove whether God does or does not exist. It’s effectively impossible to prove a negative. (See The Black Swan.) Equally, I’m not sure how to prove the existence of an entity that exists outside of time.

Fundamentally, I hear scientists claiming that time is just a persistent illusion and that it doesn’t exist. I learn about new subatomic particles and fields that we’ve never seen before (e.g. Higgs boson). I accept that I cannot know the truth and that I just have to consider what we know as conditional.

Pretending to Know Things You Don’t Know

The heart of Boghossian’s challenge is that people – through faith – pretend to know things they do not know. It’s not whether there is or isn’t an Easter Bunny, it’s the process that people use to come to their conclusion. One could say that parents, the ultimate authority for a child, said there was an Easter Bunny who came and hid eggs for them. That’s all fine and good until about the 3^rd grade, when some child told them that there was no such animal, and that it was the other parents who were pretending that the Easter Bunny was real as a sort of grand ruse for children across the planet. By the time those children have grown and have children of their own, most have discovered the truth that they must now become the Easter Bunny for their children – or become the parents who destroy the illusion for an entire class of children.

I use the Easter Bunny, which barely gets a mention, because it’s a relatively safe belief for printing on the internet and because most of us have held the belief that the Easter Bunny was real at some point in our lives. There’s probably a comedy to be made about a child who lost their parents before they learned the truth about the Easter Bunny and then as an adult must come to terms with their misplaced belief in bunnies that distributed colored eggs across the world.

What if someone took the position that the Easter Bunny was 100% real, and they refused to accept any other answer? Perhaps they referred to a cherished book their parents left them, which told the origin story of the Easter Bunny? How would one dissuade a person from this belief?

Would the person who believed in the Easter Bunny “know” of their existence, or would they just be “pretending” to know?

Doxastic Closure

People are uncomfortable with not knowing. It drives them to assert a sense of knowing even when they don’t. If we accept that our consciousness is designed to predict and thereby give us advantages as a species, then not knowing is a problem. (See The Righteous Mind and Mindreading.) When we look at the research on making predictions, we see that the greatest challenge that forecasters have is remaining neutral and accepting that just because they desire it doesn’t make it true. (See Superforecasting for more.)

I believe that it’s this need for prediction that leads to what Boghossian calls “doxastic closure” – that is, an unwillingness to examine the veracity of our beliefs and to question whether what we “know” is true. He’s describing a different aspect of the same problem that Thomas Gilovich notes in How We Know What Isn’t So. In Gilovich’s case, he was speaking about what we believe about ourselves, and Boghossian is speaking about our views of the world.

Confidence and Certainty Are Not the Same

One of the flaws in the mental apparatus that we have is that we can feel certain we know something, and we can be verifiably incorrect. It turns out that our sense of knowing something and our ability to know that thing is quite separate. Blindsight, for example, is knowing something but not knowing how we know it, as is explained in Affective Neuroscience, Descartes’ Error, and Incognito. On Being Certain explores this and an entire swath of research around how what we believe we know may not be what we know.

The short is that Boghossian’s central argument of people pretending to know what they don’t know may be a side effect of our biology. It can be that our sense of knowing is designed to help us, and we need reason (see The Enigma of Reason) and Dialogue to help us all better understand our world.

Questioning our Thinking

In the end, maybe the title should be A Manual for Questioning Your Beliefs, rather than A Manual for Creating Atheists.

Book Review-Seduced by Death: Doctors, Patients, and the Dutch Cure

Robert Bogue September 12, 2025 No Comments

The arguments for and against assisted suicide and euthanasia aren’t new. In 1997, Herbert Hendin wrote Seduced by Death: Doctors, Patients, and the Dutch Cure, and he wasn’t impressed. Hendin was also the author of Suicide and Scandinavia, so he’s done some work in comparing other approaches to suicide prevention to the US model.

The Argument For

The argument for legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia from the patient side is the ability to control the circumstances of your death – to avoid what can be a scary slip through pain to an ultimate end. This is the argument that we find in Undoing Suicidism and Final Exit. Dutch data supports the idea that suicide overall didn’t increase because of assisted suicide being legal. The more recent data from states that have legalized assisted suicide seems to confirm that it doesn’t increase suicide – and that few people take advantage of assisted suicide even when given the option.

The Argument Against

The arguments against are two. First, it’s a slippery slope – which is a logical fallacy (see Mastering Logical Fallacies). Second, doctors (and others) will abuse the system, and people who need not die will. They’ll be coerced by doctors or family into assisted suicide that they don’t truly want. Hendin cites a few cases of this in the book.

Death is final, and therefore there is no remedy for those who are coerced into assisted suicide. However, that’s why it’s society’s responsibility to establish reasonable barriers that can create a reasonable assurance that people aren’t under undue coercion.

Paternalism

When I enter into this discussion with people, I often start with recognizing a 2×2 matrix. One axis is the person, with rights and responsibilities. The other axis is the community, with rights and responsibilities. The question is always this: what is the community’s responsibility to the individual – and their decision about their life and death – and what are the individual’s rights? This fundamentally is the crux of paternalism. It’s the community’s enforcement of standards on the individual, including standards that may curtail their rights.

We must be honest in saying that designing a system for assisted suicide that protects against unscrupulous others is paternalistic. That is, it’s something the community does to protect itself. Despite this, Hendin claims that, to the Dutch people, it would be inconceivable that they’d need protection from their physician.

Consenting Adults

It’s important to acknowledge that Hendin does point to limits that community (society) places on people. We no longer allow slavery even if both parties are willing. We don’t sanction murder – even if both parties are willing. In this same way, he believes that society has the right to prohibit assisted suicide as an unacceptable act even if the parties are willing.

Hendin asks a doctor, Cohen, who is famous for his assisted suicide, how he sleeps. The answer is an honest one of sleepless nights immediately following the assisted suicide – and a feeling of absolution as the families continue to send Christmas cards years after their loved one’s death.

Medicalization

His final parting consideration is that assisted suicide further medicalizes death, making it more professionally controlled and prescribed. It makes it the topic of death not something that individuals can address on their own but is instead elevated or relegated to a discussion with a doctor. In some ways, this would seem to help to prevent someone from becoming Seduced by Death.

Book Review-Planning to Live: Evaluating and Treating Teens in Community Settings

Robert Bogue September 11, 2025 No Comments

It should have been a warning sign. When I read the subtitle for Planning to Live: Evaluating and Treating Teens in Community Settings, I should have realized that there would be a certain deterministic approach to identifying teens that I’d reject. However, the topic is important, so I read this 1990 work with the hopes of discovering things I didn’t know about teen suicide, things that were lost in the last 35 years.

Drugs

My first surprise wasn’t suicide risk assessment. It was the comment, “There are certain drugs too dangerous to try even once.” It echoed across time from the messaging of Nancy Regan and “Just say no.” While I’m not advocating experimentation, the language struck me as inconsistent with the science. In The Globalization of Addiction, Bruce Alexander explains how drugs aren’t exactly what they think they are – and how his research was misused. (Also see Chasing the Scream and Dreamland for more.)

Asymmetric Statistics

I was pleasantly surprised to see the problem with asymmetric statistics called out. While most people who die by suicide have depression, most people who have depression will not die by suicide. The counter-intuitive statement is due to the very high numbers of people who are diagnosed with depression and the statistically rare – but tragically high – suicide rate. We must be careful as we try to use statistics to predict individual behavior. Rather, we need to not do it, because it has no predictive value.

Warning Signs

I did finally get to the admission that many of the programs for teens focused on warning signs – and the complete lack of empirical basis for them. In short, all the programs that were started in schools to help reduce suicide used fiction, and thus it is no surprise that there were no results.

Stress and Coping

Planning to Live does appropriately call out that many teens struggle with understanding both positive and negative stress as well as good coping skills. (See Stress, Appraisal, and Coping for more.) Unfortunately, many of the programs that were in use didn’t focus on this key need – or did so with ineffective techniques.

Judging Counselors

We also made it to the concern about what is the legal obligation for someone to identify, report, and ultimately detain a patient. As explained in my reviews of Rational Suicide, Irrational Laws and Your Consent Is Not Required, no one can predict suicidal behaviors in the short term with any degree of accuracy. While the legal standard is lower – asking if suicidal behavior is foreseeable – there’s no real hope that someone will get right 100% of the time the people who need to have their civil liberties taken away and those who do not need to be confined.

Risk

Some organizations reject suicidal individuals for fear of liability. That’s challenging, because it gives people who are in the most immediate need of assistance fewer places they can go. It is particularly important to create spaces to support teens if your hope is that they’re Planning to Live.

Book Review-The Sorrows of Young Werther

Robert Bogue September 10, 2025 No Comments

I don’t generally read fiction, and rarer still do I review it. However, The Sorrows of Young Werther has earned a distinction in the suicide prevention space that made it worthy of a read – and worthy of a conversation.

The Summary

The spoiler is that Werther dies by suicide in the end. The setup is basically his infatuation with a woman who ultimately marries another man. Werther knew that she was betrothed when they met so it wasn’t a surprise. The end comes as a result of being spurned by this woman.

The Importance in Suicide Prevention

After publication, the book was found near the bodies of several people who died by suicide. It’s where the Werther effect gets its name. The effect refers to people copying deaths as portrayed in stories and the media. There are now guidelines for reporting on suicide, which ultimately recommend against glorifying the person or the act. There’s research support for a rise in suicide deaths and attempts after high-profile celebrity deaths. The data regarding fictional characters is mixed, having found some effect after the show 13 Reasons Why and no effect in other cases.

It’s this mixture of results that makes the distinction that The Sorrows of Young Werther has received somewhat unwarranted.

Identification and Glamorization

Upon reflection, it seems to me that the relationship is primarily one of identification rather than glorification of the suicidal act. There’s no question that it does reveal itself as an answer to being jilted, and it’s equally impossible to deny the semi-ritualistic aspects that are embedded in the story. However, there are far more people who find themselves in love triangles than find themselves with firearms hanging on the wall.

I surmise that people who are facing rejection by someone they’re infatuated with are looking for what to do next. Because they identify with Werther, they accept that his option (suicide) is a viable one. The book closes before revealing the pain that was transferred to the survivors – including his love interest. By only showing half the story, it doesn’t present the other side of Werther’s death. In that way, it’s possible to say that the book glamorizes suicide –but it does so very weakly.

As we’re looking towards improving suicide prevention, I’d suggest that we need two things.

First, we need to produce stories of recovery as an option. The work on cognitive constriction makes it clear that people can’t see a potential positive future, so we need to be explicit about these options and ensure that people see them.

Second, we need to not stop the story at the suicide death but instead conclude with the long-term hurt and suffering that are the result of the suicide. We don’t want others to get caught up in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Book Review-On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death

Robert Bogue September 9, 2025 No Comments

It’s weird. On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death is a book by Jean Améry – who was born a German named Hans Maier. It was written in German in 1976, two years after his suicide attempt – and two years before dying by his own hand. I picked it up based on a reference in Undoing Suicidism. It reminded me of the mostly – but not always – coherent musings of Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.

To Live or Die

Améry’s perspective is one that clearly believes it’s a person’s right to die by their own hand. However, he also makes it clear that living is preferrable if one can live a life of “smiling, breathing, and striding.” Basically, if you can figure out to have a desirable life, that’s preferrable to all alternatives.

Comedy or Tragedy

Améry correctly points out that all of life and each circumstance can be declared comedy or tragedy, but it is the person themselves that get to make this call. The difference between comedy and tragedy is often said to be simply timing. They’re such close cousins that it makes sense that someone might think things are comedy where others see them as tragedy.

Prove Oneself

Life, according to Amery, is an environment where one must prove themselves, and the doubting question is, “Will one be able to?” This two-sided issue starts with the belief that we must prove ourselves that our simple existence isn’t sufficient cause for existence. Somehow, only the worthy should be allowed to continue this life they’ve been given.

The opposite side is the belief system that questions the ability to meet the standard. In How We Know What Isn’t So, Thomas Gilovich explains how most of us believe that we’re better than we are. In Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Rubin explores the ways that people come to hate themselves. It’s in this place that these questions arise.

To Whom?

In the end, Amery asks, “To Whom Does a Human belong?” His answer is that they belong to themselves rather than being an integral co-ownership of society. He pushes ownership entirely to the individual without concern for the society.

Despite a deep philosophical bent, his arguments are sometimes circular, sometimes non-sequitur, and sometimes incomprehensible as he attempts to describe his thoughts On Suicide.

Book Review-The International Handbook of Suicide and Attempted Suicide

Robert Bogue September 8, 2025 1 Comment

Published in 2000, it was the state of the art in suicide prevention across the globe. The International Handbook of Suicide and Attempted Suicide had an intentional focus on what was happening across the globe – as opposed to other sources of the time that were US-focused. One could easily question how the book might be relevant today. However, the depressing reality is that not much has changed in the last 25 years.

Suicide Is Not a Disease

While suicide is not a disease, epidemiological approaches may be valuable. These approaches are usually reserved for infectious diseases, but in this case, they can be deployed to find patterns and progressions of suicide in and through a society.

Some subsequent work has focused on suicide clusters, including Life Under Pressure. Here, the approach is in trying to identify what causes one suicide to lead to others. Finding clusters is a design common in epidemiology.

Epidemiology is a public health approach, which also means looking at how factors influence outcomes and what can be done to modify those factors. Unfortunately, much of the research still being done is on static factors that cannot be changed instead of the public-health-informed approach of dynamic, or modifiable, factors.

Dichotomous Thinking

It goes by many names, including all-or-nothing and black-or-white thinking, but it’s more precisely described as dichotomous thinking, and it’s dangerous. It can lead to a rapid transition into a suicidal crisis. A breakup means that you’ll be unlovable by everyone, forever. Marty Seligman in The Hope Circuit speaks of distorted thinking patterns that lead people to believe that a particular setback is permanent, pervasive, and personal. This can destroy hope. (See The Psychology of Hope for more on hope.)

In a moment, a mistake becomes a mountain. An argument is an avalanche of bad thoughts that can overwhelm someone and make them believe that suicide is a viable option. Capture explains some of the forms that this collapse can take place.

While there are strategies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that can be used to address these thoughts, they only work when the person with the thoughts is identified.

Autobiographical Memories

Our autobiographical memories are important. The failure to integrate a traumatic experience into our autobiographical memory is one of the key factors to PTSD. (See Traumatic Stress.) An overgeneralized autobiographical memory may indicate an increased risk of suicide. Strangely, if you can recall (or, at least, believe you can recall) the details of your experiences, you’re less likely to die by suicide than a person for whom the recalled memories are vague or represent categories rather than individual events.

The presumption is that more generalized memories are associated with more negative thinking and, frequently, childhood or repeated trauma. Prospectively, it’s believed that overgeneralized autobiographical memory inhibits problem-solving and future planning. (Future planning is a special form of prediction, whose importance was elevated in The Righteous Mind and Mindreading.)

Accepting Loss

Accepting loss is not easy. However, it’s an important protective factor for suicide and attempted suicide. The obvious impacts are seen in the power of postvention to prevent suffering and suicide of those who are bereaved by suicide loss. (See Grief After Suicide, Suicide and Its Aftermath, and The Suicide Club.) However, the scope is much broader. Loss includes those who’ve lost loved ones to deaths other than by suicide. (See the whole category of books on grief.) Broader still, it doesn’t have to be a loss of a person, it can be the loss of anything. It might be the loss of an envisioned future, like becoming a star athlete or a parent. It might be the loss of a job or career. It doesn’t matter what the loss is – what matters is our ability to find a way to accept it and integrate it into our reality, which is much easier said than done.

Community Bonds

Since Durkheim, there’s been conversations about the relationship between community bonds and suicide. More broadly, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and, more recently, The Upswing have investigated social capital. There’s a striking inverse relationship between social capital and suicide rates. As social capital increases, suicide decreases. While this isn’t a factor that’s easily modifiable, it does provide some insights into what we might do to reduce suicide rates.

Root Causes Analysis

Though we knew 25 years ago that suicide deaths don’t have a single cause, we continue to see procedures built around the root cause analysis approach. The problem is, obviously, that there isn’t a single cause to a suicide death. When you apply a strategy that is designed to reveal a single cause, you’ll necessarily come up with the wrong answer – but we’re struggling to see that we’re not using the right approaches.

This is like the use of psychological autopsy. People justify its use because there are no better options – and that’s valid. However, it gets extended and used in ways that perpetuate the myth that all people who attempt or die by suicide had a mental illness. If you look hard enough with the goal of finding mental illness, you’ll find it. It’s not unlike the repressed memories discussions that lead to a lot of planted memories.

Poor Reality Testing

Consistent with dichotomous thinking, there are other kinds of problem-solving defects that lead to suicidality. Children believe their families will be better off without them. (I’ve never heard a family agree with this sentiment.) They try to project out the future and what may happen – perhaps to find hope – but they’re unable to do so. They become stuck in the idea that things will always be the way they are, or they’ll be worse.

If we want people to realize how bad of an idea suicide is, we need to help them test reality better to see that things aren’t as bad as they seem. (See The Suicidal Child.)

Suicide Prevention Programs

Many programs exist that are designed to prevent suicide. The problem is that very few of them have any evidence of efficacy. Admittedly, this is very difficult with such a statistically rare event, so we may have to accept the proxy of attempted suicide. We may need to find measures that help us believe we’re making a difference. However, we don’t need to know whether people feel good about the program. Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation makes it clear that “smile sheets” are useless.

Rationality and Depression

Are suicidal impulses a rational evaluation of the current and future circumstances or a side effect of depression? The difficult challenge exists when we dig into our reason and realize that it’s an inference engine. (See The Enigma of Reason.) Our inferences are driven by prior experiences and our general sense of our state and the environment. In short, there’s never a time when depression won’t impact our reasoning. However, finding the line between what is rational and not rational is hard.

It’s sticky in our legal system, as Susan Stefan explains in Rational Suicide, Irrational Laws. We don’t have one clear, consistent definition for mental competence. In the end, it’s an evaluation – and it’s muddied when people are believed to be suicidal, because it infers they’ve got a mental illness. It leads to the kinds of quirks that Alexandre Baril explains in Undoing Suicidism, that you can’t be competent to decide to die by suicide.

Prediction

In 1954, Rosen explained how we wouldn’t be able to predict suicide, even by the year 2000. It was – and is – too statistically rare to create a tool that can distinguish between those who are and are not suicidal. Even if we assumed the best case, where people didn’t lie, or the best case that people didn’t make quick decisions towards suicide – both of which we know aren’t true.

We can’t seem to shake the desire to predict suicide – even when we know that we simply can’t do it. We know statistically what increases or decreases risk – but we don’t and cannot know which individuals will die by suicide or make an attempt.

Maybe we need to revisit what we knew 25 years ago through the lens of The International Handbook of Suicide and Attempted Suicide.

Public Speaking