Dear @therealdonaldtrump, I am glad to hear that you are feeling better.

When a friend or relative dies, or when we or a person close to us becomes ill with something serious, it tends to change our perspective on how we live.

As @SamHarrisOrg explains, "our attention was bound up in petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal… like watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse.”

When my father died in 2017, I realized that I cared too much about point-scoring in politics and ideas. Since then, I've tried to focus more on listening and building understanding between people with different perspectives.

Free, open and democratic societies work, at least partly, because we the citizens have the ability to share information with each other and coordinate to pursue common goals.

As Milton Freedman explains, in his example of the pencil, the market system allows thousands of people too coordinate and exchange information, despite differences of language and belief that, in other contexts, can turn deadly.

We must face our differences and, to make progress, usually at least one person needs to lose the argument. We all lose, however, when we regard people on the other side as a lost cause.

Today's disagreements are made even worse by the fact that people assume that they are on opposite sides of a discussion, but only because they have different names for the same thing.

Americans are excellent at solving problems, innovating, and settling differences gallantly. But this is much harder to do when we’re being mislead, and sometimes lied to, about what our differences are.

Division can be catastrophic: a force divided in two and fighting separately will always lose to a united force of equal power.

The way that we have conversations and access media today is making us less intelligent. Social media, especially, thrives on rage, as rage encourages people to keep watching and clicking.

When we get mad or scared, we start thinking in terms of tribes rather than individuals, certainty rather than curiosity, and gotchas and point-scoring rather than listening. @DanielSchmacht1 calls this a “limbic hijack”:

The only thing better than being right is to be able to correct for errors reliably: it's a strategy that allows you to be right at scale. It's hard to adopt this winning approach, because so many people that correct errors on their own side get called monsters.

America is fantastically innovative, due not least to a variety of perspectives, a devotion to science and experimentation, and to debate, all of which is guarded by the First Amendment.

Ultimately, we should all be ready to sacrifice our own side winning on a particular issue, so as to nurture a system that is adaptable and can correct errors.

You, @therealdonaldtrump, can do more than anyone else to improve this situation.

It would help us if you said: “We need to settle our differences, but we need to settle them within a system of decency and good faith, one that prioritizes solutions over allegiance. We need to reach out to and make relationships with people who are different from us.”

See the article that was the basis of this thread, here: https://olivermeredithcox.com/2020/10/04/donald-trump-having-conversations/