HOUSE OVERSIGHT 026416 I noticed some time ago that Joi has remarkable public communication skills. He picks controversial, insight- laden topics, but sanitizes them by carefully replacing the parts of content that would divide his audience with symbolic messages that everybody can fill with their own content in a way that resonates with them. The non-controversial parts will still be insightful. He manages to come across as very subversive, while rarely offending anyone (except the hard scientists, that miss hard substance). He also asks influential people and smart students or faculty to write parts of his essays and speeches for him. This invests them in his success, especially because he is going to reward and acknowledge them. Very few of his ideas are original, instead he is good at identifying and testing thoughts he reads or hears from others. I am still beset by the ruinous instinct that the goal of communication ought to be mutual understanding. Joi is right. Public communication is about reaching one's goals. Bests, Joscha On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 12:42 AM, Joscha Bach . I> wrote: Dear Jeffrey, thank you for your support and encouragement, even where I fail. Sorry for being such an embarrassment today. I will spell out today's argument a bit better and cohesive when I get to it. Also, I should have recognized that the main point I tried to make would trigger Noam (who was as always very generous, patient, kind and humble on the personal level, even though he did not feel like conceding anything on the conceptual one). Almost all of Noam's work focused on the idea that humans have very specific circuits or modules (even when most people in his field began to have other ideas), and his frustration is that it is so hard to find or explain them. I found Noam's hypothesis very compelling in the past. I still think that the idea that language is somehow a cultural or social invention of our species is wrong. But I think that there is a cha