Tunnels.

Leaders address the fear of thinking by encouraging thought and debate.

Settling into any conversation about what is happening in us and around us is itself a project. It can be around a dinner table, in a conference room, or on the arena floor. We tiptoe. In the workplace, just as some managers are threatened by the confidence they encounter in others to challenge the status quo, squashing the questions and the people posing them, there are leaders who want to get to the best practices, the facts, the ideas. They want to build and extend, even enrich, the careers of others. Building the teams who want to hear questions and explore answers together is their jam. They steer away from sycophantic behavior and obvious plays for approval; they pursue the truth, understand patterns, and uncover better ways to invent and excel. They are afraid, too. Their secret to putting their own fear aside: recognizing that the more we make questioning a habit, the less we feel the need to interrogate and scheme. To get to the end of the tunnel to transformation, leaders ask questions of not only those around them but of themselves.

Triangular Mountainscape with Tunnel. Dana Smith. Circa 1900. Oil on canvas. Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Skepticism is the ancient philosophy we need today

Tim Brinkhof. Today, cultivating a skeptical attitude may help you navigate an online media ecosystem filled with conspiratorial thinking, ideologically motivated reasoning, and AI-generated deepfakes. Skepticism may also help you spot disingenuous politicians, self-help gurus, or anyone else who presents falsehoods or half-truths as the full truth to further their own interests. … Like other ancient philosophies, the Skeptics believed that everything had a telos, or purpose. The telos of an acorn is to grow into an oak tree, while the telos of a clock is to tell time. The telos of a human being is not as obvious.

How can organizations teach employees to think more critically?

Alex Chan to Ben Rand. The biggest risk of AI isn’t just bad answers or lack of adoption. It’s training people to stop asking why.

AI chatbots are not your friends

Ana Maria Constantin. Signal president Meredith Whittaker has warned that AI chatbots “are not your friends,” “are not conscious beings,” and “are not sentient interlocutors,” pushing back against the growing tendency of users to treat AI systems as trusted companions.

Joe Negri, handyman and music maestro on “Mr. Rogers”

Michael S. Rosenwald. “Music was really Fred’s first love,” Hedda Sharapan, a child development expert and longtime producer of the show, said in an interview. “So naturally, he had this tremendous appreciation for Joe’s musical ability. But Fred also appreciated warmth and kindness and caring and neighborliness. And that’s who Joe was.”