pktechgirlbackup | The gift of not reading The Gift Of Fear

The Gift of Fear gets a lot of praise. This appears to me to be a great of example of a poorly written book about a great idea that does not have a lot of other books competing to explain said great idea, because the book is only so so. For one, it's far too large: the idea itself ("trust instincts") takes less basically no time to explain. But no one will pay $20 for a two word book. I didn't mind that he piled on the anecdotes to stretch out the book: that's a better use than most people put the space to, they were interesting, and occasionally demonstrated a subtlety or trick. What I did mind was his continual insertion of himself into the story, his attempts to make the obvious complicated, and his blindness to the fact that the people he encountered in his work were not a random sample, and the techniques used to protect yourself from them could make the outcome worse when used on a more rational person. Given that, I can't recommend the book. But there were enough good ideas that I feel a twinge of angst over that. So as a personal service from me to you, I'm going to summarize the good ideas in Gift of Fear.

1. TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS. I think the good in this one is self-explanatory, so I'm leaving that as an exercise to the reader. This is good as far as it goes, but I think he fails to understand his limitations. For example, my fear about a stranger walking behind me is highly correlated with how recently I've read a news article on rape, in ways I don't think are reflective of the actual likelihood of said stranger raping me. Constant fear is a cost too, especially considering the actually quite low rates of stranger rape.

2. DON'T PREJUDGE. Unless you're famous, you probably know the person stalking or harassing you. But when asked who they think is stalking them, people will claim no one, because it's just too hard to contemplate accusing someone. I think this might be an internal version of what I talked about with the bus driver: people won't make an accusation, even in their own mind, without enough evidence, and they won't gather the evidence without an accusation. de Becker's work around is to ask his clients "who could have made this threat?" Once they have a list of everyone they possible know, he guides them through coming up with a reason for every single person on the list to have sent the letter. Most reasons are silly, but the fact that reasons are allowed to be silly allows people to come up with real reasons for a few people, and this is very useful. de Becker seems to think that the fact that the list almost always contains the stalker is proof that the method works, I tend to see it as a natural consequence of creating a list of everyone you know with access to stamps.

3. YOUR BRAIN HAS ALREADY MADE THE CONNECTION. When asked to tell the story of their harassment, it's not uncommon for the stories to contain extraneous information about semi-related interpersonal interactions, like "Like I was telling X, I found..." or "Right after lunch with Y, I...". 90% of the time, X or Y is the stalker. de Becker is bad at math, so he doesn't mention how many false positives this method generates, but I've found it to generate a useful rule of thumb anyway: if thinking of A frequently makes me think of unrelated thing B, maybe B is not actually unrelated. This fits right in with my graph-based view of the human brain.

There, I just saved you 400 pages. Although to be fair I only read the first half, so maybe I only saved you 200 pages.