We recently discussed this story published by three economists in 2015 and which is somewhere between 88.8% and 100% fabricated:
“On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”
The parts of the story that are entirely made up are: (1) the 19th Century, (2) the titled woman, (3) the woman being English, (4) the complaint, (5) the burly person, (6) the rowers, (6) the host, (7) the ownership of the boat, and (8) the quotation marks and the sourcing of the story. Also there’s no good evidence for the remaining part of the story, which is the guy with the whip.
I was corresponding with some people about this example. There was universal agreement that the above-quoted story is ridiculous and its publication represents a (small) failure of scholarship—but the question arose of how important this really is?
To put it another way: to what extent is this story used to support iffy social-scientific claims, and to what extent is the story just an example?
I’d say it’s both, or it’s somewhere in between. On one hand, if it wasn’t this story, it could be another. The theory being illustrated—that work contributions can be difficult to measure, and that this can create economic inefficiencies—would still be there even if none of the people involved in developing this theory had ever heard of riverboats. On the other hand, they did tell this particular story—indeed, they didn’t just tell it, they elaborated upon it. So, to look at this from an economic perspective, it makes sense to assume the story serves some function. Peter Dorman makes the following argument that seems plausible to me:
The attractiveness of the “coolie” story is that it addresses directly a major potential source of embarrassment — that a large portion of the workforce in the US and many other countries is visibly oppressed at work. People are issued orders, punished if they are seen to be less than completely obedient, and made to accept working conditions that harm and demean them. This becomes newsworthy when a union organizing drive occurs or if it’s in the context of a major public health crisis (like covid and the meatpackers), but it’s there to be seen whenever you want to look. The “coolie” story tells us not to worry, that workers *want* it to be like this.
For this purpose, it’s helpful to the theorists and storytellers that the story be presented not just as a parable, but as an actual “incident that happened” (to use the notorious words of Karl Weick that arose in the context of a different story), as that way it can be used as evidence to support the storyteller’s claim. More specifically, a true story can be used as a counterexample to refute some existing or default belief. For example, we might naturally think that it’s a bad thing for people to have to work under dangerous or uncomfortable conditions such as operating heavy machinery when tired or not being allowed bathroom breaks, and we might even think that such practices imply some power imbalance between workers and employers in the industries where this is happening—but then along comes this story of old-time laborers who, for their own business optimizing reasons, paid a “burly” man to whip them, and this story (a) makes modern workers look like crybabies by comparison, and (b) suggests that dangerous or uncomfortable working conditions are actually benefiting workers and that only a clueless outsider (for example, “a titled English woman” who “complains”) would think otherwise.
In both cases, an evocative story (of soldiers in the mountains and laborers on the river) serves as a “save” of the authors’ preferred theory (“any old map will do” in one case and neoclassical economics in the other).
Another way of putting it is that the preferred theories have serious problems with face validity (“Any old map will do” is contradicted by the commonsense view that having the wrong map is somewhere between useless and counterproductive, and extreme positions of neoclassical economics are contradicted by evidence that people are often oppressed at work), and these particular stories serve as counterexamples to those commonsense arguments (in the the map in the Alps story, the soldiers are benefiting from having a map, even though they don’t realize it’s a map of the wrong place, and in the Yangtze story, the laborers appear to be oppressed but are actually paying for the privilege of being whipped). In both cases, the story serves an active function, which is to discredit easily available views that contradict the preferred theory.
On the other hand, even if these distorted or false stories had never been told, the social scientists would still have had these theories. Sensemaking and neoclassical economics are major edifices, hardly dependent on these particular pseudo-anecdotes.
No I’m not quite sure what to think.
But let me bring in a few examples that we discussed a couple years ago:
– That data scientist’s unnamed smallish town where 75 people per year died “because of the lack of information flow between the hospital’s emergency room and the nearby mental health clinic.”
– That billionaire’s graph purporting to show “percentage of slaves or serfs in the world.”
– Those psychologists’ claim that women were three times more likely to wear red or pink during certain times of the month.
– That claim from “positive psychology” of the “critical positivity ratio” of 2.9013.
– That psychologist’s claim that he could predict divorces with 83 percent accuracy, after meeting with a couple for just 15 minutes.
Each of these stories falls in intersection of “This claim is ridiculous” and “There is no good evidence for this claim”—but it didn’t stop people from using them. The anecdotes are utterly unconvincing to me but seem to have completely conned their immediate audiences of pop science writers, textbook writers, rich people, and journal editors.
Again, the question is, how important were these anecdotes to the theories they are supporting (roughly, these are: a claim about the importance of data science, a claim about the value of free enterprise or something like that, a claim that just-so evolution stories explain a big chunk of our behavior, a claim that psychology professors can make you happy, and a claim that a mathematician has figured out secrets of marital happiness)? On one hand, not at all: the theories existed long before the stories were constructed. On the other hand, there’s Daniel Davies’s dictum, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” These stories aren’t lies, exactly, but they’re false or likely-false statements that are presented as if they are true.
This is an interesting question that I don’t really have the answer to, of what exactly is the role of fake anecdotes etc. in the presence of theories. My quick guess is that lots of people just don’t care about literal truth the way that we (most of the readers of this blog) do. Someone can make up a story about a titled English woman in the 19th Century, or a smallish town, or a critical positivity ratio, or the percentage of slaves or serfs in the world, and they don’t really care if it’s true or not. So in that sense the answer is easy: for these people in their quest to understand the world, everything’s a parable (that is, a fake story whose details can be altered to make a point) and there are no immutable facts. I think that’s too bad. It’s gonna be a lot harder to understand the world if you can’t make use of immutable facts to falsify your theories.
There is a (not very lengthy) history of fictional economics mystery novels that illustrate various economic concepts (I can’t easily provide the references since I never read any of these). Fiction can be a very effective way to convey concepts. It seems perfectly okay to use parables within professional publications – just label them as parables. Then they are just sort of mini-fictional books and can be a useful way to explain ideas. I just don’t see any justification for pretending a parable is real if it is made up.
This is slightly tangential, but there’s a weaker form of your thesis that revolves around innumeracy. For a lot of folks, even in various research areas, numbers and quantitive reasoning are not intuitive. They don’t have a good ‘feel’ for what is sound or plausible versus implausible, even just to first approximation. Street Fighting Math and lots and lots of practice are the only remedy :) Unfortunately, a lot of the time, it’s not the expedient thing to do- as long as it ‘looks’ good, that’s all too often good enough. The only exception are fields with direct enough contact with reality that there are palpable consequences for being wrong in important ways.
“and (b) suggests that dangerous or uncomfortable working conditions don’ ”
This section seems to end a little more abruptly than expected. Was something not transferred?
fixed; thanks.
No worries. I am proud to be a member of the third oldest profession – amateur/unofficial editor, after the second oldest – social/cultural critic, and the proverbial oldest profession.
If you can’t illustrate your theory without resorting to falsehood, then it’s probably time to take a harder look at the theory.
The other thing to highlight is that the anecdotes are held up to be true — framed as actual things that happened with all the details to reinforce their actuality. That’s part of their power — that they’re true — and so I don’t think we can claim that most people don’t care if they’re true or not.
I think this is exactly right. Imagine two worlds, one in which the Yangtze River story begins with “This story isn’t true, but it nicely illustrates the point” and another that just leads with the story as commonly told (implying that it is true). My guess is that if you were to ask people to rate the persuasiveness of the story and the truth of the proposition the story is supposed to illustrate, both will be much lower in the “This story isn’t true, but…” version. The power of the stories is that because they are true, they connect something concrete (someone’s experience) to a more abstract proposition.
Anecdotes are understudied, yes. My entire career has in a way been devoted to studying them!
I liked this post until the last sentence — replacing facts with false but comforting anecdotes it doesn’t make the world harder to understand. It makes it easier because the world now fits into one’s pre-conceived model.
And if you have enough comforting anecdotes in your head, disproving one does little or nothing to disturb you:
https://twitter.com/TheGoodLiars/status/1531651480180121603?s=20&t=Eb7cxxgwe3uZQG6yLYXV8g
My model of my world is not my world. If I make my model world simpler or easier to understand, that’s not the same as making the world simpler or easier to understand. So I don’t think you’re necessarily contradicting Andrew here. He’s talking about trying to understand the real world (gets harder), you’re talking about trying to understand one’s model of the world (gets easier).
“ it’s helpful to the theorists and storytellers that the story be presented not just as a parable, but as an actual “incident that happened”
Andrew: Sometimes a story is so obviously apocryphal that pitching it as a real incident would detract from its rhetorical punch. Consider, for example, this early gem from Meehl:
Once upon a time there was a young fellow who, as we say, was “vocationally maladjusted.” He wasn’t sure just what the trouble was, but he knew that he wasn’t happy in his work. So, being a denizen of an urban, sophisticated, psychologically-oriented culture, he concluded that what he needed was some professional guidance. He went to the counseling bureau of a large midwestern university (according to some versions of the tale, it was located on the banks of a great river), and there he was interviewed by a world-famous vocational psychologist. Then the psychologist explained that it would first be necessary to take a fourteen-hour battery of tests, the young man hesitated a little; after all, he was still employed at his job and fourteen hours seemed like quite a lot of time. “Oh well,” said the great psychologist reassuringly, “don’t worry about that. If you’re too busy, you can arrange to have my assistant take these tests for you. I don’t care who takes them, just so long as they come out in quantitative form“ (Meehl, 1956, p. 263)
Meehl, P. E. (1956). Wanted—a good cook-book. American Psychologist, 11(6), 263.
Aesop’s Fables have power even though everyone other than small children know they are not true. These fables wouldn’t have any *more* power if there were actually a real race between a hare and a tortoise.
There are some few of us whose view of the power of anecdotes is significantly swayed if the anecdote is “true.” Thus, we can cite the actual story of marathon runners who go out at too fast a pace and lose to runners whose pace is more steady. Exactly the same lesson, grounded in truth. But maybe not quite as evocative… (excercise for the reader: why?)
There are indeed true stories about people doing things in service of a larger good who put themselves through current pain. Think dieters, or mortifications of flesh. The principle that people try to constrain their current selves to achieve longer-term gains has many examples. The principle that workers take joint actions to stop shirking or monitor each other are true. They just aren’t as evocative (to some) as the coolie story.
So yeah… there’s a truth in labelling issue in an academic article that purports to be true. But I don;t think there’s much of a *human* problem here at all.
Jonathan:
What Kevin says below. Nothing wrong with fables. What’s wrong is presenting fables as if they’re true. Which is what happened with the story of the laborers.
I think my last paragraph agrees wth you. That was how it was intended, anyway.
The title of today’s blog is “What is the role of evidence-free, implausible, or flat-out false anecdotes in social science?” Undoubtedly it was first composed months ago–Andrew is organized and busy–so look at what purports to be up-to-date, not-anecdotal, not implausible, and not flat-out false material in medical/biological science and published just yesterday in the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/well/eat/coffee-study-lower-dying-risk.html
“Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period, with those drinking about three cups per day having the lowest risk of death when compared with noncoffee drinkers.”
To buttress its conclusion of yesterday, the NYT refers to its article of just under a year ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/well/eat/coffee-health-benefits.html
which claims that coffee consumption, “has been linked to a reduced risk of all kinds of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, gallstones, depression, suicide, cirrhosis, liver cancer, melanoma and prostate cancer.”
Think of how much less expensive health care would be if the entire health-care system were devoted to encouraging coffee drinking. One wonders if the Hoover Institution is actively working on promoting this concept.
It is UK biobank data, so the coffee drinkers are basically people who infrequently drink tea. These results indicate tea consumption is responsible for 30% of all cause mortality among people aged 37 – 73 in the UK.
If you do the same study on Finnish Biobank data, “people who dont drink coffee” would be a codename for “immigrants”.
Fables are fine as long as everyone is open about the fact that they are fables and don’t use them as “fictional evidence” (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional).
But I’m appalled by the number of people who don’t seem to think that the actual, literal truth matters, and that they are justified in embellishing, exaggerating, or flat-out fabricating “facts” in service of a “higher truth.” Whenever anyone talks about a “higher truth”, I take that as a euphemism for “lie”.
+1
Andrew,
Isn’t this described as a fable? A story?
I’m not sure why a fable/story *needs* to be factually vetted.
Its not empirical evidence. Qualitative, quantitative, or anything else.
Its not meant to be the backbone of a theory, i.e. without this story being true, the whole idea falls — just an example of it.
In the linked blogpost, and the original one from blogspot, no one ever claimed its true — only that its a story. No one ever said it was a fact — that’s the bloggers interpretation, no?
As munger and Roberts were chatting, its just a story about some theories of the firm.
What I’m more interested in is whether the academics who are in the field of intra-firm dynamics have tested or measured such effects in the real world. This story has nothing to do with that kind of research.
Stories like this are not enough to motivate a research program on its own. There has to be more.
If it is enough — that’s the story. How can writing up theories/stories be enough to get tenure.
Gabby:
You say, “no one ever claimed it’s true.” You’re wrong about that. Follow the link, and you’ll see lots of people talking as if the story is true.
Munger:
You don’t say “this is the most incredible thing” about a made-up story. You say “this is the most incredible thing” about a story that is surprising but true.
Kaur et al.:
Here, they don’t say the story is true, but they completely misrepresent the story, making up 8 features that were not in Cheung (1983).
But Cheung (1983) is not so great either, as it says:
He doesn’t refer to this as a “fable/story”; he just refers to it the way you’d refer to anything else that happened in the past. He writes that the collaborators “actually agreed”; again, the word “actually” would be strange to use here if the story were made up.
From podcast interview:
Look. I have no problem with people making up parables to illustrate their points. I do have problems with people making up stories, or passing along and embellishing made-up stories, and acting as if these things really happened.
As an outsider, it seems to me that social scientists find themselves in a rather strange position. Their theories explain some phenomena really well (e.g. price rises following natural disasters as an instance of supply and demand), but those phenomena are also really hard to observe (when more customers show up to my local noodle shop around midday, they don’t suddenly raise prices). Indeed, social theories are (it seems to me) typically at their weakest in everyday circumstance. Training in social science thus requires a sort of credulity: a willingness to trust hard-to-observe but analytically-vetted recordings over your own natural experience. (This credulity also explains why social scientists haven’t been sufficiently suspicious of statistical malpractice.) Conversely, physics can get away with arcane exemplars (see: “carrying heavy grocery bags does no work”) because sufficient physics training can explain everyday experience (in that example, we understand the biology of muscle contraction). Social science is not yet so mature. That is: social scientists need some sort of examples to convince their students to abandon common sense, but reality will not provide them. So they torture reality to fit, and the falsehoods of your post are the Procrustean results.
“when more customers show up to my local noodle shop around midday, they don’t suddenly raise prices”
This doesn’t contradict the concept that prices react to demand. First all noodle shops could readily meet the demand at existing prices if your noodle shop raised its prices. Second, noodles are “must” at lunch for a small proportion of the population. For the majority of people the meal is “lunch” not “noodles” and noodles can readily be replaced by burgers or teriyaki or hotdogs or sandwich or soup or a bag of chips from the supermarket. Third, since the demand at lunch is strongly cyclic prices are already set for the increased lunch demand across the industry. Fourth, the demand at lunch is transient: if your noodle shop raised prices from 11:30 to 1:30 to take advantage of the demand during that period, people could just shift their lunch to 2pm or 11am, negating the benefit of raising prices.
None of this is hard to observe. Presumably you’re aware many food and drink providers offer “off-hour” specials – happy hour, for example. This is pretty strong evidence that the prices are already set for peak demand and that it’s worth it to lower prices off hours to get some miles out of the labor that’s being paid anyway.
Many people think this is obscure information but it’s hardly a secret to any merchant or seller. However, with the extraordinary division of labor in modern western economies, few people are directly involved in selling and thus have no experience with these concepts. But like many people of his time, my grandad, who was born in 1887, knew it well – he started selling newspapers at age nine to help is family get by.
When a story gains the status of traditional fable, it’s usually because the story presents some facet of the human condition that audiences widely recognize as true. Making up a story and presenting it as evidence in favor of some view of human nature is completely different. A camera is not the same thing as scaffolding.
Two semi-relevant memories. I once read an article, “Parables of Information Transmission in Markets” by an economist, Steven Salop. So truth in labeling is possible.
I remember actually reading one of the economics theory mystery novels mentioned by Dale Lehman in the first comment above. As I remember it, the plot was roughly as follows: An economics professor is murdered. The hero, another economist, deduces that the killer was an anthropology grad student with a dissertation due, or anthropology professor up for tenure, who was in the process of writing up his empirical research on trading conducted by some economically primitive culture. The key clues were: the murder victim had seen the anthropologist’s data and (b) the data was inconsistent with a piece of economic theory. The hero deduced that the data must have been faked and reasoned that the murder victim must have figured this out and been about to blow the whistle. As I recall it, the economic theory (which, for all I know is empirically verified in many circumstances) was that the dispersion of prices in a market for similar goods, measured as a percentage of price, will be greater for cheap goods than expensive goods because, for expensive goods, it will pay for customers to spend considerable time shopping for a good price thereby making it hard for some sellers to charge prices a lot higher than their competitors. I read this a very long time ago and am going by memory so this should be considered a parable, not a fact, about economic mystery literature. It does seem to hit on a lot of themes of this blog, e.g., arrogance of economists, spotting bad studies.
I am not sure why you keep writing posts for this totally non-significant thing.
1) You don’t have absolute proof the story is fake. You only have circumstantial doubt about the words used in the storytelling, which have no direct relationship with the truthiness of the core story.
2) The story is just used as an example, i.e. if it did happen, there is an economic theory can be used to explain it. Even the story is fake, it does not hurt any established theory. There is nothing evil here, because the story is an example, not a proof.
3) Storytelling is a good teaching tool. Maybe you can make up some stories to teach statistical or political science concepts. ^_^
Xysname:
1. You say, “You don’t have absolute proof the story is fake.” That’s the lowest possible standard I could possibly imagine. By the way, I had lunch with Paul McCartney the other day and he told me that my brother gave him the tune and words for Yesterday, back in the 1960s. You might not believe me, but, hey, you don’t have absolute proof the story is fake. Even if you were to contact Sir Paul and get a denial, that’s hardly absolute proof. For obvious reasons he wouldn’t want to admit that his most famous song was written by somebody else!
2. I have no problem with people presenting a made-up story and saying, Hey, here’s a made-up story to illustrate a point. I do have a problem with people taking a made-up story and presenting it as true.
3. I agree that storytelling is great. True stories are super valuable; I learn from them all the time and I teach them too. Made-up stories are great, too. A made-up story is like a mathematical model; you can learn from it via the working out of logical principles. A made-up story is not the same as a true story but it can be valuable in its own way, if it’s clearly labeled as such.
Anonymous above said, quoting another post:
《“when more customers show up to my local noodle shop around midday, they don’t suddenly raise prices”
This doesn’t contradict the concept that prices react to demand. 》
Aren’t the yarns riproaringly entertaining, which Anonymous then spins to support the fundamental economic dogma that prices are not just arbitrary noise (see Fischer Black, “Noise”)?
If tomorrow Walmart decides to go with surge pricing, won’t Anonymous find equally compelling tales to explain why such a shift was required by supply and demand shifts? Doesn’t everyone know we are really dealing with fickle, arbitrary human psychology here?
I think it’s worth remembering that the people who use the Alps story usually first say that it shows that “any old map will do” but quickly conclude all kinds of other “morals”, including “any old plan will do” and, interestingly, “any old story will do.” (See this old post by Andrew.)
As I’m fond of pointing out, both Wall Street and Big Pharma executives have been cited in support of this moral, presumably suggesting that “any old bond rating will do” and “any old drug label will do” too.
I tend to agree with Nassim Taleb, who, when discussing the role of business education in the financial crisis, said to Daniel Kahneman, who had invoked Weick’s Alps story, that it’s better to have no map at all than a bad one you think is true.
The advice for chess players that “a bad plan is better than no plan” goes back to 1849 or earlier. https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/planning.html
Hmmm, okay, maybe it’s time for a controversial opinion from me.
The original hired whip-hand story is probably a juiced-up story, sure. But do we actually believe that the core idea – of an ostensibly worker-owned collective enterprise assenting to hiring a discipline officer – is actually impossible? I mean you can basically look at all manner of communist regimes, that are supposedly run for the benefit and co-ownership of the workers, but nevertheless having police and other officials to mete out punishment, and which can have support from those same workers. All manner of trade unions will still have some kind of enforcement mechanism for individual workers that might undermine the collective. Not necessarily a dude with a whip, but punishments nevertheless.
The claim is not that in the moment of being whipped, the victim thinks “oh yes, this is great”, but the idea of consent to a mechanism of oppressive control isn’t completely out there. There’s much more relevant examples you can find. The article by Supreet Kaur supposedly has results of a field experiment to present.
So I think as a story, it’s more just an example.
I’ll also suggest that some elements (fabricated or not) of the story – like it happening in the 19th century, in China, before the current communist government, featuring a titled English woman – essentially act as distancing measures. Those elements are all far away from the reader’s likely experience, reduce its relevance to modern events, and thus make the story the equivalent (rightly or wrongly) of something happening “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”.
Zhou:
Yes, I agree, it’s a good parable. The problem is when it’s presented as a true story.
Here’s another example of this phenomenon, of scholars taking someone else’s anecdote and fictionalizing it.
Mary Parker Follett’s Creative Experience (1924) includes an anecdote about a negotiation over a library window:
“In the library today, in one of the smaller rooms, someone wanted the window open, I wanted it shut. We opened the window in the next room where no one was sitting. This was not a compromise because there was no lopping off of desire; we both got what we really wanted. For I did not want a closed room, I simply did not want the north wind to blow directly on me; likewise the other occupant did not want that particular window open, he simply wanted more air in the room.” (pp. 184–185)
This anecdote was picked up by Roger Fisher and William Ury and included in their book on business negotiation, Getting to Yes (1981). Here’s their version of the story:
“Consider the story of two men quarreling in a library. One wants the window open and the other wants it closed. They bicker back and forth about how much to leave it open: a crack, halfway, three quarters of the way. No solution satisfies them both. Enter the librarian. She asks one why he wants the window open: “To get some fresh air.” She asks the other why he wants it closed: “To avoid the draft.” After thinking a minute, she opens wide a window in the next room, bringing in fresh air without a draft.” (p. 41)
Fisher and Ury cited Follett for the story, but in retelling it they changed a number of details. Follett described a conflict between herself and a man; Fisher and Ury turned it into a quarrel between two men. Follett said that she and the other occupant were able to resolve the conflict between themselves; Fisher and Ury added a third party, the librarian, to resolve it.
Gareth:
That’s a good example. On the plus side, Fisher and Ury wrote, “Consider the story . . .”, so it seems pretty clear that this is a parable—that is, a story adapted to make a point—rather than a factual anecdote.
I agree with you, though, that something is lost by stripping the real details from the story and replacing with fake bits. In particular, the replacement story fits the stereotype of a dispute being between two men and of the woman resolving it, also the stereotype of the librarian being a woman. In Follett’s (presumably true) version, one of the disputants was female, and the two parties resolved it together with no need for an outsider to resolve it.
Also, Fisher and Ury have the librarian “thinking a minute,” which implies that the solution is difficult—maybe requiring the advice of, if not a librarian, maybe a couple of Harvard professors? The real story doesn’t work so well because the solution came too easy.
Finally, Fisher and Ury’s telling reminds me of the various retellings of the “coolies” story in that it includes irrelevant details: “They bicker back and forth about how much to leave it open: a crack, halfway, three quarters of the way.” What’s weird is that the reason for such details could be to make the story seem more real, but they way they’ve framed it, they made it pretty clear that it’s made up.
Andrew –
I don’t really agree, per se, about losing something because of stripping out the details…
I mean pretty much any retelling of a story may translate into lost details. As such with any retelling something would be most. But the power of the story with regard to a particular narrative or point can still remain. Maybe the retelling over plays the role of a third, neutral party in conflict resolution. But with a skeptical eyes we could always create another narrative resulting from the changes with a retelling. In this case, I don’t think anything is lost with respect to the key points: understanding the importance of distinguishing positions versus or interests, or getting to yes.
I’ll admit a personal soft spot for the whole getting to yes, win/win model – that work had become pretty important in my life for many years.