CC’s Reviews > Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know > Status Update

Information obtained when the interviewee was under stress could be misleading and very inaccurate.

Best example to be abstinent. Alcohol makes us become myopia and can’t make good judgment. When you are drunk, you are not showing your true self, but your understanding of your true self changes.
When both parties were drunk: it’s hard to determine consent when both were deviating from their true selves. If they didn’t consume that much alcohol, things could be very different.

Face to face communications are socially necessary, but it might create errors as we all communicate in different ways. Facial expressions don’t really mean the same thing for everyone.

Heartbreaking stories about Sandusky and Nassar. I feel terrible for the devastating parents and kids who went through this, and I believe there are many more out there that are not uncovered yet. - how can we protect our children?

“Defaulting to truth is not a crime. It’s a fundamentally human tendency. We default to truth, even when that decision carries terrible risks, because we have no choice.”

Holy fools are the ones that challenge the authenticity of everything - “we can’t all be Holy Fools. That would be a disaster.”

It’s more cost effective to assume strangers are truthful vs time spent to validate that.

Thoughts after reading the Ana Monte’s spy story (which is a great story):

Don’t be too confident of self intuition: what I see may not reflect how this person really is. Maybe listening to others opinions is a good idea.

Belief is not absence of doubt, but not enough doubts.

Human beings always default to “oh it’s a truth”, unless doubts build up to a threshold. But is it a good habit?

Part 1: Many times we jumped on the chances to judge strangers based on the flimsiest clues we see, but they may not be accurate.