Change is scary; writing with AI; presently helpful: Newsletter 11 December 2024

Newsletter 73. Change you can believe in is change you can understand, merry Christmas to booksellers, how to stump ChatGPT, plus three people to follow and three books to read.

How change feels

There are two kinds of change: change in what you do, and change in who you are. Both create uncertainty. But the change in who you are creates far more unease, because it’s not something people can easily prepare for.

All of us say we want change. We want our company to run better. We want to be more moral. We want to be less stressed. We want to be out of debt. We want to be a better wife or husband or parent or child. Nobody wants to be stuck doing what we’re doing now without a chance to improve things.

But of course, change that you want may not be change that I want. If your spouse becomes more successful, will they be less available to provide you with support? If your company adopts AI, will that make your job harder? If you increase your freelance prices, will you lose clients? On the flip side of every change for good is someone whose stable world is going to get shaken up.

Anyone who has lived through change knows that uncertainty is a problem. What will my company do now that it has a new mission? What will my department do now that it reports to a new boss? What will I do now that my family includes a new child? When these changes happen and we know they are coming, we attempt to cope by assessing what the changes will mean to us. We take a good guess based on our experience, the knowledge of people we trust, and the information made available to us from people like managers and doctors and financial planners. Changes in what we do are challenging, but we can find ways to cope.

But changing who you are is different. If you always had a boss but are now a freelancer, that’s more of a change in who you are. If you were working and are now retired, or were married and are now divorced, you need to reassess your world, often from a position of complete ignorance about your new identity. That’s pretty disruptive.

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of the politics of our elections.

Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, have generally promised to change what government does. How should we treat immigrants? Poor people? Rich people who evade taxes? People with contagious diseases? Where should we spend our money? How much should we pay in taxes, and who should pay it? At what level should we set tariffs on imported goods, and on which goods from which countries? Should we become involved in conflicts around the world, and if so, to what end and in what way?

These are policy questions. Politicians like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush all promised change of one kind or another in what government does, or should do. Donald Trump, too, has promised to change in what government does, specifically around policies on immigration, taxes, and tariffs.

But Trump has promised change, not just in what government does, but in what government is. And that makes it harder for America to know what it is, and for Americans to know who they are.

For example, the Justice Department and the FBI that enforce the laws. A change in policy at those organizations doesn’t change who they are: these are parts of the government that are supposed to be independent of political influence. But once they change who they target based on opposition to the party in power, they look like very different entities.

The Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control decide what to do about health and health care based on science. That is what they are. Revising health policy based on criteria other than science, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems likely to do, is a fundamental change in their reason for existence.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates statistics like unemployment and inflation based on methods and criteria honed over decades. Changing what they report based on what looks good or bad — or as Catherine Rampell put it in the Washington Post, “Repealing the Laws of Arithmetic” — is a dramatic change in what they are.

Cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from government budgets as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are planning to do as part of the “Department of Government Efficiency” will certainly make a dramatic change in what the government is. It won’t just be smaller. It will be different.

Americans who are reviewing President-elect Trump’s changes in policy can have some idea of what might be coming in their future for taxes or inflation, for example. But his appointments and statements threaten to create a complete upheaval in what the federal government is and its role in American life. And that in turn will change who we think we are as a nation.

None of us really know what that new way of being is going to be like. Even people who voted for Trump don’t really know. They just know change is coming, and it could be very big and they wanted change, but what that change looks like is a big question mark.

We’re all about to become something that has no precedent. What is America? What will it be in the coming years?

I really have no idea. And the vertigo that creates is profound.

News for writers and others who think

Author James Patterson is giving $500 Christmas bonuses to 600 booksellers, employees at bookstores around the nation. It’s a small thank-you for a low-paying and usually thankless job.

At HBR, Alexandra Samuel, Ph.D. explains the best ways to use AI as a writing helper, rather having it do the writing for you.

Three business school professors reviewed millions of Amazon reviews and found those written in the present tense were more likely to be rated as helpful. What does this mean for your writing? Nothing at all. You should write in the tense that best fits what you’re trying to get across.

Want ChatGPT to clam up? Just mention the names Brian Hood, Jonathan Zittrain, or Jonathan Turley. Threaten OpenAI with a defamation suit and your name could be next.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray is already exploring using AI to generate translations and audiobooks, and speculated that AI could create a chatbot built on book content that would converse with readers (Publisher’s Weekly, subscriber link).

Three people to follow

…B.L. Ochman, pioneer in AI-literate marketing strategy.

James Fell, author of the most outrageously profane history books you’ll ever encounter.

Mark Anderson, proprietor of Andertoons, the witty cartoonist you should hire to illustrate your book.

Three books to read

The Alchemy of Talent: Leading Teams to Peak Performance by Vijay Pendakur (Amplify, 2024). Extensive research in behavioral science and organizational psychology distilled into a comprehensive guide for nurturing teams.

The Thinker’s Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words by Peter E Meltzer (W.W. Norton, 2015). Don’t just find the right word. Find the best word.

Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow, 2024). Any fiction by Stephenson is a mindblowing must-read.