this is pretty grandiose. its beautiful, but if youre trying to help people communicate, "adjust your models of reality" isnt actionable advice.
the core problem you allude to is that communication is built on unexamined assumptions, but this does not require a cosmic realignment to get better at solving. a perfect example of this is trying to make your partner feel loved. if you tell your partner you love them but that doesnt make them feel loved, you are miscommunicating. i am regurgitating the words of "The 5 Love Languages", by Gary Chapman. it is a short, cheap, book that will change your life and upend your cosmos : )
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Languages-Secret-that-Lasts-eboo...
no affiliation, except that i bought and read it and it made me a better person.
Showing empathy is definitely an actionable advice and should be a prerequisite to any attempt at communicating with another human being.
It is completely actionable advice. It means simply that you will communicate better if the two parties communicating have more shared context. For each of us, reality is our perspective of it. Finding common ground between our perspectives is the first step in communication, expanding our common ground is the next. Understanding how another person sees the world and how they describe it goes a long way towards making yourself understood by them.
Truthfully, it would do everyone well to have such a card.
All models are fundamentally wrong. That is what is meant by the phrase "the map is not the territory", it is only a matter of degree and scope. Building a better model of reality is a difficult and painful process which manifests as depression [0]. In many cases, it is not worth the added suffering to force someone through this process just to understand what you're telling them.
> The psychic preys upon vulnerable people seeking advice about problems in their lives
One could say the same for therapists. There are quite a lot of bad therapists, trust me. Now, I'm not saying that psychics or astrologers are comparable to therapists in terms of overall efficacy, but if people are inclined to believe in that sort of thing anyway and the advice they get helps them, then fine.
Yes, it is a problem when fraudsters take advantage of people, but that goes for literally any practice including therapists, doctors, and scientists.
[0] This is more of a pet theory based on experience than anything I can back up through study.
There are good therapists (and doctors, and scientists...). And the vast majority are not fraudsters.
But all psychics are bad at their job, in that they are incapable of doing what they claim to do. Every one of them is a fraudster.
I read that depression is what the mind/body does when it needs to step back and re-assess the (life) situation, because whatever it's been doing so far obviously isn't working. I wish I could link to it.
However it's important not to generalise on this idea too much. Depression is a mental illness and that means it comes in great variations, including things that are just unique or go past theory. More importantly, it is very possible that the above described process is just a secondary or tertiary factor in the grand picture.
If you know what’s good for someone (presumably in some data-driven/evidence-based objective sense), and your goal is to get them to do it, sometimes the highest-ROI path is to give them an incentive that causes them to want to do the right thing for the “wrong” reasons, i.e. reasons that convince them, but which are either outweighed or entirely contradicted by facts they don’t have, with the “real” reasons being entirely orthogonal to the ones you gave.
In other words, you want to convince them to do something within their existing model, rather than first attempting to expand their model into one compatible with being convinced by the actual reasoning.
I don't know your wife of course, but I feel that this might be a mischaracterization of the sentiment. Sometimes people's model of reality is incompatible with yours, and since communication requires shared context it is difficult to convey your true meaning in a way that can be readily understood. One solution to this is to build up all the context that person needs to understand what you're saying, but this is slow and because it may require them to destroy and rebuild their fundamental understanding of the world it can cause quite a lot of suffering. An alternative is to reframe what you're saying into terms that are compatible with their current model. Even though the understanding you convey may be less accurate, it is often good enough.