"Nature versus nurture" is a false dichotomy, just as "nature and nurture" is a false compromise. The real relationship is hierarchal: Nature made us nurturing and nurture-able. Nature made certain things difficult to mold, but it also gave us the willpower to overcome those difficulties.

The beginning of storytelling is the beginning of when words developed a life of their own. Originally, words were uttered for relational or informational notification such as, "Look out a snake!" or "I love you." In stories, words transcend space and time. A stream of storied text is like a magic spell that delivers blasts of pleasure when uttered. A story doesn't have to point to something happening here and now, and therefore it has a life of its own.

It's likely that the first shamans and druids were originally storytellers. Religion is all about the toll-free bridge between rhetoric and the soul. Sin is a word, which becomes a thought, which becomes one's damnation. The priest utters some words, perhaps even unintelligible words in Latin or glossolalia, which then lift one's spirits. It happens so automatically that we take for granted that a stranger can broadcast some words to a crowd and have it affect everybody's identities.

So, first it was the story, then came religion, and now it's self-help. The difference between religion and self-help is that the latter spells out the mechanics of the link between rhetoric and the soul. The power of positive thinking, or the laws of attraction, or Dianetics, all aim to not only show us that words have power, but that we can manipulate those words. Armed now with two centuries of psychological research, it's no longer necessary to tell people that God condemns them to make them feel guilty. Instead, a cognitive behavioral therapist explains how negative distortions create negative feelings which lead to negative actions, and it is up to us to dispute such distortions.

The need for more nuanced language in communicating statistics is becoming more and more urgent. While as it's only a venial rhetorical sin for the media to report averages without context, such simplification can prove catastrophic in a different setting. For example, as more and more people get personal genomics reports, it is bewildering to read that you have twice the risk of getting a rare cancer.

When DNA reports come back, instead of saying, "You have a 12.6% chance," they should say, "We can say with a 95% certainty that you have between a 5% and a 22% chance, with the variation depending on lifestyle choices."

Most statistics communication comes across as cold, reductionist, and fatalistic. And yet, the vocabulary of statistics is broad enough to describe hopeful, free-will data. The trick is that whenever we publish an average, we should accompany it with the standard deviation. And we publish the standard deviation, we should include information on what tends to cause that deviation.

When conservative politicians co-opt policy positions that they once rejected, they frame it like this is the way things have always been. While as when liberals do it, they frame it like it's something new and innovative. For example, when Mitt Romney campaigned in 2008 for what is essentially Obamacare, he framed it terms of "re-asserting choice in medicine and bringing back accountability," while as President Obama framed it in terms of "modernizing health care and turning a new chapter." Conservatives then cast Obamacare as a form of socialism, to make it seem like a deviation from a good America, while as Obama framed it as a struggle against entrenched interests, and therefore a deviation away from a bad America. Conservatives call it returning to roots, whereas liberals call it breaking new ground. For conservatives, there is no apostasy, only the re-enforcement of orthodoxy.

When socializing in groups, subjects randomly stream in and out, bringing in new perspectives and attitudes that lead the number of possible conversations to expand exponentially based on combinatorics. Turn-taking is tricky and determined on the insistence and volume of a dominating speaker. There is no steadiness or predictability as to where the conversation will go and who will speak.

When socializing one-on-one, the number of partners is fixed, and the topics change only gradually. Each partner takes turns leading the conversation, and the proportion that each partner spends speaking is relatively more equal than in a group. The difference between 2-person socializing and groups is much like the difference between sitting for an acoustic set at a coffee shop versus stadium rock.

Extroverts are hailed as charismatic leaders, whereas as introverts seem aloof or uninterested in others, and by extension, uninterested in the human race. But introverts love their friends just as dearly as extroverts. The perceived difference may just be a matter of temperament, not interest.

The nature of ethics changes depending on where we hear those ethics. On one end of the spectrum is network news, which has mass appeal. These ethics tend toward irreproachable ideas, such as "All men are created equal." They're the same ethics that are discussed in high school history books, often perpetuating a mythology of the Founding Fathers and their concern for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

On the opposite end of the spectrum is parental ethics. For example, mothers may teach their daughters things like man-catching, or dads may teach sons "how to be a man." The mainstream media—as well as academia, another land for mass ethics—scrubs out any notion of gender inequality.

In other words, the political correctness of ethics changes depending on who is listening. Somewhere in the middle is talk radio, since you often listen to it alone in your car, as opposed to television ethics, which are the ethics of the living room.

Consensus ethics, the kind of ethics that politicians talk about or we discuss in polite company, are ethics that we can all agree are for the good of all. Peer-to-peer ethics are designed to help both parties in a conversation. And parent-to-child ethics are just for one person since parents are trying to send their children on their way. The kind of ethics that gets handed down from parents tends to be the most selfish of imperatives. They're even worse than the ethics from friends; Friends at least want you to follow the golden rule.

The language of probability confounds our rhetoric. When we say that President Obama has a 90% chance of winning the election, the statistician's explanation is, "If the election were to be held today, in 9 out of those 10 times holding that election, it would lead to his victory." But in what universe do 10 hypothetical elections exist? The election that will lead to his victory is a singular event, and so what are we to make of these alternative elections?

Sure, a multi-verse theory of physics could describe an infinite number of hypothetical scenarios that exist somewhere. However, are we then saying that 90% of those alternative universes have Obama winning, and in 10% he is not?

Such thought experiments either sharpen our skills at "probabilistic thinking" or they point to actual un-addressed paradoxes in our understanding of the nature of randomness.

If we wanted to model politics using economics, we could view political discourse as a marketplace for signals. Every utterance about a policy position has a cost and a benefit. The act of saying something requires time and calories to move your mouth. Gaining access to a platform, such as a major news channel, can also have operational costs. Then there is the cost that people may not like what you have to say. The upside being that you said something that people like which helps advance your campaign or stature.

The same model could extend to a polical action committee. For PACs, there is a cost in buying ads, and there is a benefit if those ads generate interest.

From the end-consumer's perspective, listening to political words has a cost-benefit too. It takes time and attention to watch the news. And Cable TV subscriptions cost money, as does owning a television. A benefit is entertainment. Another is information. The news informs you so that you can participate in political conversations later according to the same cost-benefit rules.

Let's say that the end-consumer goes to a party and shares some of the things they' heard. Again there are costs and benefits. It costs time and money to go to that party, as well as penalties to health for drinking alcohol or junk food. The benefit, though, is that by uttering political words they might receive affinity from other people.

In this model, politics is, by definition, capitalistic, which may explain why campaign finance reform is so difficult. The United States has periodically advanced major campaign finance regulation without making the country more democratic. Political discourse follows the same power laws of capitalism, with accumulation begetting more accumulation, and with influence consolidating into the hands of the few. The slickest politicians have the maximum cost-benefits from their rhetoric, and so they are used by the most profitable political ideas as vessels for change.

When we say that animals have memories or that they communicate, we are anthropomorphizing on a basic level; we are essentially saying that animals have features like us. A more limited description of animal memory would say, "The animal returned to the location of its food after a separation of days." But instead, we say that animals have memories. It's simpler and more accurate. While we will ultimately never know what happens inside the black box of the brain, especially animal brains, the odds that animals have memories or that they communicate as humans do is high.

But anthropomorphizing has its limitations. If a dog wags its tail, an ethologist will describe it as a submissive gesture. She is confident in this description because she has studied hundreds or thousands of dogs and knows that when this gesture occurs, it is often in the presence of the powerful. And since the gesture commonly appears with other gestures, such as avoiding eye contact, it's safe to apply a label drawn from humans.

However, when a dog shows submission, it is in the context of the world of dogs. We are power hungry, so the word "submissive" means something special to us. For dogs, it could mean something trivial. For chimpanzees, who are arguably more power hungry than humans, it may mean something more profound. Maybe a submissive gesture for chimpanzees has as much a hold over them as being in love would be for humans.

The most accurate statement, then, is that the dog is making a submissive-x gesture, where -x is a modifier indicating that while it models a behavior found in humans, it may or may not have the same meaning to members of that species. This preserves the accuracy of behaviorist, black-box descriptors, without surrendering the descriptive power of applying terms that obviously link the human and animal worlds.

While a dog kneeling is a submissive gesture, submission means something completely different in the world of dogs to us, and so while it's useful to anthropomorphize, in order to group gestures together, and figure out what is being communicated, it's not useful in that we have no idea what that gesture means to the subject.

Anthropomorphic labels for gestures, such as submission in dogs, is only good enough from a formal perspective, but we have to keep in mind we have no idea what submission means to a dog, maybe it's just a ritual deference, or maybe it's a question, may I have.

"The Internet was invented" sounds better than "Scientists invented the Internet" or "Al Gore invented the Internet." Even though passive voice is discouraged in English class, we crave it. Much of the human experience is about receiving things or things happening to us, with the actor or agent unknown. We can identify who invented the Internet, but doing so ignores the idea that technology itself has agency. "Technology wants something," with or without the specifically named inventors, and so the arrival of the Internet, in a way, is something that magically appeared.

Active voice frames conversations with causality, which makes sense in the plot of a spy thriller with a character who is pushing the events of the story forward. But even then, one could frame it in terms like, "conspiracies formed, commands were sent, and computers got hacked."