Gongol.com Archives: September 2025
September 27, 2025
A common way to sign-off from a broadcast news story is to ask for audience feedback. It's often phrased something like, "We'd love to know what you think! Send your comments to..." ■ The instinct to solicit feedback is perfectly natural. Giving people the sense that they contribute to creating the product is a terrific way to build audience loyalty, and most people who place themselves in the public eye are either wired or conditioned to think of feedback as a form of applause. ■ But most of the time, the sign-off is driven by a faulty call to action. "What you think" is often irrational, unhelpful, or inadequately informed. Opinions are among the cheapest space-fillers on Earth -- a perpetually renewable resource. Most really don't need to be amplified. ■ A considerably better question would be, "What did we forget to ask?" It is not a question designed to provoke the same amount of response. But it would be a more useful prompt, because journalists and interviewers should always be interested in improving the questions they ask. The general public usually does not possess the expertise required to offer high-quality commentary. ■ The average member of the public is, however, well-positioned to know what questions pique their own curiosity. Moreover, journalists ought to welcome good-faith efforts to help them identify their own blind spots.
A study of more than 22,000 people found that people who are conscientious, active, and generally agreeable turn out to have a lower risk of mortality than their peers who do not. It's not an especially shocking result: Being careless would seem to have obvious deleterious effects on one's health and safety, and the importance of remaining active is among the central premises of most geriatric care. ■ What's interesting comes from the conclusion of the study: Particular personality traits taken individually have "little incremental predictive power" relative to mortality, but "the aggregated predictive value of items was stronger". In other words, it's not the individual factors so much as the collective basket of the right ones that matters. ■ The person who happens to be "active", "lively", "organized", "responsible", "hardworking", "thorough", and "helpful" is thus the person probably in the most enviable position. It does seem almost odd that these traits, which would seem to have life-preserving merit individually, are perhaps most protective as a sort of cohesive disposition. While the study's authors have discouraged readers from taking the conclusions as deterministic, is it really that hard to conclude that those traits are worth inculcating in young people? ■ Human nature is powerfully entrenched at the species level, and many of us express at least a few pretty strong characteristics that are obvious practically from birth. But we're not really born learning to express the very specific traits underneath the "Big Five"; that is, there's a pretty good chance that one is born naturally inclined to be somewhere on the extroversion scale, but being specifically "active" or "lively" comes at least in part out of practice. The practice may simply consist of being in the right environment to take advantage of opportunities to be that way.
