Today, in Harvard Ballroom's Wintersession series, the advanced class was doing Waltz. The only thing you need to know about Waltz to read this post is that steps come in repeating sets of three:

1. drive (forward)
2. swing/rise/shape
3. float/lower/prepare

Our instructor had this to say about what to fix when things go wrong:

...And here's the thing: Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Some people have strong drive, but problems with float. Others have problems with swing. But remember this: If a step feels bad, the problem is with the previous step.

If you have problems with float, it's probably because your swing left you off balance. If you can't drive, it's probably because you didn't lower out of your float in time...

And I think that there's a bit of this that makes good sense in general, in a pattern I'll dub the Law of the Culpable Prior: If you see a problem in a thing, look for the real problem in the thing that came before it:

• If there's a financial crisis...look at the economic policies that were instituted three-to-five years ago.

• If Millenials are whiny, fragile, entitled, and unmotivated...look at the Millenials-parents generation. (I'd link to an appropriate editorial, but, like everything else including the word "Millenial", you can pretty much extrapolate the entire text from the title and your imagination.)

• If a student -- or a discrete subset of students -- is doing poorly at grade level [N]...look at their educational

I was having an interesting discussion over dinner the other day with my aunt and cousins, which began as a relatively minor complaint about the propensity of Agents of SHIELD screenwriters (yes, I only just discovered this show) to use real science words in absurd ways, rather than making things up. At some point, the conversation had morphed into something about the general habit of filmmakers to publish misleading science as if it were plausible. (I found myself attempting -- but failing -- to communicate a point better made by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his post Science as Attire.) Some of us were of the opinion that this was a pretty bad thing that should probably stop; others didn't see much harm in it, so long as it was in works that were clearly fiction (false-science documentaries another matter entirely.)

My aunt, in the latter group,

"It's fiction, and it's art. If you're watching it as an audience and as a scientist, then it means one thing to you, but if you're just watching it as an audience, the science doesn't really matter, unless it's somehow important to the plot. Besides, anyone who's getting their science education from movies should really educate themselves better."

My one cousin and I had spent some time pushing against this head-on, without much success, when my other cousin tried a different tactic:

"You two, you're framing the stakes wrong. Mom, what would you say about a movie, clearly fiction, which had some offhand scenes involving domestic violence in a light that made it seem acceptable, or even normal? I mean, it's clearly fiction, and the screenwriter isn't an expert or adviser on

Today, I had someone pull me aside and ask me if I was alright; several people had noticed that I was really worked up about something the other day, to the point of getting angry at one of my coworkers.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about, and when I did, I laughed a little. "Oh, Lucian and I go way back; we've been roommates for two years now. We're in the habit of giving each other a hard time; there's nothing wrong."

Afterward, I realized what I should have said -- something like: "Oh. I understand what it might have looked like, but actually everything's okay. We've been roommates for two years now, and I was just giving him a hard time."

The crucial difference: If someone comes to you concerned that there might be a problem, first let them know unambiguously whether there is, in fact, an issue, and then explain. If you put the explanation before the verdict, they'll spend the entire time parsing through what you're saying, trying to determine whether it makes the problem better or worse, before you give them the bottom line at the end. They'll be distracted enough to miss most of what you actually say, and then they'll be forced to change mental gears at the end from whatever conclusions they had dug into to the conclusion you then sprung on them.

The principle, I think, generalizes. If you're trying to tell someone something important (either in conversation, or, as I've found