23
" Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line - the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is share intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement often discourage learning, questioning, and independent thought. Tribes based on alignment want to maximize each person's contribution, provided that they stay pointed in the same direction like magnetized iron filings. "
24
" Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line - the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement often discourage learning, questioning, and independent thought. Tribes based on alignment want to maximize each person's contribution, provided that they stay pointed in the same direction like magnetized iron filings. "
28
" Our
outsideness, after all, is a major part of what makes us different from the direct
participants in history and enables us, as historians, to render the past intelligible
and meaningful in ways that simply are not available to those immediately in-
volved. In other words, outsideness, whether that of Americans addressing the Chi-
nese past or of historians in general addressing the past in general, does not just
distort; it also illuminates. This means that, as I said earlier, our central task is to
find ways of exploiting our outsideness that maximize the illumination and mini-
mize the distortion. "
― , Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past