On Dialogue, by David Bohm

Famous theoretical physicist writes a little book on his theory of conversation/discussion/dialogue

I got very little out of this book. Bohm is describing some kind of philosophy of what's gone wrong in human affairs, and advocating for people to set up Dialogue Groups, but the whole thing is done at a level of abstraction/generality where I can't help feeling like it's all true-enough but also reductive and basically trivial.

I catch myself wondering whether this is the kind of topic that just isn't well-treated in book form? Maybe you have to just go do one of his dialogue groups to get anything out of it? And maybe, failing that, it's better to watch a youtube video of people doing a Bohm-style dialogue?

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and since the main thing I have (idea-consumption-wise) is books, I keep trying to solve non-book-shaped problems with books. And this seems silly.

I also catch myself recognising that I only read this book because Bohm is a very famous physicist. Someone I didn't know mentioned this book at a party, and I would 100% have ignored the recommendation if not for recognising Bohm's name (I think he was mentioned in the Von Neumann book I just read, among other things) and specifically recognising him as a theoretical physicist. So this was a rare occasion of noticing myself falling prey to a halo effect -- why should a theoretical physicist have anything meaningful to say about dialogue? (And maybe Bohm fell prey to the halo effect too? Though I have more-mixed feelings about whether people should put out work that maybe has nothing to say, perhaps it's good to just put it out there and see if people connect to it)

The one thing I'll actually take away from this book -- and maybe this is obvious, but I didn't realise it -- is the throwaway metaphor that rainbows don't actually exist, and when someone points at a rainbow you're just creating a representation of roughly the same thing in roughly the same spot they are, and both believing/pretending you're seeing the same one. I don't know why but that resonated with me.