> I don't really think any of the tips and strategies in this article are helpful unless both (or all) parties go in to it with this same mindset.
You'd be surprised. If there's a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is "devoted follower of the Beginner's Guide to Arguing Constructively", I think it's possible to have a decent constructive argument with people who are about 30-40 and up. I've certainly done so myself.
If you lead by example, many people will conform the standards of the debate to your tenor. Not all, of course, but that's when you have to know when to quit.
> Which means that, for example, I believe it is simply impossible to have these kind of "constructive arguments" on, say, Twitter, for example.
That was mentioned in the guide :)
> everyone argues from an emotional perspective.
Certainly you'd agree that there's a scale? It's not black and white. I will edit this part to make that more clear.
> Certainly you'd agree that there's a scale? It's not black and white. I will edit this part to make that more clear.
Actually, not really. You seem to be missing my primary point, which is that thinking that things lie along a single scale where on one hand you have "pure, platonic ideal of reason" and on the other end you have "emotional hysterics". I don't think it works that way. I think the sibling commenter put it best:
>> everyone argues from an emotional perspective
> You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.
That is, I think step one is try to understand why you (and your debate partner) are emotionally incentivized to care about the topic in the first place.
> You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.
The thing is, if you're talking about an average online debater, their emotional motivation is likely quite confused. The emotional distribution might be: 20% wanting to appear smart/reasonable, 30% wanting to insult their idea of bad people, 30% wanting to reinforce their lifestyle as valid, etc or whatever. With that, you could can could translate liamrosen's comment to say "if they're motivated 30% to appear smart, you can involve them in the framework" and once you involve the person, Cialdini's commitment and consistency can strong motivators to keep them there.
That said, I think this does raise the point that there are other good way to deal with the emotions behinds arguments that aren't mentioned in liamrosen's essay (the OP). One standard approach to determine the emotion behind a given irrational claim, acknowledge the emotion, sympathize with it and then go back and show that the original claim is unnecessary.
> > You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.
> That is, I think step one is try to understand why you (and your debate partner) are emotionally incentivized to care about the topic in the first place.
I think this is excellent advise. To add to this, I think often minor details, like the use of some word or terminology can trigger an immediate "emotional reject" response. It then becomes impossible to have a constructive debate because the person will reject all arguments based on that emotional reaction to the minor trigger. It then is very helpful to trace back to the source of the reaction and e.g. agree on different terminology.
Sometimes I use emotion in an argument to create ambiguity that the other party fills with some new point.
So, for example, I'm arguing something, I run out of good argument. I dodge by making a vague, emotional point. Then the other party will construct a new argument based on my vague emotional point. This lets me reset and construct a new argument.
It's a way to keep arguing when following a given point down the rabbit hole gets stale.
It's to learn, and to play with whatever point we're arguing from different angles.
When the point has been prodded to death by some argument, it lets your fellow arguer back-up and poke it from another side. Maybe my argument is wrong, but myself and the person I'm arguing with haven't figured out exactly why yet. This lets us keep circling looking for weak points.
Hopefully over the course of that we both come away with a deeper understanding of the idea itself.
I think of it like when E. coli run and tumble over the course of the hunt for food. Sometimes a random walk is a weirdly great way to discover the mechanism of how an idea works or doesn't work. I'm just occasionally flipping the switch on the 'tumble' circuit:
https://www.mit.edu/~kardar/teaching/projects/chemotaxis(And...
Fwiw, I have had some discussions on FB that seemed to improve with some of these strategies.
This goes a bit against the spirit of the thing, but a side-effect seems to be that if one is using these tools in a public forum like FB (which of course goes against this article's advice), one does come off as more reasonable to anyone in the audience who is undecided. (I think...)
Paul Graham's Post "How to Disagree", as well as many other resources, have progressed by debate style from "destroy the other person and claim victory" to "calmly work to find common truths and update beliefs".
I often try and guide friends to this form of debate, but found that there was no one resource that summarized the mindset, knowledge and techniques needed to get there, so I wrote one.
Alternative title: the antidote to the first 2020 Presidential Debate
Send an email to info@coviddash.org and we'll talk there!