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byrnema comments on Logical Rudeness - Less Wrong
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The Logical Rudeness (and a little bit of Plain Rudeness — generally a somewhat angry and mocking tone) were strong in someone I was recently debating about the desirability of indefinitely long lifespans.
They make an argument. I offer a counterargument. This may go back and forth a few times, but in the end, they would usually then switch to another argument without acknowledging my last counterargument at all. And then, later, they'd often switch back to the same point they made before and refused to acknowledge my counterargument to it, as though I had never said it. Very frustrating.
(This is why I'm not interested in going into politics anymore. This is the structure of pretty much every political debate, and I have a very low tolerance for it.)
I think I'm going to start asking people to accept this precondition if they want to argue with me: When one of us makes a point, the other must offer a counterargument or explicitly concede the point. We're not allowed to move to another point without doing that first. Concede or refute, don't ignore. And if one of us later reuses an argument we previously conceded, the other person gets to dismiss it without repeating their refutation.
I accept your precondition for engagement.
Perhaps we can start be debating the desirability of indefinitely long lifespans. If you want to broadly summarize your friend's position on the Open Thread, I'll take that position.
(I need practice arguing, because I often have conviction without identifiable or linearly structured reasons.)
Don't practice arguing. Practice thinking. When you believe the right things for the right reasons, good arguments will follow. I explicitly try not to be too good at arguing (with myself or with others), so that I can't persuade people of things without having done the hard work of figuring out what I rationally must believe and how strongly I must believe it.
(Edit: In case it might have come across the wrong way... I didn't mean those first three sentences to sound condescending at all, as though I was saying you in particular need to practice those; just stating my view on what we should want to be good at.)
I would not have argued in a rhetorical way, but would have tried to present the most thoughtful arguments that I could identify. (In other words, it would be a way of thinking about the issue.)
The exercise is to relate to the position and then experience (from a relatively detached viewpoint) how the position is taxed or not taxed by the counterarguments. I think this would be an interesting exercise to see if your arguments would work with someone who (in theory) holds your friend's position but is willing to absorb the counter-arguments.
Thanks for your advice, but it doesn't resonate so much for me. I'm not fearful of persuading people of things, but I need to learn how to persuade myself. In particular, what you wrote seems backwards. Believing the right things for the right reasons follows from developing and recognizing good arguments, and I need more skill in developing arguments.
Are you offering to argue for a position you do not sincerely hold? Because there are lots of people in the world who disagree with you about something if all you want is to practice arguing.
I suppose I was making some small gamble that I would be able to relate to the friend's position. Although this could bear some objective testing, I think that I am pretty flexible about what I can be sincere about. Also, I have some undeveloped ideas about this issue and I thought it would be interesting to develop them, in one direction or the other.