David_Gerard comments on The Truth about Scotsmen, or: Dissolving Fallacies - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Tesseract 05 December 2010 09:57PM

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Comment author: nhamann 06 December 2010 04:06:42AM *  1 point [-]

That’s because all you’ve done is deprive him of evidence for his belief, not make him disbelieve it – wiped out one of his squadrons, so to speak, rather than making him switch sides in the war.

The wording here is very unfortunate. You seem to be alluding to the fact that the hypothetical Scotsman is using arguments as soldiers, and in the same sentence go on to reinforce the unproductive notion that argument is a battle between factions.

Comment author: David_Gerard 06 December 2010 08:43:08AM *  4 points [-]

You're going to need to be able to deal with people who bring the war to you. However you resolve that is up to you, but the situation described - in which he thinks of it as a war, whatever you think - is not unrealistic.

And you will have occasion in life to need to actually convince someone of something. At which point you can approach it in a number of ways, e.g.

  1. War of ideas (which there are any number of ways to conduct).
  2. Selling the idea (just like selling something for money).
  3. Do nothing and let them stay unconvinced (a sometimes neglected alternative, particularly for nerds).
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