How to Not Lose an Argument
Related to: Leave a Line of Retreat
Followup to: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale, The Skeptic's Trilemma
"I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."
--Dave Barry
The science of winning arguments is called Rhetoric, and it is one of the Dark Arts. Its study is forbidden to rationalists, and its tomes and treatises are kept under lock and key in a particularly dark corner of the Miskatonic University library. More than this it is not lawful to speak.
But I do want to talk about a very closely related skill: not losing arguments.
Rationalists probably find themselves in more arguments than the average person. And if we're doing it right, the truth is hopefully on our side and the argument is ours to lose. And far too often, we do lose arguments, even when we're right. Sometimes it's because of biases or inferential distances or other things that can't be helped. But all too often it's because we're shooting ourselves in the foot.
How does one avoid shooting one's self in the foot? In rationalist language, the technique is called Leaving a Social Line of Retreat. In normal language, it's called being nice.
First, what does it mean to win or lose an argument? There is an unspoken belief in some quarters that the point of an argument is to gain social status by utterly demolishing your opponent's position, thus proving yourself the better thinker. That can be fun sometimes, and if it's really all you want, go for it.
But the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his mind. If you want a world without fundamentalist religion, you're never going to get there just by making cutting and incisive critiques of fundamentalism that all your friends agree sound really smart. You've got to deconvert some actual fundamentalists. In the absence of changing someone's mind, you can at least get them to see your point of view. Getting fundamentalists to understand the real reasons people find atheism attractive is a nice consolation prize.
I make the anecdotal observation that a lot of smart people are very good at winning arguments in the first sense, and very bad at winning arguments in the second sense. Does that correspond to your experience?
Back in 2008, Eliezer described how to Leave a Line of Retreat. If you believe morality is impossible without God, you have a strong disincentive to become an atheist. Even after you've realized which way the evidence points, you'll activate every possible defense mechanism for your religious beliefs. If all the defense mechanisms fail, you'll take God on utter faith or just believe in belief, rather than surrender to the unbearable position of an immoral universe.
The correct procedure for dealing with such a person, Eliezer suggests, isn't to show them yet another reason why God doesn't exist. They'll just reject it along with all the others. The correct procedure is to convince them, on a gut level, that morality is possible even in a godless universe. When disbelief in God is no longer so terrifying, people won't fight it quite so hard and may even deconvert themselves.
But there's another line of retreat to worry about, one I experienced firsthand in a very strange way. I had a dream once where God came down to Earth; I can't remember exactly why. In the borderlands between waking and sleep, I remember thinking: I feel like a total moron. Here I am, someone who goes to atheist groups and posts on atheist blogs and has told all his friends they should be atheists and so on, and now it turns out God exists. All of my religious friends whom I won all those arguments against are going to be secretly looking at me, trying as hard as they can to be nice and understanding, but secretly laughing about how I got my comeuppance. I can never show my face in public again. Wouldn't you feel the same?
And then I woke up, and shook it off. I am an aspiring rationalist: if God existed, I would desire to believe that God existed. But I realized at that point the importance of the social line of retreat. The psychological resistance I felt to admitting God's existence, even after having seen Him descend to Earth, was immense. And, I realized, it was exactly the amount of resistance that every vocally religious person must experience towards God's non-existence.
There's not much we can do about this sort of high-grade long-term resistance. Either a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he doesn't. But there is a less ingrained, more immediate form of social resistance generated with every heated discussion.
Let's say you approach a theist (let's call him Theo) and say "How can you, a grown man, still believe in something stupid like talking snakes and magic sky kings? Don't you know you people are responsible for the Crusades and the Thirty Years' War and the Spanish Inquisition? You should be ashamed of yourself!"
This suggests the following dichotomy in Theo's mind: EITHER God exists, OR I am an idiot who believes in stupid childish things and am in some way partly responsible for millions of deaths and I should have lower status and this arrogant person who's just accosted me and whom I already hate should have higher status at my expense.
Unless Theo has attained a level of rationality far beyond any of us, guess which side of that dichotomy he's going to choose? In fact, guess which side of that dichotomy he's now going to support with renewed vigor, even if he was only a lukewarm theist before? His social line of retreat has been completely closed off, and it's your fault.
Here the two definitions of "winning an argument" I suggested before come into conflict. If your goal is to absolutely demolish the other person's position, to make him feel awful and worthless - then you are also very unlikely to change his mind or win his understanding. And because our culture of debates and mock trials and real trials and flaming people on Usenet encourages the first type of "winning an argument", there's precious little genuine mind-changing going on.
Really adjusting to the second type of argument, where you try to convince people, takes a lot more than just not insulting people outright1. You've got to completely rethink your entire strategy. For example, anyone used to the Standard Debates may already have a cached pattern of how they work. Activate the whole Standard Debate concept, and you activate a whole bunch of related thoughts like Atheists As The Enemy, Defending The Faith, and even in some cases (I've seen it happen) persecution of Christians by atheists in Communist Russia. To such a person, ceding an inch of ground in a Standard Debate may well be equivalent to saying all the Christians martyred by the Communists died in vain, or something similarly dreadful.
So try to show you're not just starting Standard Debate #4457. I remember once, during the middle of a discussion with a Christian, when I admitted I really didn't like Christopher Hitchens. Richard Dawkins, brilliant. Daniel Dennett, brilliant. But Christopher Hitchens always struck me as too black-and-white and just plain irritating. This one little revelation completely changed the entire tone of the conversation. I was no longer Angry Nonbeliever #116. I was no longer the living incarnation of All Things Atheist. I was just a person who happened to have a whole bunch of atheist ideas, along with a couple of ideas that weren't typical of atheists. I got the same sort of response by admitting I loved religious music. All of a sudden my friend was falling over himself to mention some scientific theory he found especially elegant in order to reciprocate2. I didn't end up deconverting him on the spot, but think he left with a much better appreciation of my position.
All of these techniques fall dangerously close to the Dark Arts, so let me be clear: I'm not suggesting you misrepresent yourself just to win arguments. I don't think misrepresenting yourself would even work; evolutionary psychology tells us humans are notoriously bad liars. Don't fake an appreciation for the other person's point of view, actually develop an appreciation for the other person's point of view. Realize that your points probably seem as absurd to others as their points seem to you. Understand that many false beliefs don't come from simple lying or stupidity, but from complex mixtures of truth and falsehood filtered by complex cognitive biases. Don't stop believing that you are right and they are wrong, unless the evidence points that way. But leave it at them being wrong, not them being wrong and stupid and evil.
I think most people intuitively understand this. But considering how many smart people I see shooting their own foot off when they're trying to convince someone3, some of them clearly need a reminder.
Footnotes
1: An excellent collection of the deeper and most subtle forms of this practice of this sort can be found in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, one of the only self-help books I've read that was truly useful and not a regurgitation of cliches and applause lights. Carnegie's thesis is basically that being nice is the most powerful of the Dark Arts, and that a master of the Art of Niceness can use it to take over the world. It works better than you'd think.
2: The following technique is definitely one of the Dark Arts, but I mention it because it reveals a lot about the way we think: when engaged in a really heated, angry debate, one where the insults are flying, suddenly stop and admit the other person is one hundred percent right and you're sorry for not realizing it earlier. Do it properly, and the other person will be flabbergasted, and feel deeply guilty at all the names and bad feelings they piled on top of you. Not only will you ruin their whole day, but for the rest of time, this person will secretly feel indebted to you, and you will be able to play with their mind in all sorts of little ways.
3: Libertarians, you have a particular problem with this. If I wanted to know why I'm a Stalin-worshipper who has betrayed the Founding Fathers for personal gain and is controlled by his base emotions and wants to dominate others by force to hide his own worthlessness et cetera, I'd ask Ann Coulter. You're better than that. Come on. And then you wonder why people never vote for you.
Comments (109)
American Rhetoric is an incredible site and there are some real gems that aspire to rational persuasion with some flair.
<http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html>
Malcolm X's "Ballot or the Bullet" navigates the fact that he is black, widely regarded as dangerous and Muslim all at once while urging people to put these things aside and think about his plans and their outcomes. He does a first rate job of tailoring his rhetoric to increase your emotional desire to think and not react.
Milton Friedman is another person to watch live. He gets a bad rap from people who don't watch him, but if you have ever heard him speak, he excels at softly thinking through positions with the listener while still taking bold positions.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfdRpyfEmBE&feature=player_embedded>
They said it best in Howard Stern Private Parts:
Gladwell is probably the best for presenting fact and figures in speeches. You might not like his numbers or rigor, but his presentatoon methods are top notch, often focused on challenging his listeners beliefs with academic research:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6204900041349106153&ei=YRTDSerTM4qIqwLbn9yuCw&q=Gladwell&hl=en>
I am curious about the large emphasis that rationalists place on the religious belief. Religion is an old institution, ingrained in culture and valuable for aesthetic and social reasons. To convince a believer to leave his religion, you need not only convince him, but convince him so thoroughly as to drive him to take a substantial drop in personal utility to come to your side (to be more exact, he must weigh the utility gained from believing the truth to outweigh the material, social, and psychic benefits that he gets from religion).
For rationalists' attention, there are myriad more important and relevant issues where human irrationality has an effect on the world. In addition, these issues are normally easier to change people's beliefs about.
People have been believing in God for 500,000 years. People have been believing unsupported things about Global Warming for 30. I would rather teach people how to be skeptical and cautious about modern policy debates than have Yet Another God Conversation.
I was scarred by religion growing up. I understand the impulse to despise it and oppose it. But there came a time in my life when I realized that it was going to be around for as long as humanity, though its fortunes may wax and wane. It's time to move on.
This post goes hand in hand with Crisis of Faith. Eliezer's post is all about creating an internal crisis and your post is all about applying that to a real world debate. Like peanut-butter and jelly.
If you want to correct and not just refute then you cannot bring to the table evidence that can only be seen as evidence from your perspective. Ie. you cannot directly use evolution as evidence when the opposing party has no working knowledge of evolution. Likewise, a christian cannot convince an atheist of the existence of God by talking about the wonders of His creation. If you picture you and your opponent's belief systems as vin-diagrams then the discussion must start where they overlap, no matter how small that sliver of common knowledge might be. Hopefully, if you and your opponent employ crisis-of-faith properly, those two circles will slowly converge.
This is a critical point.
One of the reasons arguments seem to exist at all - from what I can understand - is that when people look at the same things in different ways, effectively seeing two different things. A christian might look at the world and see the wonder of God's creation, but a physicist might see nothing but billions and billions of tiny particles interacting. Someone pro-life might see an abortion as a murder, while someone pro-choice might see it as part of a woman's right to her own body.
You need to frame the argument so both parties are looking at the same thing for any progress to be made. Otherwise, people just become more and more entrenched in their position, while getting more and more frustrated that the other person doesn't see it their way.
When Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus, this was basically his only point. If you clearly define your terms, thereby unambiguously fixing the referents for your propositions, then all disagreement will disappear.
In later works, he realized that there are a lot of things we do with language other than relating propositions, that you use language before you get definitions, and that things are generally a bit more complicated than he used to think.
that you use language before you get definitions
Ah, but that's simply untrue. We use language before we get explicit definitions. The implicit definitions are a necessary precursor for language use.
Maybe. But the point is that implicit definitions are never clearly defined. Indeed, they are hardly definitions- more like an incomplete sense of in what circumstances the use of the word is appropriate.
Of course, in practice this process of definition is more like iterative refining than fixing for all time, but the result is the same: the point is to ensure that your discussion is actually about the world. This is what making beliefs pay rent and tabooing words are all about.
(Hmm, we're developing a vocabulary drawn from EY posts - are there more standard terms for these things we could be using?)
For our European readers, I would like to note that what kurige meant by 'Like peanut-butter and jelly' was something like 'they go really well together, and in fact one would probably not put one on a sandwich without the other'.
Just try not to picture it; you'll be fine.
Probably most people know this, but if you find yourself needing to mention this again it's vital to add that "jelly" here refers to what we call "jam", because to us, "jelly" is what you call "Jell-O". You can imagine why we're not thrilled by the thought of a peanut-butter and "Jell-O" sandwich!
In Rhetoric, they call this technique "Concession".
You've overlooked another way to "win" an argument: To persuade otherwise uninvolved third parties.
Typically, two people arguing are already thoroughly fortified in their opinions. Few people find argument for its own sake enjoyable and thus are unlikely to be lured into a debate they have no emotional stake in; as well, upon rising to the occasion to defend their side, their resistance to acknowledging their opponent's valid arguments will be stronger than ever.
Less-involved bystanders, however, can view the argument with a more impartial eye, and are much more likely to be persuaded. Of course, this is typically the justification made for the style of debating you argue against in this post--especially on the internet, where bystanders are plentiful and social dynamics are strongly subject to John Gabriel's G.I.F. Theory--but it's not at all clear that such an approach is actually effective for this purpose, any more than it is for persuading the opposing party.
As an aside, I can think of at least two other reasons to engage in debate; but neither derives value from actually winning the argument, and thus are irrelevant in this context.
Bystanders may well identify themselves emotionally with one debater or the other, so being "nice" to one's opponent would reduce the defensiveness of the audience as well.
The first rule of persuading a negatively disposed audience - rationally or otherwise - is not to say the things they expect you to say. The expected just gets filtered out, or treated as confirmation of pre-existing beliefs regardless of its content.
Also, by following their arguments, trying to clarify it and understanding the pieces. Your sincere and genuine attempt to understand them in the best possible light will make them open to your point of view.
The smart Christians are some of the most logical people I've ever met. There worldview fits together like a kind of Geometry. They know that you get a completely different form of it if you substitute one axiom for another (existence of God for non-existence of God), much like Euclid's world dissolves without the parallel postulate.
Once we got to that point in our conversation, I realized that they we agreed on everything about the world except that postulate, which they were also aware of. I realized that they were neither stupid nor evil, as I had assumed before (a remarkably common, and uncivil, view that atheists have of believers). I still disagree with them. However, I was fine with leaving the conversation with both of our positions unchanged, but understanding each other better.
Sadly, the unexpected frequently gets translated into the expected, even to the point of explicit denials of a position being ignored repeatedly in a single conversation.
Then say something more unexpected. There's an art to it.
How hard is it to fit a simple denial into a frame? Not hard at all.
This situation is especially troublesome if you've already been market as standard opponent #445, such as when you change your own mind you a new, more subtle position that is similar to your old position.
When I adjust my position in subtle ways like that, I go to pains to point it out, which is rhetorically advantageous and shows that there's a real dialectic going on.
Sometimes the harsh approach has surprisingly good results. Example.
Tangential, I know, but this surprises me. Hitchens, with his literary background, strikes me as a very nuanced thinker, attuned to the various shades of gray. (For example, he's by no means unmoved by religion's contributions to art and culture.) Maybe you're thinking of his talent for devastating rhetorical flourish, as in his infamous comments on Jerry Falwell?
I've read God is not Great and seen footage of him in debate, and while I admire him in many ways, in other ways think he's a total arse and an embarrassment, and I don't think Yvain's picture of him is all that unfair. There isn't anyone prominent who thinks that the Sistine Chapel is bad because it's religious.
(I should add that there's almost nothing he has to say about religion that I actually disagree with, I just wouldn't use his turns of phrase to my religious friends)
You use different rhetoric to energize the base than to sway the undecideds. Hitchens often acts as a cheerleader. All of the big four do from time to time -- well, maybe not Dennett.
Hitch has the strongest line in work-the-base rhetoric and so provides a good example of the sort of rhetoric you shouldn't use when trying to sway the undecideds, which was Yvain's point.
I accept your correction. I've only seen Hitchens on TV a few times and never read his book. My introduction to him was in fact his Jerry Falwell comments. If you say he's more nuanced in his writings, I believe you.
My goal going into arguments is not to crush them or convince them that I am right. I try to keep a more open mind and understand their arguments. If you start out with a goal of crushing them you won't be in a state of mind to admit if their arguments are stronger.
My sense is that the most rational argument is the one that gets you closest to your true goal. The theme of my most persuasive arguments is usually something like, "Once we sort things out I bet we'll see that we're really in substantial agreement." Dale Carnagiesque or not, to me rhetoric doesn't have to be a "dark art," full of manipulation and cant. Instead, I try to give respect and keep in mind what I really need to take away from the transaction. I also conceptualize what my erstwhile opponent needs and why. This way, minds may yet meet and all parties have a line of social retreat.
The inventors of the original form of rationalist virtue AND rhetoric sure didn't think that the latter was a dark art. Rationalists should WIN!
Rationalists should WIN!
Rationalists have better definitions of "winning". They don't necessarily include triumphing in social wrestling matches.
We're running up against the equivocation at the core of this community, between rationalists as people who make optimal plays versus rationalists as people who love truth and hate lies.
rationalists as people who make optimal plays versus rationalists as people who love truth and hate lies
It's only possible for us to systematically make optimal plays IF we have a sufficient grasp of truth. There's only an equivocation in the minds of people who don't understand that one goal is a necessary precursor for the other.
Rationalists should shouldn't deny themselves the utility of rhetoric. Any rational rationalist can see that rhetoric is the path to winning, a kind of social theatre that lubricates decision-making with irrational or intermittently rational groups. If a group needs to be convinced of a position within a finite amount of time, bare reasoning isn't always the best option.
Maybe that is too Machiavellian to be "really" rational, but it is the winning path.
I think I am using "rhetoric" in a different way than Aristotle. For Aristotle, it was the art of speaking clearly and eloquently to communicate a position. I am using it more in the way people use when they say "empty rhetoric" or "political rhetoric". "Unless you give up your rights, the terrorists have already won" is my idea of an archetypal rhetorical technique. That may not be fair to the field of rhetoric, but I need some word to describe it and I can't think of a better one, so "rhetoric" it is.
Rhetoric is a technique that may be useful to rationalists, but it's not a rationalist technique. Compare the use of force. I may, as a rationalist, decide the best way towards my goal is murdering all who oppose me, in which case I'll want to know techniques like how to use an assault weapon. But there's still something fundamentally shady about the technique of killing people; it may just barely be justified on utilitarian grounds for a sufficiently important goal, but it's one of those things that you use only as a last resort and even then only after agonizing soul-searching. I feel confident saying that the technique of murdering people effectively as a Dark Art.
I feel the same way about rhetoric (by my pessimistic definition). Tricking people into believing things they have no legitimate evidence for can certainly be helpful, but the more people do it the worse the world gets. Not only do people end up with less than maximally accurate beliefs, but every rhetorician needs to promote Dark Side Epistemology in order to keep zir job. And if I use rhetoric, you need to start using rhetoric just to keep up, and sooner or later everyone's beliefs are completely skewed and inaccurate. It's not quite as Dark an Art as force is, and it's much easier to justify, but it's in the same category.
Be careful about using the "rationalists should win" slogan too literally. Martial artists should win too, but that doesn't mean they should take an AK-47 to their next sparring match and blowing their opponent's face off. Martial artists place high value on winning honorably. I see no reason why we shouldn't emulate them.
I disagree. The problem with using dishonest rethoric to win in a debate isn't that it's winning dishonorably; it's that it's winning at the wrong game - on a game that you wouldn't consider the most important if you looked at it closely.
To continue with the martial arts analogy, imagine say a Chinese kung fu master in World War 2 Nanjing that knows that Japanese soldiers are coming over to kill off all of his family. Should he try to win the fight honorably? Or just try to win using every dirty trick in the book (including running away)? If he focuses on winning honorably, he's lost sight of his main goal (save his family) in favor of a secondary one (win honorably).
Similarly, if you foxus on "winning the debate", and as a result push people into a corner that will make them dislike you and become more attached to their identity as a believer in whatever - you focused on the wrong subgoal, and lost at the one which was important to you.
I'm a precedent utilitarian. I try to maximize utility, except when doing so would set a bad precedent that would lower utility later.
Precedent utilitarians are usually good about restraining from force. Yes, killing a rich miser and distributing her money to the poor might increase utility. But it sets the precedent that anyone can kill someone if they think of a good enough reason, and most people won't be smart enough to limit themselves to genuinely good reasons. Therefore, precedent utilitarians generally respect the rule of not killing others. But in certain cases this rule breaks down. In the WWII example you mention, it doesn't seem particularly dangerous to set the precedent that you can use force against invaders coming to kill your family.
I try to use the same thought process when evaluating when to use rhetoric. If anyone can use rhetoric any time it furthers a goal that they consider genuinely good, then there's little incentive to use rational argument except on the rare hard-core rationalists who are mostly resistant to rhetorical tricks. I want to be able to condemn a demagogue who uses rhetoric without being a hypocrite. If I needed to use rhetoric in a situation where I couldn't blame anyone else for using rhetoric, like trying to save my family, I'd do it.
(the problem with precedent utilitarianism is that the calculations are impossible to do with real math, and mostly just involve handwaving. But I hope it at least gives a sketch of my thought processes)
Yvain: "I'm a precedent utilitarian. I try to maximize utility, except when doing so would set a bad precedent that would lower utility later."
I think this is an odd thing to say. Any utilitarian ought to be declining short-term gains that result in long-term losses. So why the need for this specific disclaimer?
Yvain seems to be using the term to mean a utilitarian (in the pure sense) who scrupulously considers the force of his example. The implication is that many don't - we're not talking about perfectly rational beings here, just people who agree with the principle of utility maximization.
Except, of course, for all those aspects of martial arts which we shouldn't emulate.
Um, isn't it kind of rhetorical to compare rhetoric to force and murder?
Also, all your articles here that I recall -- likewise those of Eliezer on Overcoming Bias -- are masterful applications of rhetoric. So I'm kind of confused here. Is this one of those "do as I say, not as I do" things?
If you mean the articles here are clear or well argued, thank you. I have no objection to clarity or good argument; see the first paragraph of the comment above. If you mean that I'm using dirty tricks like the "terrorists win" example, then I'd like to know exactly what you mean so I can avoid doing it in the future.
When I compare rhetoric (meaning "empty rhetoric", as mentioned) to force and murder, I'm not saying they're equally bad, or doing one leads to the other or anything like that. Just that they're bad for the same reason. Both are potentially "useful" techniques. But both prevent rational argument and if used too frequently lead to a world in which rational argument is impossible.
I think the point is that you do a little of both; loosely speaking you are guilty of being fairly eloquent--presenting your ideas persuasively and engagingly, in a style that is inherently likely to increase acceptance.
It is an unavoidable facet of human communication that the same idea can be more or less persuasive depending on how it is presented. Over on OB, Robin uses a far more neutral (or at times even anti-persuasive) style, and if memory serves me he and Eliezer have argued a bit about such use of style.
But that is precisely the sort of "dirty trick" you claim to be against. By using murder as an example, you're setting off a "boo light" (opposite of applause light) and linking it to the thing you want people to dislike. That's rhetoric, and emotional manipulation.
And it's neither a good thing nor a bad thing, in itself. Used to strengthen a valid argument, it's fine. Arguing that it's bad in and of itself is a misunderstanding... and another "boo light" (e.g. "empty rhetoric", "dirty tricks").
Emotional manipulation is unavoidable, by the way. Boring presenters and neutral presentations are just manipulating people's emotions either towards boredom and not caring, or to "respect", "status", and "seriousness", depending on the audience. It's best to deliberately choose what emotions you want to create, in whom, rather than leaving the matter to chance.
Indeed. I've had similar thoughts to you, and take care to leave a social line of retreat. In the case of religious people, it doesn't work. In other cases, it works great, though I can't think of any off the top of my head. I just have a general recipie in my head "to convince someone, make it so that they'll look and feel good if they agree with you"
I've had similar thoughts as well. One problem, it seems, is the amount of effort it requires to argue in this way. If you don't know your opponent's position backwards and forwards, it can be very difficult to come up with a line of retreat for them to follow. If you don't actually grok your opponent's position, pretending to do so is unlikely to be effective. Ultimately, it probably pays to specialize a bit in a couple of areas so you know everyone's argument well enough to find those lines of retreat and to help them intuitively understand your argument.
Yvain, I enjoy your posts, and generally find them useful, informative, and well written.
I also recognize that this view is controversial in some circles, but one thing that would make me enjoy them rather more is if you managed to ferret out the implicit assumption that crops up every now and then that your rationalist protagonists are necessarily male. (Or at least predominantly so, I haven't been back to do an exhaustive stock-take of your gender specific pronoun usage, but I do recall being struck by this at least once before, so I figured it was worth a comment this time.)
Just to clarify, I don't mean Theo here. If you want to use a specifically male example, that's fine. But phrases like "the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his mind" and "[e]ither a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he doesn't" strike me as problematic.
I'm not for a moment suggesting that you're being consciously sexist here. In fitting with the theme of this post, I spent a fair while rejecting others' calls for gender neutral language under the mistaken (largely emotional) impression that agreeing with them would have be an admission of some deep moral flaw in me, rather than merely a small and relatively painless step towards inclusiveness - and ultimately better communication.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I've thought about this a few times, and I agree with you that it promotes sexism and is bad, but I just really hate using the phrases "he or she" every time I have to use a pronoun. A sentence like "A rationalist should ensure he or she justifies his or her opinion to himself or herself" is just too awkward to understand. And I am too much of a grammar purist to use "them" as a singular.
I used to use the gender-neutral pronoun "ze", but people told me they didn't understand it or didn't like it or thought it sounded stupid. And I tried using "she" as the default for a while, but people kept getting confused because they weren't expecting it, and trying to figure out where I'd mentioned a female.
I'm willing to accept whatever the common consensus is here. Maybe Less Wrong-ers are open-minded enough to accept "ze" where the average reader isn't.
(I've heard some people here use "ve" a few times, but from the context I gathered it was more of a way to refer to aliens/AIs/transhumans than a normal gender-neutral pronoun. Is this true?)
I think I remember reading that the plural used to be conventional grammar and was then deliberately suppressed in favor of "he".
I use the plural. It grows on you surprisingly quickly and isn't at all obtrusive. Anyone who doesn't already have the info stored "Oh, Eliezer uses the plural" after reading my writings for months is a case in point thereof.
Use of the plural form also has the advantage of being the stylistic direction the language is trending to. English is a mass hallucination anyways, why stand in futile defiance of its whims?
The grammatical value of "they" used as a singular has been discussed frequently at the inestimable Language Log, including citations of the form used by such disreputable, notorious abusers of the noble English tongue as William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill. A good post on the subject, though by no means the only one, can be found here.
Maybe next time, we can all argue over splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, or other happy chestnuts of wholly-unfounded prescriptive grammar pedant absurdity.
Indeed! I pay attention both to gender pronouns and to Eliezer's writing patterns, and I never noticed this. (Eliezer_2000 used "ve" a lot though.)
I had previously decided on "he" in order to optimize for flow, but I am happy to accept this well-made point and switch to "they'.
For myself, I use the generic feminine wherever possible in writing, but that's just me. In natural speech, I use they, like everyone else.
Sometimes I flip a coin for each hypothetical person I invoke.
Landsburg:
I'm using this disclaimer from now on. Nearly as hilarious as it is awesome.
Hofstadter has made an excellent argument on this topic called "A Person Paper on Purity in Language".
Iain Banks, in "Player of Games", also expressed this sentiment pretty well:
"Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it's brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over."
My preferred sex-neutral pronoun is "they".
Yes, I also prefer "they".
It's unobtrusive and it has a decent chance of actually catching on, unlike any alternative I've ever heard of. There's something to be said for practicality.
A lot of people object to "he or she" on grounds of euphony; but clarity of meaning should always take priority in our considerations over sound. The fact is that "he or she" is what we actually mean.
Granted, like any phrase, it is inelegant in certain contexts, and can become tiresome if repeated. So one has to use workarounds. Luckily, "they" (always perfectly acceptable in spoken conversation) is also available for judicious written use.
"the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his or her mind" sounds just fine. ("Their" could also be substituted.)
"Either a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he or she doesn't" is bad, mainly because of the "or" preceding "he or she". "He/she doesn't" is better, but "they don't" is probably the best (certainly in a comment; maybe a post should be more formal?).
Invented pronouns are just too strange and should be avoided.
Agreed. Sound is deeply important though. Most of us on a forum like this spend our days navigating seas of words. To give no consideration to the sound of those words is exceptionally bad fun theory.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I do appreciate that this inevitably opens up a can of worms, and that no solution is really ideal.
I agree that "he or she" awkward in many, if not most situations. For whatever it's worth, my preferred solution is to use the plural (they/them/their) in any situation where it's unambiguous enough to function effectively, and to otherwise use she/her. If people are confused by feminine pronouns... well, that kind of just illustrates the problem, and making them think about that at least serves some sort of purpose.
Regarding being a grammar purist, it should be noted that being offended at using 'them' as a singular indefinite is a relatively recent trend.
'ze' and 've' are aesthetically unpleasing, but using them more is likely the only way they would become less so. You won't find me doing it anytime soon though.
It should be noted that until recently, 'man' was gender-neutral in English. John Stuart Mill found himself just on the cusp of that, and tried to argue for women's suffrage in England on the basis that the law referred to 'man' and so included women. (he lost). Common archaic equivalents to todays' 'man' and 'woman' are 'were' and 'wif', where 'man' meant the whole species (though commonly that only considered males).
'She' isn't that confusing, and radical feminism isn't the pernicious beast it was in the 90's, so it seems like 'she' is the best bet for a gender-neutral personal pronoun.
Personally, I prefer to invent a subject for such a thought experiment and then use the appropriate pronoun for the person's gender - which is what you did here with Theo.
The problem with inventing a subject is that people may notice a (unintentional or even nonexistent) trend to always cast one gender as the brave, smart, rational protagonist and the other gender as the cowardly, stupid, silly antagonist.
Personally, I don't care what technique is used (fictional subject, always "he", always "she", "he or she", "they", invented pronouns, etc.)
Flip a coin?
Please stick with "he".
I agree that it's imperfect, but inelegance matters.
If inelegance is your primary concern, then "she" seems at least as good, and probably a lesser evil for other reasons.
I find it very hard to consider that anything but nitpicking. Although that's probably because my native language is Finnish and it doesn't have separate third person pronouns for different genders. I don't think that distinction is worth making.
Then again, since English does have he and she, perhaps one can't avoid it.
I agree. And after studying Japanese, I started to find it silly that English (like most Western languages) makes the distinction between 'singular' and 'plural'. Like whether we're talking about exactly 1 thing or any number other than 1 is information important enough to encode with every noun, but it's usually not worth mentioning what the particular number is.
ETA: exactly what Nebu said below.
I feel like mentioning that English seems to be quite tolerant of not making the singular/plural distinction. When borrowing from languages that don't make this distinction (in my experience, Japanese and Lojban), it seems that people simply use the existing form for both singular and plural: "This gismu is different from all other gismu in that instead of taking just one sumti or finitely many sumti, it can take infinitely many sumti."
In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I'm amazed that ancient people put enough emphasis on past/present/future to justify having irregular verbs. They must have had a very strange conception of time.
But then I'm also amazed that Russian doesn't have a definite article...
I think what Thomblake would like (and which is how I understand Japanese to work) is to be to use a noun without specifying whether or not it is plural, and have extra (not necessarily "grammatical categories") contructs for adding the extra information of whether it is plural or not.
E.g.
So it's not new grammatical categories (as long as you don't consider just prefixing the word "three" to be a new grammatical category).
The way English works, there's no way to use a noun while leaving the "1 vs not 1" information ambiguous. If you leave off the "s", you must be referring to exactly one instance. If you put the "s", you must be referring to a non-1 instance (possibly zero instances).
If you believe morality is impossible without God, you have a strong disincentive to become an atheist
That idea is distinct from whether or not God exists. In arguments about evolution I have made the point that it is compatible with both the existence and non-existence of God. I did not say that to "leave a line of retreat" for the Christian anti-Darwinist I was talking to, but because I believed he held an incorrect notion of what Darwinian evolution is. The notion of leaving a line of retreat for others seems less rationalist, for it implies valuing certain beliefs themselves rather than the truth per se. The reason to leave a line of retreat for yourself is because it is always possible you are wrong about something and so it is wise to be prepared.
P(evolution|God) is much lower than P(creationism|God), so even if you are leading them to the right conclusion about evolution, they still aren't really reasoning properly if they still hold their belief in God. In fact, one might argue that they are doing worse.
That depends on your motivations. The line of retreat is also useful for improving their reasoning capabilities. Changing one's mind in the face of emotional resistance is hard and takes practice to master.
I'd write that as P(evolution|Creationist God) < P(creationism|Creationist God). One can easily conceive of many variants of God which are not only compatible with evolution, but for which evolution is the most sensible explanation for what we observe around us. E.g. a God which sets the initial conditions of the universe, starts the big bang, and then does not interfere from there on.
The other benefit of writing it that way is that it more clearly highlights the tautological nature of the argument for creationism given the existence of (a creationist) God.
however P(evolution | moral God) would be rather low.
ie, think about all the nasty stuff that had to happen to, well, give rise to all the currently existent beings. Evolution is a nasty process. A god that is sufficiently intelligent and powerful that it COULD have engineered the species it wanted right from the start, rather than just setting stuff in motion and waiting for something interesting to evolve, allowing all that suffering to happen in the process, well... that would seem to exclude such a being from having anything resembling human morality, right? So when taking into account the often associated "god is good" claim, well, the whole thing completely implodes, no?
I'm not sure you need that. If you're willing to grant an omnipotent being, it seems like spontaneous creation of whatever he wants would be more likely than anything else.
If miracles are possible, they're always the simplest explanation for everything. Which might itself provide a methodological reason for denying them.
Well, now we're getting into a discussion about the nature of God.
An omnipotent, but non-omniscient God might be compatible with evolution, especially if the universe is large (as it seems to be), because perhaps God, while capable of spontaneously creating stuff, just isn't paying attention to anything going on in our particular neighborhood of the universe.
An omnipotent and omniscient, but disinterested God would also be compatible with evolution, as he could, if he wanted to, create new species, but just doesn't bother, as he has other things to worry about.
Etc.
What about if miracles are possible, but extremely improbable? Which I think exactly describes the universe we are currently in, assuming you are willing to accept "new organisms of a new specie spontaneously coming into existence via random quantum effects" as a possible but extremely improbably miracle.
Nope. by 'Miracle' I mean God goes *poof* and things happen. If you've got an omnipotent, omniscient being with his grubby little paws in everything, then he provides the simplest explanation for any phenomenon.
Not true -- you would still model God as some sort of cognitive entity. Miracles which are parsimonious given the temperament revealed by his previous miracles would be simpler.
For example, given a Judeo-Christian God, if you discovered that gay men were living longer happier lives than straight men, this would not be easily explained as a miracle.
Hmm... I think we are talking about the same territory. It's just that in your map, you've labelled the territory as "God" and in my map, I've labelled the territory as "random quantum effects".
Not sure why Marshall is being voted down here; I agree with him completely. The main reason I "argue" with someone is to seek truth. Perfectly rational agents with the same information should never disagree. So if I disagree with someone, either one (or more) of us is not rational, or one (or more) of us has information that the other one doesn't.
If I argue with someone, I am doing them a favor by expending effort to provide them with more information or helping them see their irrationalities. If someone argues with me, they are doing me a favor by expending effort to provide me with more information or helping me to see my irrationalities.
When I argue with people who are relatively rational (e.g. most of my friends), this works well. Usually one of us learns something new.
When I argue with people who are less rational (e.g. most people in general), this does not work very well, and I run into the problems described by Yvain here.
The most important reason to argue with someone is that someone should change their mind.
Bad, bad idea. There's no way to avoid losing an argument, because most of the time arguments are social wrestling contests / displays of influence and status.
The only thing you can do is to always make sure you're supporting the right side. That doesn't guarantee that you don't lose, if losing is defined as not coming out as the social victor and failing to convince your opponent or your listeners.
You can't control the responses of others. You can force them to be rational. All you can do is be correct.
As a rationalist, that's all you should really care about anyway. But precious few of us are rationalists.
Surely you don't mean that simpliciter. There are other things that one should care about, perhaps even while wearing a 'rationalist' hat. It seems that being able to argue in a way that supports the truth without alienating one's friends seems like a worthwhile endeavor.
No person who chooses his friends over speaking the truth is a rationalist.
Everybody has their priorities. Rationalists can have only a limited subset of the possibilities.
Then rationalists are terribly vicious people.
Honesty is a virtue. Too much concern for truth-telling is a vice (one might call such person a 'stickler').
This post does not ask you to pursue friendship at the expense of learning the truth. It instead suggests a way of helping other people come to the truth, in a way that can advance friendship.
It is an empirical truth that people tend to become more like what they pretend to be.
You can't pretend to agree with a counter-rational position, or believe in counter-rational arguments, without degrading your own rationality. Whether it's theoretically possible for minds to exist such that this does not occur doesn't matter. Our minds are structured so that it does.
Furthermore, I am highly skeptical of the position that despite valuing rationality enough to stick to it even in the face of inconvenience and countermotivations, rationalists could plausibly value the inaccuracy of people they supposedly care about.
Once again, we are running into the problem of the term "rational" referring to at least two different concepts.
Once again, we are running into the problem of the term "rational" referring to at least two different concepts.
1. Epistemic rationality: The map should reflect the terroritory. Truth above all else. 2. Instrumental rationality: You should win. My values are such that making my friends happy is a form of winning.
You can't expect to achieve your goals unless you can match options with outcomes. How we define 'winning' is itself something that's determined by our goals, and reality determines which goals are self-compatible.
A commitment to epistemic rationality means taking maximum care that one's own beliefs are correct. It doesn't say anything about what one should say to others.
& 3. Honesty: Always speak the whole truth as you know it to everyone.
Eliezer, that's not what honesty means. Honesty is a term of virtue. It represents the appropriate amount of concern for truth-telling. Here's a thought experiment:
Let's consider two hypothetical people, Harry and Stan. Harry and Stan are both very honest people - they do their best to never lie or otherwise deceive people.
Suppose that Anne Frank is hiding in the attic, and the Nazis come asking if she's there. Harry doesn't want to tell them, but Stan insists he mustn't deceive the Nazis, regardless of his commitment to save Anne's life.
Now, is Stan therefore more honest than Harry?
Depends on what Harry says.
If Harry says "I don't know where Anne is", then he's lying, and thus less honest than Stan.
If Harry says "I don't want to tell you where Anne is" then he's not stating a falsehood, nor "deceiving" (in any sense that I can think of) the Nazis, so would probably be "comparably" if not "equally" honest as Stan.
If this seems to conflict with your intuitions of ethics, it may be because you associate "ethical goodness" with "honesty", whereas I consider "honesty" to be merely "usually ethically good" in most cases, but in the fully general case a "ethically neutral" concept.
edit: Fixed typo where I forgot to add the word "not".
But if Harry says "I don't want to tell you where Anne is", he will arouse the suspicion of the Nazis, who will search his house and find Anne.
In this thought experiment, the price Stan pays to maintain his code of honesty is one human life. What benefits accrue from his code that make such sacrifices worthwhile?
Stan isn't a consequentialist; he considers himself to have done the right thing even though there are alternatives that would overall have better consequences, and so he won't look for benefits to justify his decision.
I think the world needs more Harrys and fewer Stans; or at least, I think that would have better consequences, and that's what I value.