Alicorn comments on According to Dale Carnegie, You Can't Win an Argument—and He Has a Point - Less Wrong

61 Post author: ChrisHallquist 30 November 2013 06:23AM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 30 November 2013 07:19:21PM 8 points [-]

What has happened many times is I argue with my friend or my parent and "win" while they're defending their position to the teeth. Months later, they present my argument to me as their own as if the previous discussion never happened.

I have known one person for whom this was a deliberate policy. He would never (he said) admit to changing his mind about anything. If he did change his mind as a result of an argument, he would merely cease advocating the view he now thought erroneous, and after some suitable lapse of time, advocate what he now believed, as if he had believed it all along.

Comment author: Alicorn 01 December 2013 01:25:27AM 5 points [-]

Did he have a reason for this policy?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 01 December 2013 09:21:37AM *  9 points [-]

Not that he said, but I guess it was a status thing. Another curious feature of his discourse was that on mailing lists he would never post a direct reply to anything, with a "Re:" in the subject line. He engaged with the conversations, but always framed his postings as if they were entirely new contributions -- as if one were to participate here by only posting top level articles. I assume this was also about status.

Comment author: JackV 02 December 2013 12:06:48PM 1 point [-]

FWIW, I always struggle to embrace it when I change my mind ("Yay, I'm less wrong!")

But I admit, I find it hard, "advocating a new point of view" is a lot easier than "admitting I was wrong about a previous point of view", so maybe striving to do #1 whether or not you've done #2 would help change my mind in response to new information a lot quicker?