Focusing on truth rather than status in a conversation tends to save time with respect to the goal of truth.
Those two aren't the only possible ways of having a discussion. There a lot more that goes into having discussions.
Communicating why you believe A is different from communicating why it makes sense for other people to believe A. However, if the two are very different, something has gone wrong:
Not at all.
At the LW-Europe Community camp I did a workshop on Focusing. There are two ways to provide evidence that Focusing works.
I personally choose mental techniques based on trying different techniques and experiencing what the techniques do. I can speak about my empiric personal experience.
I can also refer to Eugine Gendlin being a respected academic psychologist and the fact that there are many published studies that support Focusing.
Both arguments are entangled with reality but it's more useful to talk about the scientific evidence. It's more likely to convince my audience that Focusing is valuable.
Cross-posted to my blog.
A while ago, I wrote about epistemic trust. The thrust of my argument was that rational argument is often more a function of the group dynamic, as opposed to how rational the individuals in the group are. I assigned meaning to several terms, in order to explain this:
Intellectual honesty: being up-front not just about what you believe, but also why you believe it, what your motivations are in saying it, and the degree to which you have evidence for it.
Intellectual-Honesty Culture: The norm of intellectual honesty. Calling out mistakes and immediately admitting them; feeling comfortable with giving and receiving criticism.
Face Culture: Norms associated with lack of intellectual honesty. In particular, a need to save face when one's statements turn out to be incorrect or irrelevant; the need to make everyone feel included by praising contributions and excusing mistakes.
Intellectual trust: the expectation that others in the discussion have common intellectual goals; that criticism is an attempt to help, rather than an attack. The kind of trust required to take other people's comments at face value rather than being overly concerned with ulterior motives, especially ideological motives. I hypothesized that this is caused largely by ideological common ground, and that this is the main way of achieving intellectual-honesty culture.
There are several subtleties which I did not emphasize last time.