On a recent trip to Ireland, I gave a talk on tactics for having better arguments (video here). There's plenty in the video that's been discussed on LW before (Ideological Turing Tests and other reframes), but I thought I'd highlight one other class of trick I use to have more fruitful disagreements.
It's hard, in the middle of a fight, to remember, recognize, and defuse common biases, rhetorical tricks, emotional triggers, etc. I'd rather cheat than solve a hard problem, so I put a lot of effort into shifting disagreements into environments where it's easier for me and my opposite-number to reason and argue well, instead of relying on willpower. Here's a recent example of the kind of shift I like to make:
A couple months ago, a group of my friends were fighting about the Brendan Eich resignation on facebook. The posts were showing up fast; everyone was, presumably, on the edge of their seats, fueled by adrenaline, and alone at their various computers. It’s a hard place to have a charitable, thoughtful debate.
I asked my friends (since they were mostly DC based) if they’d be amenable to pausing the conversation and picking it up in person. I wanted to make the conversation happen in person, not in front of an audience, and in a format that let people speak for longer and ask questions more easily. If so, I promised to bake cookies for the ultimate donnybrook.
My friends probably figured that I offered cookies as a bribe to get everyone to change venues, and they were partially right. But my cookies had another strategic purpose. When everyone arrived, I was still in the process of taking the cookies out of the oven, so I had to recruit everyone to help me out.
“Alice, can you pour milk for people?”
“Bob, could you pass out napkins?”
“Eve, can you greet people at the door while I’m stuck in the kitchen with potholders on?”
Before we could start arguing, people on both sides of the debate were working on taking care of each other and asking each others’ help. Then, once the logistics were set, we all broke bread (sorta) with each other and had a shared, pleasurable experience. Then we laid into each other.
Sharing a communal experience of mutual service didn’t make anyone pull their intellectual punches, but I think it made us more patient with each other and less anxiously fixated on defending ourselves. Sharing food and seating helped remind us of the relationships we enjoyed with each other, and why we cared about probing the ideas of this particular group of people.
I prefer to fight with people I respect, who I expect will fight in good faith. It's hard to remember that's what I'm doing if I argue with them in the same forums (comment threads, fb, etc) that I usually see bad fights. An environment shift and other compensatory gestures makes it easier to leave habituated errors and fears at the door.
Well, in my experience, we don't all arrive at consensus, just because we start by liking each other more. This was the discussion where one of my friends said that disagreeing with Eich's resignation was the moral equivalent of endorsing genocide against gays (for a variety of slippery slope reasons that I don't feel the need to disentangle).
The main difference, as far as I could tell, is that we all heard his reasoning, rather than all jumping in right after his assertion, and got a better idea of the reasons of his belief and then could decide what arguments to marshal (or whether we wanted to let the most inflammatory statement dominate the topics we covered at all).
Basically, think of changing contexts as all along a spectrum. Probably it's a bad idea to have a discussion while pleasantly tipsy in a spa. And also a bad idea to have it while quickly tabbing back and forth between facebook and your work and hiding windows from your boss. My main point isn't that "Cookies" is always the right context, but that it's often worth not staying in the venue where your argument started.
Personally, I find that people are more likely to show me the soft underbelly of their beliefs if they're relaxed and in a situation where it's clearer I care about them (and easier for me to do the same thing). So I like creating contexts of warmth and trust, because it often means people are sharing their beliefs with me, excited to show me how they work, rather than just looking for weak points in mine. (and vice versa).
Depending on how close and dear someone's belief are to their own identity, a context of warmth and growth could work against going against a wrong belief full-bore. Especially when you notice how essential such a belief is to someone's identity. Like telling a child there's no Santa, to their face.
Probably the crux of our disagreement: Looking for weak points in your own and the interlocutor's belief is what you should be doing, with as few distractions as possible. (If correct beliefs were the overridin... (read more)