You'd be surprised. If there's a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is "devoted follower of the Beginner's Guide to Arguing Constructively", I think it's possible to have a decent constructive argument with people who are about 30-40 and up. I've certainly done so myself.
If you lead by example, many people will conform the standards of the debate to your tenor. Not all, of course, but that's when you have to know when to quit.
> Which means that, for example, I believe it is simply impossible to have these kind of "constructive arguments" on, say, Twitter, for example.
That was mentioned in the guide :)
> everyone argues from an emotional perspective.
Certainly you'd agree that there's a scale? It's not black and white. I will edit this part to make that more clear.
> Certainly you'd agree that there's a scale? It's not black and white. I will edit this part to make that more clear.
Actually, not really. You seem to be missing my primary point, which is that thinking that things lie along a single scale where on one hand you have "pure, platonic ideal of reason" and on the other end you have "emotional hysterics". I don't think it works that way. I think the sibling commenter put it best:
>> everyone argues from an emotional perspective
> You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.
That is, I think step one is try to understand why you (and your debate partner) are emotionally incentivized to care about the topic in the first place.
> You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.
The thing is, if you're talking about an average online debater, their emotional motivation is likely quite confused. The emotional distribution might be: 20% wanting to appear smart/reasonable, 30% wanting to insult their idea of bad people, 30% wanting to reinforce their lifestyle as valid, etc or whatever. With that, you could can could translate liamrosen's comment to say "if they're motivated 30% to appear smart, you can involve them in the framework" and once you involve the person, Cialdini's commitment and consistency can strong motivators to keep them there.
That said, I think this does raise the point that there are other good way to deal with the emotions behinds arguments that aren't mentioned in liamrosen's essay (the OP). One standard approach to determine the emotion behind a given irrational claim, acknowledge the emotion, sympathize with it and then go back and show that the original claim is unnecessary.
> That is, I think step one is try to understand why you (and your debate partner) are emotionally incentivized to care about the topic in the first place.
I think this is excellent advise. To add to this, I think often minor details, like the use of some word or terminology can trigger an immediate "emotional reject" response. It then becomes impossible to have a constructive debate because the person will reject all arguments based on that emotional reaction to the minor trigger. It then is very helpful to trace back to the source of the reaction and e.g. agree on different terminology.
So, for example, I'm arguing something, I run out of good argument. I dodge by making a vague, emotional point. Then the other party will construct a new argument based on my vague emotional point. This lets me reset and construct a new argument.
It's a way to keep arguing when following a given point down the rabbit hole gets stale.
When the point has been prodded to death by some argument, it lets your fellow arguer back-up and poke it from another side. Maybe my argument is wrong, but myself and the person I'm arguing with haven't figured out exactly why yet. This lets us keep circling looking for weak points.
Hopefully over the course of that we both come away with a deeper understanding of the idea itself.
I think of it like when E. coli run and tumble over the course of the hunt for food. Sometimes a random walk is a weirdly great way to discover the mechanism of how an idea works or doesn't work. I'm just occasionally flipping the switch on the 'tumble' circuit: https://www.mit.edu/~kardar/teaching/projects/chemotaxis(And...
If the other party is with people, they tend to play to the audience.
This goes a bit against the spirit of the thing, but a side-effect seems to be that if one is using these tools in a public forum like FB (which of course goes against this article's advice), one does come off as more reasonable to anyone in the audience who is undecided. (I think...)
Not only that. Another aspect is that emotions and "instinct" are much, much older, from an evolutionary perspective, than our very recent reasoning abilities, and way more widespread amongst the animal kingdom than reason.
So, while far from perfect, they work. Emotions and instinct kept most of our ancestors and most of the currently living animals both alive and thriving. Which means that, despite their limits, they have their place and shouldn't simply be discarded by a wave of the hand.
Took me some time to understand that. And I still have a hard time taking it into account in my everyday life and interactions.
This is the point. Instincts developed to keep you alive in a world where the classic laws of the jungle where true. Since the modern world, the definition of what is "strongest" and the threats you find yourselve exposed to differ vastly from that back in the days.
While instincts will generally give you a good direction to start with, problems are too complex today to just rely on instincts. Heck even I had my instincts tell me "this feels wrong" and upon reading and getting smart about that topic i completely changed my mind.
If you have time to prepare for a discussion, try not to rely on instinct but let it push you to gather facts to undermine it or to oppose it.
I think you might be underestimating how much of human instincts have evolved to deal with a complicated network of interpersonal relationships. To ensure fairness, avoid deceit, help our neighbour, and get a good mate. That wiring – which constitutes a large part of our brain – has essentially the same job today as it did back then.
This is so very true. For example, the act of withdrawing from the TTP was an own-goal by the US against China. However this required relatively detailed understanding of the trading relationships and geopolitics of the region. It's much easier to appeal to base emotion - "strong man good for tribe, working with outsiders not good" - to gather support for what is essentially an act that furthers your opponents goals.
It's not just that they work; they matter in and of themselves. For example, it may literally be true that I'm more likely to die from falling furniture than from terrorism, but the fact that I fear terrorism more than falling furniture is relevant on its own terms. The emotions we feel about something like terrorism are real. They have a direct impact on quality of life. And you're not just going to reason people out of them. You can read me the statistics every morning, but my relative fear levels aren't likely to change.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't be educated or that we shouldn't make an effort to control our emotions; it's just to say that the emotions are real and it's ridiculous to dismiss them as irrelevant.
Isn't it the whole point of Behavioral Economics?
In such case you are not arguing with the person but your argument is with the observers which might not be so fundamentalist in their views. There is in fact an excellent book that lays out this argument. Unfortunately it is only available in German, its called "Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren: Anleitung zum subversiven Denken" by Hubert Schleichert. The rough translation of the title is: "how to argue with fundamentalists without loosing your mind. Instructions to subversive thinking".
He discusses some of the rhetorical tricks used by fundamentalists of every color using some historical examples and how to counter these strategies. For everyone who knows some German this is a highly recommended read.
That said, I highly appreciate the OP blog, because the arguments with fundamentalists are definitely in the minority and a more constructive argument culture is needed, especially online.
You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.
Often these are ideas that I don't agree with, but I can't articulate exactly why I disagree.
When I argue it, I can get others to argue against the idea, and so I can discover points that I may not have been able to put to words.
It's essentially idea farming.
Their followers might not even believe it but still support and spread the argument, for their own selfish reasons.
Say Hitler pronouncing that Jews are an inferior race worthy of destroying. Did his followers really believe that when they agreed with him, or did it just seem in their self-interest to spread such propaganda further, and seize the property of Jews?
Just an example from past but I believe similar examples happen all the time. Some people argue in bad faith. If that is the case there is no reason to argue with them.
I agree that this is literally true, but only so long as you include intellectual curiosity as an "emotion". In fact I would count it as an emotion, exactly for the reason that you said - ultimately all human motivation can only be explained by emotion - combined with the fact that clearly most people and even some animals do some things solely out of curiosity. Just like all emotions, curiosity exists because its presence increases your chances of survival (having hunger at the right time decreases your chances of dying due to lack of food, having curiousity at the right time decreases your chances of dying due to lack of knowledge of the environment). Of course it's a lot weaker than other emotions (e.g. if a furious lion is running towards you but has a very strange spot on its nose, you're probably going to run away rather than investigate).
All that sounds like supreme pedantry, but it's important due to this other thing you said:
> everyone argues from an emotional perspective
I think most people reading this sentence would interpret the word "emotional" here in a subtly different way: to exclude intellectual curiousity. The implication is therefore "no one ever really argues because they're just curious about the truth". I agree with the literal meaning of this sentence, but not with that interpretation of "emotion", and not with that conclusion.
I'm sure I see this sort of mix up a lot: two statements that both sound completely reasonable on their own, but use the same word with a subtly but critically different meaning, forcing you to draw a conclusion (because you can't disagree with either part individually) that isn't really true.
But it is important to maintain some moderation and rein them in. Emotions are powerful, and if you don't learn to exercise some degree of control them, then they will control you.
I think it helps to understand that emotions have a purpose. For example, fear helps you avoid threats, and anger pushes you toward taking action that is needed to change a situation. If they're serving their purpose constructively, that's good.
But if they're not, they need to be controlled. For example, when fear makes you avoid something which is actually safe, or when anger makes you act in a rash manner or suffer mentally over things you cannot change.
Again, I'm not saying that this is what you meant by "controlling" or "moderating" emotions, but just want to clarify that learning how to express emotions in a constructive way usually makes an argument that much more forceful that trying to "rein in" your emotions and make them subservient to logic.
Even if you call it managing, it's too easy to see emotions as something with a volume knob you can just turn down whenever you like. But it's more complicated than that. They're basically hardwired into our brains. Some people's brains are wired differently, but even in a completely normal brain (if such a thing exists), there are systems that kick in and do stuff whether you want them to or not. As in parts of the brain that activate and shift gears for other parts of the brain.
So there are some things you can control but also some things you cannot control. Which means to manage them, sometimes you need to understand how the system works and the kinds of changes you can make. It's a bit like fixing a complicated bug: you can't just comment out the code that is doing whatever you don't like. You need to understand the whole system so you can make the right change in the right place.
I think your fear example is a good illustration of this. Experts have figured out how the system works, and they know where a change can be made, and that's exposure.
> The solution is actually to experience more of that fear - in a controlled, gradual and safe manner, which is what exposure therapy is all about.
is true for some of the people some of the time. There is a wide range of approaches that will work for some and not for others, in various circumstances.
Emotions are not just big things. It may be that weird feeling about someone you cant explain. And that weird feeling may be either unfair bias or you actually noticing a problem with that person.
The emotion-logic dichotomy where mention of emotions makes you sound irrational motivates people to hide those. And it creates discussions that happen in sort of alternative reality and emotional conflicts that mask as professional disagreements.
From reading your other responses, my conclusion is that in any hypothetical argument, you wouldn't consider either side to have better reasoning than the other and if you did, you would chalk it up to your own emotional biases.
Your attitude seems incompatible with the concept that one argument can be better than another.
Is my assessment inaccurate or is there some nuance here that I've missed?
> It’s true, as I wrote about last week, that emotions can bias our thinking. What’s not true is that the best thinking comes from a lack of emotion. “Emotion helps us screen, organize and prioritize the information that bombards us,”
As well as http://mitp.nautil.us/article/157/feelings-what-are-they-and...
> This realization turns the scientific language of emotion on its head. What are commonly called emotion functions in humans and animals are not emotional functions at all. They do not exist to make feelings. They are survival functions essential for the continued life of the individual or the species.
1) explicitly state what emotions I'm feeling (this is surprisingly difficult for me)
2) figure out why I'm feeling that way.
Logic and rigorous thinking becomes relevant for that second step - it's where the "both / and" union of the two modes happens.
This process forms the backbone of "Nonviolent Communication": https://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/
If you want to have effective, kind conflicts, that book is a must-read.
1. I don't really think any of the tips and strategies in this article are helpful unless both (or all) parties go in to it with this same mindset. Which means that, for example, I believe it is simply impossible to have these kind of "constructive arguments" on, say, Twitter, for example. One of the things I like most about HN is the guidelines are clear about the goals of the forums, and while of course they are not always followed (I've certainly not always followed them), they are very helpful to help recenter debates, and I think there are a lot of helpful commenters that try to get things back on track if they go off the rails (thank you, dang).
2. > When people feel that something so close to them is in question, they often lose sight of reason and argue instead from an emotional perspective.
This may sound condescending, and it's really not meant to be as I also used to believe this, but I have come to the realization over the years that this mindset is woefully naive and immature. As someone who identifies as pretty "Spock-ian" in nature, it took me a long time (and years of therapy) to realize that everyone argues from an emotional perspective. It's what it means to be human. The entire purpose of emotions is that they are they only place where human motivation comes from. Trying to separate "logic" vs. "emotion" when dealing with humans is a fools' game in my opinion.