I think this is childish.
How to listen when you disagree
71–80 of 192 posts
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#72This is a really well written piece, so its petty to pick on an aspect of the style, but:I hate the trend of writing really short sentences and starting a new paragraph after almost every sentence. When you hear it in your head it's supposed to sound like a grave and wise and worldly narrator over a poignant montage or something. It's cheap and corny.
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#73"Hear the Biography, not the ideology"
This is just another way of attacking someone else's position, with the added bonus of letting you be intolerably smug while you do it. You're not communicating in good faith unless you're willing to concede the possibility that the other person is actually right about something. At the very least you need to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
This, on the other hand, is a way of reconciling the fact that you obviously don't have a good reason to believe the things you do (otherwise, you wouldn't be threatened by the mere fact that someone disagrees with you) with your preference to believe that your views are in some meaningful way correct: obtain ammunition against the other by "discovering" the real reason they believe such obviously wrong things, then being the superior person by empathizing with this poor benighted creature.
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#74"When someone has a point of view we find difficult to understand, disagreeable, or even offensive, we must look to the set of circumstances that person has experienced that resulted in that point of view."
This is great advice for getting along with people and treating others politely. However, I don't think it provides any insight into actually improving public policy or improving one's own beliefs.
Of course we all "pick sides" based on our own experiences in debates like these. There will never be any way to systematically remove all bias in a debate. Rather than try to dig up and fully understand the causes of every bias in every individual, we should take the simpler route: Examine just your own biases, judge everyone else's viewpoints based on facts and data alone, and never take strong positions on any point without an abundance of objective justification. You will end up agreeable, epistemically cautious, and continuously learning.
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#75So you're saying, basically, we should "put words in their mouth".
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12228618 and marked it off-topic.
hilarious response to the most on-topic reply in the thread, doing exactly what the parent suggests, and seeing the results
EDIT: Frankly, I'm fine with being down-voted, that's to be expected when trying to engage in a logical meta-example, in a touchy-feely thread about being nice in an argument. But I'm a bit put-off by an official HN mod detaching the thread. That's inappropriate. Obviously.
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might be making a joke about active listening, but it's actually really effective. Try it out next time you disagree with someone -- it is a good tool to prevent you from talking over or past someone.
I once attended some training that discussed communication skills and one of the things they asked us was: when talking to someone, are you listening to what they are saying or are you merely waiting for your chance to talk? I have to admit to frequently doing the latter.
For me, I know I've listened when I can make their argument for them. This also has the important point of testing what I believe in an honest way and allows for modifying of what I believe or solidifying it with better ways to explain it to others.
Sadly, many people are in the "chance to talk" side with a rather large sprinkling of "people who disagree with them never get to talk".
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#77There's an important distinction to be made between disagreement on the facts and disagreement on their implications. I find that the best conversations can be had by figuring out which points of disagreement are on questions of fact and then asking "how do you know X?". Repeat respectfully as necessary.
Peter Boghossian calls this technique "street epistemology".
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who wasn't listening? Did anything in either of my comments imply I wasn't? I read the author's post. I digested it. I provided my counterpoint. Your initial response was essentially dismissal. I prompted you to provide a more substantial response (admittedly rather sarcastic, though I hope it wasn't viewed as hostility... probably a bad decision, that), and you once again come back with a pithy response. It's almost…
"Offended" is the wrong word. "Pissed off" is closer. That probably seems not very fair to you, but you're far from the first person in a short space of time whom I've seen fail to recognize the fact that, while understanding the other person's perspective certainly isn't guaranteed to lead to compromise, it just as certainly is the only thing that can . The really infuriating thing is how close to it you come, and a…
You talk about compassion, but only so you can dismiss it offhand on your way to a multi-paragraph denunciation of the way she and people like her are just so unreasonable.
I denounced nothing.
I said her beliefs are her beliefs and that they are unlikely to be shaken purely because someone listened to her.
You read malice into a comment where none was present.
You read judgement into a comment where none was given.
You're failing, right now, at the very kind of compassionate listening you feel is so very important.
Even if it doesn't, easing another person's suffering is a bedrock tenet of almost any scheme of ethics or morals. But that doesn't even occur to you, because you're so caught up in the question of whether you can make someone else think like you that nothing else has a chance to get a look in.
How do you know that it didn't?
Once again, you're reading into my post values and motivations I never espoused, I presume based on past experiences with others who disagree with you.
In fact, in my other comments, I agree that, on an individual, one-on-one basis, this post contains immensely valuable moral and personal lessons.
My comment, rather, is about whether a small act like this might change how we debate and decide upon issues in the large (my claim is that it is idealistic but unlikely to have value in the large).
I apologize if my comment wasn't clear, that I was not disagreeing with the compassionate act of listening, but rather questioning it's value in improving the way we hold forth on discourse in broader society.
Hopefully I've made that clearer here.
Perhaps it's unjust of me to react to this kind of heartlessness with contempt.
And now you're making it personal.
I'd thank you for the discussion, but I'm not sure much of value has come out of this. It's a shame, but so be it.
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might be making a joke about active listening, but it's actually really effective. Try it out next time you disagree with someone -- it is a good tool to prevent you from talking over or past someone.
Just not like this: https://youtu.be/65GbpVZTgAk Or god forbid: https://youtu.be/TChRv8m79zs
Watched the first video, and I am now irrationally angry with an urge to violence. I think I'll skip the second.
Re: How to listen when you disagree
#80Eh, perhaps I'm cynical, but listening to someone, and coming to understanding regarding how they might have developed there beliefs, sounds nice, and it's very compassionate, but I question if it's actually a step toward compromise, or simply understanding. After all, for an increasing number of issues, in the end, the beliefs themselves are so polarized they leave no room for compromise. To this woman, it doesn't m…
By actually listening to her, he found that she doesn't have an intractable philosophical opposition to abortion. Her opposition to abortion is rooted in her insecurity because her husband left her because she's barren; she feels like she's failed at being a woman, so other women getting abortions feels like a spiteful act to her.
Clearly, there is in fact room for compromise with her. At that point, the author could probably have shared his story about women he knew who'd had abortions, for whom it was a painful decision that wasn't thoughtless and casual and spiteful, and wasn't an indictment of her worth. Done carefully, she probably would have acknowledged that it's properly a deeply personal decision and she's not really that committed to her own feelings.