121–130 of 307 posts
Learning how to do this is an essential skill. Most people are not idiots. If they disagree with you, it's probably not because they are being irrational, but because they're starting from a different premise, making different assumptions, or assigning different values to different aspects of the problem. Only when you understand their argument well enough to articulate it in your own words can you effectively presen…
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> Only when you understand their argument... I couldn't agree more. As a lifelong believer in science, raised in the Midwest among creationists, I have come into many conversations with intelligent people who somehow place faith in front of evidence. It's demoralizing to realize the frequency that this phenomenon occurs. I've recently scheduled a trip to the Creation Museum to observe the message at its core (half fo…
Imagine that there's a meteor heading towards earth. All evidence suggests that it will hit in three days, and wipe out all multicellular life - it's a big one. What do you do? How do you live your life your last three days? One school of thought says, disregard the evidence. Assert, against it all, that the meteor is going to miss. Or if that's hard, decide to trust someone who asserts it (this is usually easier). T…
A very similar effect is the "backfire effect" http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect I've been spending a lot of time focusing on this with customer support. When a customer is hot about a problem it doesn't help at all to show facts about anything. It really helps though to begin with a place of empathy of how you understand how they feel if you were in a similar situation. For example, had a great experience…
The simpering sympathising and apologising thing can go much too far as well. My reaction to that is "stop apologising and fix the damned problem". Experience teaches that it's almost always a sign of someone who's not empowered, or worse, not capable, of actually improving the situation. At worst their role is to actively impede the process, a circumstance far too frequently encountered.
This is also known as the "shit sandwich" (when leavened with another helping of praise on the other end), and is instantly recognizable once you see the pattern. The risk is that your initial praise is seen as disingenuous by its recipients, or that it goes too far and reifies their underlying value system when it actually is contradictory to yours. Incidentally, Barack Obama was particularly good at this constructi…
I hate this pattern. If something is fucked up, tell me, so I can fix it. Don't waste my time buttering me up first and patting me on the back afterwards, just get to the point. It's one thing I do kind of miss about working shitty, dangerous construction and logging jobs summers in college. There's no time for pussyfooting around when a miscommunication means somebody gets crushed or mangled by heavy equipment. Brus…
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I'm with you on most of that (the sandwich), but (the shit) it requires a community of trust, and some healthy functioning people, at least within that specific context. I've had a recent online experience in a community in which all interaction is anonymous -- but the anonymity isn't persistent, rather, identities are created and assigned for each discussion. This almost perfectly destroys any and all sense of commu…
> I've had a recent online experience in a community in which all interaction is anonymous -- but the anonymity isn't persistent, rather, identities are created and assigned for each discussion. I'd like to experience that, it's pretty much how I read reddit/hn anyway. I would be a good way to eliminate group think.
You’re not entitled to take a view, unless and until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view. If you can argue better than the smartest person who holds the opposite view, that is when you are entitled to hold a certain view.”
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Creationist, son of creationists here :-) Although I guess there are creationists and there are creationists: If you ask me about science I will answer with science. I did well in school, including biology and introduction to astrophysics. If you hold a gun to my head and ask if I still belive this nonsense about the world being created I'd guess I'd say yes (if I can't get around to disarming you, I don't like armed…
My favorite explanation has been: science answers What/How, religion answers Why. It's when we start asking one a question for the other that we get into trouble. Which is what I don't like about [some] creationism. It tries to use a Why tool to answer a How question. And as long as you take Biblical stories to be metaphors and/or best-effort explanations from before we had the data that we have now, they're perfectl…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria#Rec...
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> I've had a recent online experience in a community in which all interaction is anonymous -- but the anonymity isn't persistent, rather, identities are created and assigned for each discussion. I'd like to experience that, it's pretty much how I read reddit/hn anyway. I would be a good way to eliminate group think.
eh doesn't 4chan work that way?
While this is an important skill to have, I've also learned over time that there are certain types of people where it's easier to let them "be right" and accommodate the consequences. I didn't always think this way. In the past, I would say that people are reasonable, it's always possible to figure out what the truth is, especially if I acknowledge the possibility that I am often wrong. But now I realize that some pe…
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My favorite explanation has been: science answers What/How, religion answers Why. It's when we start asking one a question for the other that we get into trouble. Which is what I don't like about [some] creationism. It tries to use a Why tool to answer a How question. And as long as you take Biblical stories to be metaphors and/or best-effort explanations from before we had the data that we have now, they're perfectl…
The NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria argument/How vs. Why) position is useful to try to coexist peacefully while establishing a more solid rapport, but is not itself universally accepted[0]. For example, philosophy is also capable of answering "Why" questions with or without the help of religion, and neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology can explain a lot of the "How" that actually drives what we pe…
Could religion not be considered a philosophical framework?
Thanks for showing me there's a name for why vs how. I had no idea.
I think the atrength of this distinction also varies between people. I know many religious atheists who believe in the value of religion, in its teachings and traditions, even in some hybrid concept of heaven and hell, possibly god, but who do not believe God exists as a factual entity or that anything from any religious text is fact rather than metaphor.
But I also come from a country that is 68% christian but only 32% of the population says they believe in there being some sort of god.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Apparently "Catholic Atheism" is a thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism