My favorite was arguing with my brother and I said "logically ...." he replied I don't believe in logic. He won the argument I had nothing to work with.
To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
201–210 of 307 posts
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I.E. how is it possible to choose fiction as fact in the knowledge it is fiction? That's just the moment of choice though. Given enough conditioning and getting used to it yourself, it can become as convincing (to your own self) as any reality. Besides, don't people chose convenient truths over reality all the time, creationists or not? Even the belief in science, which usually is a belief in fiction (an ideal of h…
But you would still know that you had a moment of choosing unreality. Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no. People that choose inquiry over ignorance are the ones thay actually make stridea out of the darkness and got us where we are today. "Belief" in science is the wrong way to think about it. Understanding that the scientific method has flaws but is still far superior as a to…
>Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no.
That's a convenient fiction to believe, but I haven't found it to be true in anybody.
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#203Learning 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…
Someone could also disagree with me because they are correct and I am in error. They may have knowledge or perspective that I lack. My first step is to try and find something they know that I don't before crafting persuasive arguments. Maximize for total knowledge not winning arguments.
That's an unexpected sentiment for the username John Galt. I was all set to write a rebuttal, but now I'm not sure what to say beyond expressing my surprise.
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you would still know that you had a moment of choosing unreality. Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no. People that choose inquiry over ignorance are the ones thay actually make stridea out of the darkness and got us where we are today. "Belief" in science is the wrong way to think about it. Understanding that the scientific method has flaws but is still far superior as a to…
> Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no. That's a convenient fiction to believe, but I haven't found it to be true in anybody.
That would be an opinion of mine, not a belief, that people worth knowing try not to hold on to fictions.
Whether they end up doing so is less important, they choose not to whenever the choice is apparent.
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "ID (which is often breathlessly conflated with creationism)," I think you do a misfavor by using the phrase "breathlessly conflated" in a comment which supports being aware that others may be "starting from a different premise", etc. It doesn't help that the authors of a "Of Pandas and People", an ID textbook, effectively did a search and replace in early drafts of "creationism" with "intelligent design", and "int…
There are no constitutional restrictions on what can be taught in schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_v._Aguillard
"Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) was a U.S. Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of teaching creationism. The Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be taught in public schools, along with evolution, violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion."
In the spirit of the OP's article, let me say that I wholeheartedly agree with you, but you might want to look at this from another perspective... ;-D
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#206This 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 can't believe I had to scroll this far down to find someone bringing this up.
I work for a boss that went to a management school where they taught him a "retain/improve" method: first tell people which behavior they should retain, to stroke their egos, then tell people how they can improve, which is what you actually want them to do. So every time I hear praise come out of his mouth, I immediately get cynical and think "that's not what he really thinks, he's just saying that because he's been trained to say things like that first."
TL:DR of the original article is "show empathy to people." Empathy is not the same thing as flattery, and poor management doesn't know the difference.
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might want to remember that while scientific method is pretty useful, it does has a weakness. It has all the bases covered except for the hypothesis. Where do hypothesis come from?
From hunches, partial observations, suggestions from prior research, various other sources of questions about what may or may not be correct that warrants further investigation. I'm not sure how that's a weakness?
My point is to make you think about bootstrapping the hypothesis issue.
Yes, an intelligent agent will do exactly what you suggested. And by the way, what you said was exactly a hypothesis. What exactly did you do to generate it? Where did that text/ideas come from?
When you come to the bottom of it you'll probably find something that you can't explain. You'll have to think about something and that will lead to something else and so on.
The scientific method is just a means of communicating ideas to other people. But, can you use scientific method on itself? That is, can you communicate a scientific method to generate scientific methods (basically only the hypothesis) for a particular subject? What about "hunches"? Can I have them?
If you can, you hit jackpot. But if you don't, then you might want to think more about discarding the unexplainable.
Go beyond that and try to imagine an 4d or 5d space. Then extrapolate and do a bijection from that to understanding what God is. Why do you think that you can do that? What does this prove about all this thing?
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#208Learning 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…
> 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
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I think you're conflating two orthogonal dimensions.
There is someone's level of intelligence, and there is the degree to which they have different starting assumptions to you on the topic.
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly not creationism specifically but my religion.
Useful perhaps, in that it makes you feel good. But like another poster pointed out, nazi ideology made its followers feel pretty good.
More useful though in that it made me stop hating and get control over my impulsiveness.
Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> If evolution is true, then God is not. By the way, this is disputable. I'm not denying that idiots/creationists use this argument; I question the argument itself. If evolution is true, a literary interpretation of the Bible is not. Still, evolution can be seen as a wonderful present from a "superior intelligence".
Catholic Church is OK with evolution if you make humans a special case; as long as you believe God gave ("created") humans a spiritual soul.