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To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

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Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#241

Post by Nursie »

Nursie wrote: post #240
Karunamon wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing the substantial difference between those two things, aside from the unrelated-to-my-point variable of how much the idea-holder wants it to be upheld. That variable certainly exists - it's why we have blind-controlled trials as the gold standard of research.

Surely that's the whole point of a belief - here is something I know to be true. As compared to a hypothesis - here is an idea that should be tested by investigation, I make no prior judgement to its truth

--edit-- I can't help feeling we've wandered off-piste here.

The point I was trying to make is that the origin of a hypothesis is not really important, just that before it is accepted as true or false it is tested.

--edit-- this wasn't actually an edit so much as a reply. Oops!

Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#242

Post by Karunamon »

Nursie wrote: post #240
Karunamon wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing the substantial difference between those two things, aside from the unrelated-to-my-point variable of how much the idea-holder wants it to be upheld. That variable certainly exists - it's why we have blind-controlled trials as the gold standard of research.

Surely that's the whole point of a belief - here is something I know to be true. As compared to a hypothesis - here is an idea that should be tested by investigation, I make no prior judgement to its truth

(oops!)

I don't think a true null hypothesis exists as long as humans are involved in concocting them, the person could want, consciously or subconsciously, any output from any experiment.

Maybe one outcome leads to more research that's a major paint to secure funding for and one is much easier? Maybe the outfit funding the study clearly wants one particular result?

Which goes right back to what I'm saying: humans are not purely logical, true null hypotheses don't exist, and the only difference between a "hypothesis" and a "belief" by what you just described is the degree to which the person with the idea wants a specific outcome - a variable which is completely unrelated to the eventual truthiness or falsity of the output.

Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#245

Post by Nursie »

Karunamon wrote: post #242
Nursie wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that's the whole point of a belief - here is something I know to be true. As compared to a hypothesis - here is an idea that should be tested by investigation, I make no prior judgement to its truth

(oops!) I don't think a true null hypothesis exists as long as humans are involved in concocting them, the person could want, consciously or subconsciously, any output from any experiment. Maybe one outcome leads to more research that's a major paint to secure funding for and one is much easier? Maybe the outfit funding the study clearly wants one particular result? Which goes right back to what I'm saying: humans ar…

The fundamental difference is that a hypothesis is not (or should not be, different argument) accepted as fact by the scientific establishment before it is tested and shown true or false with empirical evidence.

As such it doesn't matter where it comes from so long as it is tested before acceptance. Which is why I struggle to understand the bootstrapping problem that the other poster talks about.

--edit-- To put it as simply as I can muster - why does the origin of the idea to test matter, when it is the testing that's the important part?

Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#246

Post by tomjen3 »

johngalt wrote: post #25
rayiner wrote: post #16

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…

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.

The problem with that is sometimes you are arguing about a solution to a problem and eventually some solution must be chosen.

Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#247

Post by tomjen3 »

annnnd wrote: post #205
DigitalJack wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partic…

Brown vs Board of education overturned Plessy vs Fergusson. The court eventually overturned itself agreed that US citizens have the right to write pamflets arguing against a draft was not shouting fire in a crowded theater (rather than outlaw that, one would think it would be better to make them safe from fire, but that is an aside).

Point being SCOTUS can even agree with itself. It has the power of the gun, which means we may care about its position, but hardly that it is right.

Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#248

Post by emodendroket »

DigitalJack wrote: post #216
annnnd wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partic…

The constitution has meaning apart from whatever a given Supreme Court says. They try to decipher it, but they don't create its meaning. We may be bound legally by their ruling, but that is simply a matter of law and tradition. The Supreme Court does not itself have a constitutional mandate to decide on the meaning of the constitution and the constitutionality of laws. It started when a chief justice decided that is…

It seems a little unreasonable to insist on a way of thinking about Constitutional law that has been moribund since John Jay's term and this role of the Court's fits fairly well into the common-law framework we've inherited from England.

It also doesn't seem clear to me how setting up a curriculum (a legal act, after all) can't be covered by that text, unless you want to go back and argue it is only concerned with preventing a church becoming literally "established" like the Anglican Church is in England.

Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#249

Post by Nursie »

Karunamon wrote: post #232
Nursie wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense. Modern science is based on gathering information and forming ideas and hypotheses around it. The origins of matter and energy are an active area of investigation, not a guilty secret.

And yet, that information is not forthcoming, and those hypotheses effectively infinite. "Guilty secret" is an uncharitable reading of the parent post, I'd say more out of the realm of scientific inquiry and more the philosophical. It's like asking "what was there before time existed?" - the scientific answer is null because that's a nonsense question - "before" implies the existence of a "time" to count it. And yet,…

It rather depends. There are branches of physics (m-branes, multi-universe, some offshoots of string theory) that could possibly have answers to this, should they figure out ways to test and measure such things. They are somewhere in the realm of philosophy or mathematical conjecture until that point though.

And potentially that pushes the question back further - so where did all that come from?

I took issue with the initial post because it sounded conspiratorial, and it also sounded like there was a huge cop-out at the centrw of everything that people were trying to ignore. On the contrary - it's very interesting and it's no shame or revelation to say "we don't know yet, and we don't know if we ever will"

Re: To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

#250

Post by danielam »

Mendenhall wrote: post #4

Always start from common ground and that which can be agreed upon. Although I do disagree that there was no formal study of "persuasion" before then. Socrates was trolling sophists long before then. Rhetoric = persuasion and thats what the sophists got paid to do. Read Gorgias.

You're headed in the right direction, but your characterization isn't accurate. Strictly speaking, Socrates wasn't trolling the sophists so much as drawing attention to their manipulative practices. The sophists weren't infamous for employing rhetoric, but rather sophistry and eristic. Here, rhetoric is to sophistry what polemic is to eristic.

Where rhetoric is an art that emphasizes logical, sound, effective and clear communication for the purpose of persuading someone of a position that the rhetor believes to be true, the sophist employs fallacies, flattery and other methods of appeal to manipulate someone into accepting a position, regardless of the truth of that position, for other ends. The highest value for the sophist was oratory excellence and skillful use of language, not the attainment of truth. Analogously, the polemicist aims to dispute a position, but he does so while maintaining the same ethos as the rhetor, i.e., by attacking what he deems to be false for the sake of the truth. The eristic, on the other hand, shares the ethos of the sophist, i.e., he is unconcerned with the truth and aims only dispute for some other end. Josef Pieper's puts it well in his essay "Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power" when he says that when language is disconnected from truth, it becomes an instrument of power.

Both rhetoric and polemic are useful during intellectual exchanges. Indeed, the most successful philosophical arguments often consist of disputation of a previously stated position, followed by argumentation in favor of another position and here both rhetoric and polemic may be used.

I was rather annoyed by what appears to be the author's ignorance of these ancient arts.

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