To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by nathan_long » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 3:05 PM UTC

pif wrote: post #150

vintermann wrote: post #102

Earlier 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".

I'm a Christian who finds evidence for evolution pretty strong. http://biologos.org/ is an organization promoting this general view.

I also find the evidence for Christ's resurrection quite strong. "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel is a book that lays it out well (though I'm not a huge fan of the literary approach).

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

#302

Post by nathan_long » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

scardine wrote: post #188

vintermann wrote: post #102

Earlier 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…

Existence IS meaningless, this is the very beauty of it: you can give it any meaning you want. You can even give your superego a face and think there is a big guy in the sky that loves you and cares about what you do.

> Existence IS meaningless, this is the very beauty of it: you can give it any meaning you want.

Although you have to concede quite a lot. When you feel awe at the stars, or the exhilaration of love, or burning anger at injustice, you must tell yourself, "this feeling is just an adaptive delusion; there's nothing good about caring or wrong about rape and murder per se, I just happen not to like them because I'm That Sort of Mammal".

If you say "existence is meaningless, morality doesn't exist" and in the next breath say anything about what people should or shouldn't do, including whether they should believe in God, I respectfully submit that it's inconsistent to do so. (Not that you should mind inconsistency.) This is my beef with people like Dawkins: if he's right, everything he says is utterly pointless.

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

#303

Post by scardine » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 2:31 AM UTC

donutz wrote: post #226

scardine wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Existence IS meaningless, this is the very beauty of it: you can give it any meaning you want. You can even give your superego a face and think there is a big guy in the sky that loves you and cares about what you do.

If you have no meaning, how can you have any to give?

You just make up some meaning from thin air. All meaning is made up. Meaning is a human construct, as any other concept.

Even if you disagree with me, you may concede that for all practical means the universe is infinite and the human mind is finite. Since something finite can't contain the infinite, how foolish would I be if I pretend to understand the universe?

Not that I agree with the creationists, I would love to believe that I'm special because some big guy in the sky gave me life. It is a comforting idea, but in order to accept the concept of an anthropomorphic god you have to believe that humans are somehow special, and this is very pretentious. I'm living in this tiny little rock floating in space which existence is barely a drop in the ocean of time. I'm not special except in the minds of the few people that manage to like me.

But I will not pretend my own version of god is less made-up: the Tao we talk about is not the real Tao.

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

#304

Post by scardine » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 2:49 AM UTC

nathan_long wrote: post #302

scardine wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Existence IS meaningless, this is the very beauty of it: you can give it any meaning you want. You can even give your superego a face and think there is a big guy in the sky that loves you and cares about what you do.

> Existence IS meaningless, this is the very beauty of it: you can give it any meaning you want. Although you have to concede quite a lot. When you feel awe at the stars, or the exhilaration of love, or burning anger at injustice, you must tell yourself, "this feeling is just an adaptive delusion; there's nothing good about caring or wrong about rape and murder per se, I just happen not to like them because I'm That…

That is why I never talk about what people should or should not do - I talk only about some mind tricks that work for me.

That said, I can concede a lot without pretending the universe somehow cares for me. I eat good food, and drink good wine, and just enjoy everything I have.

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

#305

Post by tmptmp » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 8:44 AM UTC

Good article and great advice. But I wish to make a qualification to the statement: To tell "someone" they're wrong, first tell them how they're right and make sure that the "someone" is not a psychopath or sociopath or a brainwashed person.

Still as a liberal, I would start with an open mind (null hypothesis) but I will keep my analysis running and will keep on adjusting the hypothesis accordingly. Also depending on what is at stake, I will cut the analysis shorter and come to conclusion faster (and potentially wrong) so that I can take some action that is needed in time.

Unfortunately, there are enough people in the world who are completely convinced of their superiority or of the superiority of their views/beliefs and if you tell them they are right they just use your statement as a testament to their advantage and if you later even try to tell them they are wrong then they will not hesitate to kill you. Some examples that come to mind are Hitler (blinded by Nazism) [1], prophet Muhammad (blinded by Islamism) [2], Stalin (blinded by communism) [3].

Because with such people it doesn't matter what you tell first or later. Sadly, that's the main reason why we need (have to face) wars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler [2] http://www.faithfreedom.org/understanding-muhammad-free-down... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

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

#306

Post by regularfry » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 10:24 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #244

regularfry wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's begging the question.

what do you mean?

The definition of IQ says that it assumes a normal distribution, with half either side of the mean. To use the definition of IQ as a justification for the statement "half of all people have less than average intelligence" assumes that the distribution of intelligence matches the distribution of IQ.

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

#307

Post by apathy » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #296

apathy wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interacting with the right people, a review of events will reveal that they gently led you to discover this. I'm kind of pissed that I guy I disagreed with seems to have been banned here, for example. I was curious where he was coming from and whether my foundation was as shaky as his appeared to me. (I think it was a guy, but I'll never know) The best teachers I've ever had simply laid out all the evidenc…

Unfortunately laying out the evidence is pretty powerful too. You have so many choices, from omission/overplaying of evidence to mislead the availability heuristic, to picking and choosing what sources are good and bad.

this is also why critical thinking is more important than specific technical skills. The former allows you to generalize the latter, making them more powerful.

I started out as a chemist (undergrad), became a statistician (grad), and finally realized that I had to design, run, analyze and fund my own experiments if I wanted something resembling "the truth", 9 times out of 10.

But my undergrad English teacher made me realize that it's more powerful to plant the seed of an idea and water it with evidence (selectively presented or not) than to try and outright convince people, when you have the luxury of time. I hope that my students are smarter for it; I let them sink or swim by their own wits and I expect them to ask for help if they find they're out of their depth. It's how the real world tends to work anyways.