I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
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Against Persuasion
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Against Persuasion
#22This reminds me of a Slate Star Codex post, Epistemic Learned Helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
Essentially, this essay argues that sometimes it is rational to ignore attempts at persuasion altogether – there is always someone more adept than you at arguing their point, and since they are so convincing you are incapable of distinguishing the truth, so you fall back on your Bayesian prior.
Re: Against Persuasion
#23I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
> I still think Plato invented Socrates.
No, he was an actual historical person. Plato of course wrote a more literary depiction of him, not a direct transcript of his conversations.
> If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way?
You should probably actually read the dialogues (at least the Apology and the Crito) and you'll understand what happened. Socrates explicitly chose not to escape prison and to go through with the execution, and he gives his reasons in the Crito.
Re: Against Persuasion
#24The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the next informational morsel that will evolve y…
Much of openness is what you are born with. Seriously. You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part. That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very well defined though the results are stochastic rather than deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games". But such techniques are merely tools…
> You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life.
Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings, but exceptionally skillful thinking in things like logic and epistemology must be learned...but for people to learn them, they must be taught. As it is, numerous errors can be easily found even in intellectual spaces online, demonstrating that even the cream of the crop is far from perfect....and as for the less intellectual places (the overwhelming majority), well we're all familiar with how bad those are.
Re: Against Persuasion
#25This article, for all of it's words, doesn't really justify it's thesis at all. In one hand, it declares that we all must put aside our differences to pursue lives of ethical piety, and in the other hand it demands that we cannot ask questions to get there. At no point along the essay does it seem that the author entertains a middle ground between the two, which frankly confuses me even more. And for all the Socrates-bashing they indulge in, they seemingly forget that the purpose of a Socratic Seminar is not to walk away feeling personally dejected, but mentally enlightened. If all you can take away from it is offense, then why bother learning anything in the first place?
Persuasion is a two-way street. Rhetoric is not. If you dislike the way someone says something, then don't conflate that with the actual thing they're saying.
Re: Against Persuasion
#26The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the next informational morsel that will evolve y…
My rule is that I'm open to changing my mind, but on my own timetable and with no obligation to provide any feedback to the persuader. For instance, my time constant for updating my views is longer than one election or marketing cycle.
Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater.
Re: Against Persuasion
#27I think the largest problem of persuasion right now is that no one (left or right) is willing to really try to understand what it is like in the shoes of the other. Until we get past that, we're just going to keep fighting. The only ones that see this are those that recently switched sides (aka usually moderates).
The way I see it, the left tried really, really hard for a long time. They probably tried badly, but they did try. The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall) Whereas books by prom…
There is something to this.
I am a big fan of the organization Braver Angels, which is working to reduce polarization and facilitate conversations between people with different viewpoints.
One of their biggest struggles is that they get significant participation from the "blue" tribe, but have trouble recruiting "red" tribe members. Some of this may be skepticism from the red tribe that they will be treated fairly, but I wonder how much is simply lack of interest in understanding others.
Re: Against Persuasion
#28This reminds me of a Slate Star Codex post, Epistemic Learned Helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn... Essentially, this essay argues that sometimes it is rational to ignore attempts at persuasion altogether – there is always someone more adept than you at arguing their point, and since they are so convincing you are incapable of distinguishing the truth, so you fall back on your…
40K said it best: “An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded”.
Re: Against Persuasion
#29I think the largest problem of persuasion right now is that no one (left or right) is willing to really try to understand what it is like in the shoes of the other. Until we get past that, we're just going to keep fighting. The only ones that see this are those that recently switched sides (aka usually moderates).
The way I see it, the left tried really, really hard for a long time. They probably tried badly, but they did try. The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall) Whereas books by prom…
> The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought: ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
> Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals.
One of the big theories in The Righteous Mind can be used to explain this. The Moral Foundations Theory lists 5 drivers of moral judgments, 5 reasons why people may feel things are 'right'. Then it gives data showing that liberals feel 2 of these strongly and 3 weakly, while conservatives feel all 5 about as equally strongly.
By that theory, the reason that conservatives need not work as hard to understand liberals is that they feel all the same moral impulses liberals do, and more, while liberals only feel 2/5ths of the conservatives' impulses.
The same theory suggests that conservative persuasion will be more effective on liberals than liberal persuasion on conservatives. This then leads to election losses, which leads to hand wringing about how liberals don't understand conservatives, so they can't convince them to vote liberal.
Re: Against Persuasion
#30I think the largest problem of persuasion right now is that no one (left or right) is willing to really try to understand what it is like in the shoes of the other. Until we get past that, we're just going to keep fighting. The only ones that see this are those that recently switched sides (aka usually moderates).
The way I see it, the left tried really, really hard for a long time. They probably tried badly, but they did try. The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall) Whereas books by prom…
> Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have titles like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change". (Not that the left doesn't produce books with similar titles, but they don't get wide distribution, while you've heard of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg).
Interestingly enough Jonah Goldberg is pretty much never-Trumper.