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Against Persuasion

bostonreview.net

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: Against Persuasion

#31
post #16
post #7

The 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

Which studies?

This sounds like one of those new-agey empathic business tutorials which are actually hidden racism, classism and eugenicism 101s.

Re: Against Persuasion

#32

I 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).

Very true. The amount of energy spent on trying to persuade or vilify the “other” side is much higher than the effort that’s put into really understanding issues and trying to come up with solutions.

Re: Against Persuasion

#33
I wrote a full length response to this article here. Basically, I think it raises two questions: 1) what does the socratic mode miss? 2) is it better to have a conversation between two socratic types, or does does socratic dialogue require one dupe? https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/should-we-aspire...

Re: Against Persuasion

#34
post #27
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

> but I wonder how much is simply lack of interest in understanding others.

Talk about assuming the worst about people! Let me present an alternate theory: The "blue tribe" is surprised by a "red tribe" reaction more than the "red tribe" is surprised by the "blue tribe".

I read about a study in the lead up to the 2016 election. Conservatives were asked to voice liberal opinions and vice versa. The conservatives were able to voice opposing viewpoints significantly better than those who leaned left wing.

This blog came up while searching for a source on that research and has some other information you might find useful. I can relate to the author's feeling of frustration very well! [0]

[0] https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand...

Re: Against Persuasion

#35
post #7

The 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…

Well, for my part, I have a couple of things that have helped me here (determined by change in outcome post-intervention which I, unfortunately, cannot share):

1. I know Aumann's Agreement Theorem and the appropriate lemmas about information transfer and prior modification (i.e. if I start failing to modify my priors with repeated conversation, I am failing or the other person is failing, either of which leads to our conversation failing at converging => we should exit)

2. I try to place myself in situations where the difference in outcome is a large multiple of the difference in knowledge of reality. This biases me to accept input well, since I want positive outcome and biology will ruthlessly optimize me toward it. Not every situation is like this. Sometimes, the part of reality you want to optimize against is specifically the people, ignoring the underlying reality. e.g. Though I had a respirator with P100 filters on all exhale and inhale valves I took it off and wore my standard N95 mask when on a plane when asked to. The truth didn't matter there as much as the part of the truth which is "don't piss off flight attendants".

3. I force skin in the game. For instance, I took all my money out of Vanguard and actively managed it in 2019 on a 5x lever. My idea was that I could beat the market, and I did. I also believed in early Feb that despite having advance warning from my friends in Asia about COVID-19 that it was a huge deal, that American bureaucracy was likely to be sophisticated and evidence-based. Since I knew the correct actions to be taken in response, I assumed they knew, and I assumed they had the wherewithal to make it happen. It appears that none of these things are true. But it was a good lesson. It helps me understand how some people I am distantly related to make all that money on defence contracts in Virginia - the bureaucracy is actually not sophisticated, it is merely large.

4. I model us all as message-passing elements that incur a cost per message. I make a good effort to pass you information that has been effective to me to encourage you to do so to me. Multiple elements doing so will lead to easier misinformation detection, less variance in information availability, etc. This is good for me since I am a very capable execution machine. I can only lose in the world in the ways I care about because I don't have information, not because I can't execute.

The consequence of the message-passing element idea is that I don't try to convince, i.e. if I know that there is a red apple at the corner of Bush and Sansome and I tell you this and you say "oh yeah? Prove it!" I will not attempt to do so. I have given you the information but the cost of ensuring good provenance is high in an untrusted information network with few repeated interactions. So, what I do is that I attempt to repeat interactions as frequently as possible with a limited set of elements so that provenance-information is cached and I am operating on the trusted subnetwork. For my part, I try to make falsifiable claims so that other people can either add or remove me from their trust network. For HN, I have an extension that removes comment-threads started by low-information low-provenance individuals. I know I will fail sometimes at not being one of these people and I'll accept that risk and let others choose to do the same to me.

Re: Against Persuasion

#36
post #19
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Socrates was not in fact wise….But perhaps he would have told you that.

He was literally "stoic" which is a wisdom that you can't change most things in the world so you survive as best you can and if you can't you accept that you can't control when your life ends either. If people still read the Classics, this would be widely known as table-stakes.

Socrates was not a stoic. Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium roughly 100 years after Socrates’ death.

Re: Against Persuasion

#37

This 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…

No idea where you got the notion that the author is Socrates-bashing or that the author “demands that we cannot ask questions.” The piece is so obviously a love letter to and defense of Socrates! You seem to have completely misread it.

The author obviously thinks persuasion is “a two-way street,” that asking questions is good, and that Socratic dialogue leaves people more enlightened: it helps make their ignorance more precise.

Re: Against Persuasion

#38
post #7

The 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.

> Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater.

A silly distinction - the most skilled debater is the one who makes you think their idea is the best.

Re: Against Persuasion

#39
post #29
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mo…

> 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.

How so? My impression would be that then 2 out of 2 liberal arguments would then have appeal to conservatives, but only 2 out of 5 conservative arguments would work the other way.

Re: Against Persuasion

#40
post #16
post #7

The 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…

Do you mean literally what you are born with, as in just your genes (or perhaps technically environmental effects during gestation)?
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