>The Muslim explains why Islamic law is a perfect recipe for peace.
That would be so funny to listen to. Mental gymnastics would be trough roof.
I want to lose every debate
211–220 of 386 posts
Re: I want to lose every debate
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's interesting in this is how many people still think that in politics there's a ,,good side'' and a ,,bad side''. Europe would stay much stronger together with Russia, so it was worth for US to increase the conflicts between the two powers (destroying Nordstream wasn't the nicest move). Putin was used to high gas prices making his power the highest, but he wasn't used to the power of LNG that US has, as it's the…
So why did Putin attack Ukraine if it was so obvious that it would benefit the US?
That's a great question worth a full deep dive. A debate where losing is beneficial and where being a spectator is worthwhile.
Re: I want to lose every debate
#213I don't like the position of "losing is good". I want to win every debate, because I define winning a debate as coming out of it knowing more that I did going in. Debating isn't a zero-sum game, me winning doesn't make you the loser.
Yeah but what if you're wrong and you "won" by attrition? This is the problem with a lot of debates; they don't end with one party being convinced of the other party's point of view, they often end because one party just gives up. I mean your point does apply if you actually acknowledge your lack of knowledge on a subject and do your research before bringing in an argument, but a lot of people don't, they have a stan…
I think you misunderstood me.
The point I'm making is that you should redefine "winning a debate". Learning (and hopefully coming to a consensus) is exactly what winning should mean in your head. Just altogether abandon the notion that you win by convincing the other party you're right.
Re: I want to lose every debate
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that some prodtitutes are victims of human trafficking doesn't mean that all are. In fact, there are countries where sex work is legal but not human trafficking. So it's possible to even have a legal distinction there. I don't know how things are in Spain, but in the US there's a huge stigma associated with being a sex worker besides it being illegal and actively enforced. In these conditions it would be ver…
I'd like to believe that the people who are against sex work are actually thinking of the good of the sex workers and because of human trafficking. Yet there is a lot of human trafficking in other areas, like farmwork or maids in the Western world, and the non-Western world is filled with sweatshops and literal slaves. And you never hear them mention it. Which makes me convinced these people are just anti-sex work fo…
> Which makes me convinced these people are just anti-sex work for religious or moral reasons
If it matters I'm an atheist. I'm against "sex work" because women (it's women in the majority of cases) are trafficked and taken advantage of, in both a material and a direct physical way.
I see this "sex work" non-sense mostly coming from people who have had no direct contact with the reality/materiality of it all, i.e. mostly from the Western middle-classes.
Later edit: Because this has touched a close nerve with me, copy-pasting some stuff related to that reality/materiality I had mentioned from a news article about Romanian prostitution rings in Spain [1]:
> The women were freed from brothels in Malaga and Girona where they had been sexual exploited by their compatriots and made to work for up to ten hours a day under the threat of violence.
> Some had come to Spain after being falsely promised better lives by the Romanian sex traffickers while others had fallen victim to the so-called 'lover boy' scam, according to a police statement.
> This method involves one of the sex traffickers forming an intimate relationship with the woman to earn her trust before later forcing her into prostitution.
> One of the women freed, who was only 18 years old, had been reported as missing by her family in Romania.
> Police described the 'iron control' exerted by the 'well-organized' sex-trafficking ring and said that the women had been kept completely isolated from the outside world.
I don't know of any sane person who would call that legit "work" and "liberating".
[1] https://www.thelocal.es/20140812/spanish-police-smash-romani...
Re: I want to lose every debate
#215I’d like to offer an alternative framing: don’t debate at all, just listen. While high school debate did teach me many positive lessons and I am thankful that I spent four years of my life doing it, many years later I have come to understand that it also taught me something truly negative: that the point of a conversation is to win. I have put a lot of time in my adult life unlearning that trait, and reflecting on th…
The linked article did say: "I never want to debate"
Re: I want to lose every debate
#216I feel the same way. I'm going to try to defend my position as well as I can (sans dishonesty and rhetorical tricks), but actually winning an argument means it was probably a waste of my time. My goal is to be right about everything, so I wish that in every argument I have I'm on the wrong side because when somebody who is right convinces me that I am wrong, I become smarter than I was before the argument.
I think it's pretty common to feel indebted to people who convinced you that you were wrong. Really what happened is that they put in the work before you got into it with them, and aggressively shared the benefits with you. Losing an argument is like someone beating the crap out of you, strolling into your home and ransacking it until they find your debts, then paying them off against your will.
I walk into every argument hoping to lose, and hoping I don't embarrass myself too badly on the way to that loss. The worst is when you figure out that you were confidently, smugly wrong. But if you laugh with your opponent about how cocky you were, it makes it all better.
edit: it's only worth my time to win in an argument if I'm trying to help someone I care about, or if I'm trying to argue against behavior that affects me or someone I care about negatively. Not an abstract effect, like when you pretend your tweets are social work, but concretely, like with a coworker that you depend on, or a neighbor.
Re: I want to lose every debate
#217I find this article amusing. I think it puts forward something interesting but frame it completely incorrectly. The author doesn't actually want to lose debates even if it doesn't seem to realise it. He doesn't want to have debates at all. He just wants to have conversations with people and less preconceptions. That's something I'm completely in line with. I believe we suffer as a society from a collective excess of…
I agree he frames it incorrectly, but he has not failed in terms of results. If he framed it as "I want to talk to people", it would not be posted on HN, and no one would be visiting his site or discussing his shower thought.
It's not really healthy to view such a thing as success, unless your goal is to become good at bullshitting people (as opposed to creating lasting things of value that you can be proud of). Lots of great projects show up in HN and receive no views. On the other hand lots of self promoters who say nothing imortant get tons of views. Ideally you'd want to be in the middle, where you made something awesome and were good at promoting it.
Re: I want to lose every debate
#218I’d like to offer an alternative framing: don’t debate at all, just listen. While high school debate did teach me many positive lessons and I am thankful that I spent four years of my life doing it, many years later I have come to understand that it also taught me something truly negative: that the point of a conversation is to win. I have put a lot of time in my adult life unlearning that trait, and reflecting on th…
> don’t debate at all, just listen
I think that depends on how familiar they are with your perspective. You don't want to think of the interaction as unequal, with you taking the higher perspective of observing both their ideas and yours, appreciating and integrating them, while they only exist in their own point of view, the observed to your observer.
If they understand your perspective but you don't know theirs, it makes sense for them to do most of the talking. But if they don't understand where you're coming from, then a one-sided conversation is one-sided in a bad way. It's like looking at them through a telescope. You'll have your reactions to their ideas, but you won't have their reactions to yours, their reactions to your reactions.
Re: I want to lose every debate
#219I try to aim for education with empathy.
Re: I want to lose every debate
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider this: You have an idea about how things are and this other person has another idea in direct contradiction with yours, such that at most one of the two can be right. If you want to treat their idea as if it has merit then you have to argue with them to understand why they think what they think and how well their idea fits in with other facts you already know. If you care about the truth then you will need to…
> Do you see how and why one might want to learn something new while outwardly appearing to want to prove themselves right (or, more accurately, to prove the other person wrong)? An idea that one can't prove wrong is certainly worth considering seriously. Yes, this is exactly what I meant by my last sentence. Two people may want to learn something and in order to do that they have to "attack" each other's ideas so it…
"Always wanting to be right" is something I've been accused of since I was little, when all I've always wanted was to know as few false things as possible, even before I could articulate that thought like that. In my experience, people who don't like or want to argue, which is most people, will always assume that someone who is arguing is doing #2 no matter what. I don't think someone can correctly tell which of the two the other person is doing.