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Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

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Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#531

Post by jodrellblank »

tryagainian wrote: post #15
josefritzishere wrote: post #3

This is a bizarrely anti-democratic. "Winning" isn't the important part of discussing a topic with multiple points of view.

Do you believe all points of view are equally valuable?

A low-effort comment from a new user account which I remember from this other low-effort comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734579

either you're still fat, or at 45 you should be long past boasting on the internet about your muscle gains. "SOME of the 8 billion people on Earth aren't adequately described by a system with only four outputs"? See comedian physicist Dara O'Briain saying that comedically:

"""Racism is way better than Astrology - Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these things about me, and you say I share these personality traits with this huge group of people, and I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and you say not only do we have the same character traits, but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny, and you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what? On the back of a fluke of birth. How dare you do that?

What? Ooh, Capricorn.""" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhCWw0E_mVY

Come on, try commenting something more effortful, interesting, or substantial than "do you really believe ?" or at least, something funnier? We've all got to while away the time until death arguing on the internet forever, at least give it some oomph.

Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#532

Post by bigbadfeline »

juleiie wrote: post #465
csrse wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If the argument is well argued, and makes you have better understanding of the issue, does it teally matter who you argue with? Can you only have your deeply held convictions changed from your own sphere? The implications are a bit disheartening in that case.

Nobody thinks this way about actual strong convictions they held like belief in god or abortion or polygamy. This works only for very narrow set of topics about numbers and data. Even the same academics that would change their mind quickly about some theory would never actually change their mind on their strong ideological convictions. I know it from real life examples. Strange that it needs to be articulated so loud…

> Nobody thinks this way about actual strong convictions they held like belief in god or abortion or polygamy.

There's no need to change that kind of strong convictions, what needs to change is the desire to use such convictions as justification for policies imposed onto others.

> Even the same academics that would change their mind quickly about some theory would never actually change their mind on their strong ideological convictions

Again, that wouldn't be a problem if they recognized the right of others to think differently. Their propensity to invoke "science" to justify intrusive policies, one way or the other, is the real problem.

> So I repeat again if you changed your mind under influence of an internet stranger then it wasn’t a very strong conviction.

To paraphrase Keynes here, those who don't change their minds when facts change are simply fools or trolls. And the realization of change may come from a single word, of people known or unknown, or even without words - it doesn't matter, change must take place when change is due.

We could argue about the semantics of "very strong convictions" until the cows come home, but it won't do any good if we haven't beforehand agreed upon "why we argue".

Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#533

Post by [deleted] »

lelandfe wrote: post #172
sejje wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same, except mostly I delete the responses. The writing was important to me, but the reading is rarely important to someone else. It would be wasting their time. I would guess I post about 40% of the comments I write.

Lincoln famously wrote and never mailed letters as a way to vent emotions.

[deleted]

Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#535

Post by dyslexit »

jknoepfler wrote: post #275
threethirtytwo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value is in the feeling of euphoria you get when dominating the other person by being unequivocally right. This isn’t philosophy. It’s biology. Every human feels good when this happens and millions of years of evolution has made most humans have feelings of euphoria when being right. The fact that this thread even exists speaks to the fact of the extremely high survival benefit this behavior confers onto a human.…

Ease off the adderall bud. There's a lot of sloppy thinking in that post, starting with the pseudo-scientific framing in terms of evolutionary psychology... which is ironic given then ScIeNcE-bro tone... couched against an artificial and incorrect taxonomy of reason into "philosophical, logical and scientific"... in reality those are intersecting at times, orthogonal at others, and the devil is generally in the detai…

[dead]

Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#536

Post by cvwright »

t-writescode wrote: post #485
EvanAnderson wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so bizarre to me that this works and I can't say I believed it until I tried. I shouldn't be surprised that it's so easy to trick our brains. I assume the phenomenon where I write 90% of an email, save it as a draft to finish later, never remember to finish it, get asked about it and have irrefutable certainty I sent it, then finally discover it as an unfinished draft is a facet of the same trickery. Stupid brai…

Journaling sounded stupid to me, until I tried it; and then the whole “do you really think that?”, “is that true?”, “what about this?” and “why are you lying to a sheet of paper?” started happening and I was like, “oh I get it.” Come to think of it, that’s a major reason why fully agentic coding doesn’t resonate with me and/or feels like I’m not growing or learning. I’m short-circuiting the “journaling” step where I…

You should try writing a design doc with the AI before you have it write the code. It will make random extrapolations from your first prompt, some good and some bad. Then you get a chance to argue back and forth with yourself with the robot as a helper.

Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#537

Post by a4isms »

einpoklum wrote: post #223
a4isms wrote: post #60

Here's a simple idea: You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. And three interpretations to consider: 0: The default: That person is irrationally attached to being wrong. Best to walk away, argumentation will be futile, and I have a life to lead. 1: Whoa! Sometimes that person is me. 2: If they didn't reason themselves into it, how did they get into it? What if their position rep…

> 0: The default: That person is irrationally attached to being wrong. Best to walk away, argumentation will be futile, and I have a life to lead. Disagree here, because: * Most of us have an irrational attachment to many of our positions. Arguing may or may not be futile, but if you can't "walk away" from most people (except if you sit at home and do nothing, and maybe not even then). * These people may well be your…

With people I'm invested in, like a community (which includes co-workers), I start with some experience that they are good people, which provides an incentive to ask whether options 2 or 3 (or both) would work. Option 3 in particular leaves open the possibility that I will be convinced to support what they have in mind once we move from "that seems unreasonable" to "this is aligned with your values, could it align with some of mine?"

Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#538

Post by Nevermark »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #256
lelandfe wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lincoln famously wrote and never mailed letters as a way to vent emotions.

It's so bizarre to me that this works and I can't say I believed it until I tried. I shouldn't be surprised that it's so easy to trick our brains. I assume the phenomenon where I write 90% of an email, save it as a draft to finish later, never remember to finish it, get asked about it and have irrefutable certainty I sent it, then finally discover it as an unfinished draft is a facet of the same trickery. Stupid brai…

I think one of the drivers of arguments is we are trying to understand something, and the argument is subconsciously a way to not just bash their ideas, but test the strength of our own.

In the effort to create a written response we:

1. Find it takes more effort than we imagined to nail down our views, and describe them well.

2. Often have to adapt our own ideas more than we expected to make a clear description possible. Achieving a "better understanding of ourselves" is almost always a reassuring euphemism for "fixing our own surprisingly under-developed/under-coherent ideas".

3. This puts in a more humble mood.

4. Realize the issue is more nuanced than we imagine, and better assess the depth of conversation that even the most constructive engagement would require.

5. Realize we don't have energy left for that.

6. Feel good about having put our ideas to the test and "understanding them better". So a good place to stop.

The practical need to argue (test our ideas in battle) was real, we just didn't need the other person to have the argument. Their imagined pushback forced us to improve our thinking, probably more than we acknowledge.

When preparing for a race, the best thing anyone can do is tell you your opponent is achieving better times than they are. You will achieve more gains by competing with an imaginary competitor, who always sees all your weaknesses, than a real one who likely would not.

Re: Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

#539

Post by JackFr »

cvwright wrote: post #536
t-writescode wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journaling sounded stupid to me, until I tried it; and then the whole “do you really think that?”, “is that true?”, “what about this?” and “why are you lying to a sheet of paper?” started happening and I was like, “oh I get it.” Come to think of it, that’s a major reason why fully agentic coding doesn’t resonate with me and/or feels like I’m not growing or learning. I’m short-circuiting the “journaling” step where I…

You should try writing a design doc with the AI before you have it write the code. It will make random extrapolations from your first prompt, some good and some bad. Then you get a chance to argue back and forth with yourself with the robot as a helper.

“Are there any ambiguities, open questions, or hidden assumptions in spec? Please think deeply.”
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