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Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

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Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#41

Post by Buttons840 »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #37
rjprins wrote: post #7

The best insight here is that self-worth and fear of shaming are the main motivators for not agreeing. A weaker argument, that is less threatening to self-worth is one way of preventing that your discussion partner goes on the defense. Another way is to make him feel safer in the sense that he can trust that you will not hurt his feelings. This can be done by affirming that you are on the same page with him, that you…

Could it be that the tendency to preserve the coherence of one's views goes beyond self-worth? E.g., most people, I think, would try to avoid holding in their minds ideas which don't agree with each other. So, if your previously acquired ideas are already leaning this way , they may tend to oppose new ideas that are leaning that way .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance -- I believe this idea is called "cognitive dissonance", and has been demonstrated in some interesting studies.

As I read about it, I could remember several instances in my life where I have behaved exactly as described.

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#42

Post by tocomment »

I've always found it interesting that most people have really strong opinions on complex political questions to begin with.

For example, as a programmer, how do I know what the correct immigration level should be? How should I know if we should intervene in Syria?

Even if I follow the news, a few articles and news clips really aren't going to give me enough information to make an educated decision.

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#43

Post by tocomment »

mathattack wrote: post #19

A mentor explained this to me as, "If you want someone to do something, you have to let them save face. If someone screws something up and you want them to fix it, you can't humiliate them in the process." I used to get very frustrated with shoddy work from subcontractors. I found that the more I directly documented the quality of the work, the worse they'd harden their position. I learned there are better ways to op…

Would you mind providing some examples? I can't really picture what you're talking about?

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#44

Post by janson0 »

hackula1 wrote: post #36
IvyMike wrote: post #29

Once upon a time, I learned to play the game Go. One of the key insights I took away was that if you directly attacked an enemy in a weak area, the enemy would defend in that area, making him strong there. Almost always you would end up with an impenetrable wall on both sides. There's an art to pressing your advantage in an area without making it an 'attack'. (In the end, I never really got that good and haven't play…

Risk has this same dynamic. Going head to head on main choke does nothing but let the other players come in and mop the floor with you and your opponent.

I agree. This also shows up in Stratego on some levels, with the interesting twist that you can't understand the size of the force in each area.

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#45

Post by mathattack »

tocomment wrote: post #43
mathattack wrote: post #19

A mentor explained this to me as, "If you want someone to do something, you have to let them save face. If someone screws something up and you want them to fix it, you can't humiliate them in the process." I used to get very frustrated with shoddy work from subcontractors. I found that the more I directly documented the quality of the work, the worse they'd harden their position. I learned there are better ways to op…

Would you mind providing some examples? I can't really picture what you're talking about?

Example: I recommend a client to hire a specific 3rd party consulting firm that will work side by side with my team from the product vendor. The firm's salesman agrees to my methodology and deliverables. The project starts, and their project team starts making up their own methodology, and staffs it with underskilled resources. I raise this to the salesman, who raises it to the PM, who digs in. So I gather an email chain of all the mistakes his team has made. And their PM digs in even more. The client is getting antsy about missed deadlines all around. So I get an extremely detailed report on every failure their team has made, and send it to the PM, the salesman, the senior partner responsible for the client and senior partner responsible for the practice area. The PM has to save face, so all he can say is, "You're not there day to day to understand." The client meanwhile gets hosed.

In hindsight, once I humiliated the PM, he couldn't turn things around. I should have set it up that they were reporting to me, and pushed them with a "Here's how you can succeed in making the client love you guys" message rather than being confrontational. If they didn't react to that, I could have then replaced them.

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#46

Post by nhaehnle »

tocomment wrote: post #42

I've always found it interesting that most people have really strong opinions on complex political questions to begin with. For example, as a programmer, how do I know what the correct immigration level should be? How should I know if we should intervene in Syria? Even if I follow the news, a few articles and news clips really aren't going to give me enough information to make an educated decision.

Based on Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, I would suggest that it is a case of substitution: We (often unconsciously) substitute a hard question for an easier question. In your examples, that might be: Did you have good experiences with immigrants? How do you feel about war more generally?

Those judgments aren't necessarily bad in themselves. For example, as a pacifist, I might be happy to err on the side of non-interventionism as long as the situation is sufficiently unclear.

These substitutions only really become problematic when we close ourselves to new data that might change our mind.

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#47

Post by nhaehnle »

einhverfr wrote: post #17
tomjen3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure about your point two. Abortion isn't nearly as split along party lines as you may think, except among the leaders of the parties and a few extremists.

I said political lines, not party lines. My point is that people IME who are more likely to see liberty as the winning interest in abortion are more likely to see life as the winning interest in gun control and vice versa.

I would like to point out that nobody really sees liberty in the abstract as a winning interest in the abortion debate. Pro-choicers clearly do not care about the "liberty" of the fetus, while pro-lifers clearly do not care about the "liberty" of the woman.

The whole issue arises because liberty in the abstract cannot have a full victory, because different kinds of liberty collide.

So then you have those who think society's interest in population growth trumps the woman's interest in self-control, and those who think the opposite.

Something similar is true in gun control. If the liberty of gun ownership ends up severely restricting certain people's liberties - after all, you can't really exercise any form of liberty when you're dead - then gun control debate isn't really about liberty in the abstract.

Of course, that doesn't prevent people from phrasing it as such as a matter of rhetorics.

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#48

Post by oscilloscope »

DanHulton wrote: post #16
jonnathanson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I would even go so far as to say that it's not about making a "weaker" argument; it's about making a more socially nuanced argument. Context counts. Subtext counts. They count especially when there's an audience to the argument (real or perceived). When someone feels his face, or dignity, or credibility is on the line, he feels intense pressure to stick to his guns -- and to keep his guns blazing. Convers…

This feels a lot like John Cleese's advice on creativity within teams: You need to be surrounded by people who will build on ideas with you, not people who will lead with "no". The moment you have a person in the room with you who will shoot you down on an idea, trust falters and creativity dies. Honestly, I've thought a lot lately about how I argue, and I find I get a lot more accomplished when I lead with "Yes, and…

"Yes, and" refers to one of the techniques of improvisational theatre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvisational_theatre#Applyi...

Basically you must accept the reality your scene partners put forth and build on it. Otherwise you end up with a confused, amorphous environment with no clear direction.

Improv theatre still needs tension and conflict to emerge. This comes out of the structure of the scene spontaneously. It could be some kind of repetition, pattern, contradiction, physical motion, etc. Ideally, the players don't just rehash old games but are eager to make a new, unusual play.

"Unusual" in this sense relates to the context of the world you're playing in. In a scene, it's not unusual for a coven of witches to kidnap children and boil them in a brew. But it could be unusual for a scientist to discover that brew has miraculous healing properties and to publish the results in Nature. This could be humorous to an audience, because normally there's absolutely no legitimate utilitarian imperative to mix children into a brew.

There are more interesting ideas in improv that relate to politics/business. I recommend anyone interested check out Impro For Storytellers by Keith Johnstone.

http://appliedimprov.ning.com/profiles/blogs/7-keith-johnsto...

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#49

Post by dwaltrip »

IvyMike wrote: post #29

Once upon a time, I learned to play the game Go. One of the key insights I took away was that if you directly attacked an enemy in a weak area, the enemy would defend in that area, making him strong there. Almost always you would end up with an impenetrable wall on both sides. There's an art to pressing your advantage in an area without making it an 'attack'. (In the end, I never really got that good and haven't play…

Go is an awesome game and, dare I say, strategically superior to chess ;)

Re: Want to Win a Political Debate? Try Making a Weaker Argument

#50

Post by rdtsc »

I use another tactic sometimes, somewhat related.

I make a stronger and radically (more inflammatory if you wish) than the person I am talking to. It has to be just inflammatory enough for them to start defending the weaker more moderate position, basically leaning towards the direction you'd want to persuade them originally. For example, I have some hard core Fox News watching Republicans in my extended family. So sometimes when they bring health care and how it distributes wealth to the lazy and it is not free market and such. I bring grandma so and so and how she is just mooching off our government with the medicare. She never paid all that in her life and she is part of the socialist communist system that is robbing the country. Then they usually start to backpedal -- well...you see this is different and they argue for how the country should take care of the elderly and so on...

Anyway I do it more for fun and amusement if someone makes the mistake of bringing the topic up, rather than hoping to actually convince them.

And maybe this is well studies and has a name I just don't know what it is called. "Act crazier than the crazies"?

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