161–170 of 192 posts
While I agree with the overall sentiment, people ought to have to earn the privilege of being listened to by meeting a higher standard of reasonableness, self-awareness, and intellectual responsibility than that. The woman was unable herself to have children, so she latches onto the view that those who are able but choose termination are unethical killers. She manufactures further rationalization: "it's not right to…
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If listening and understanding other people isn't the first step to working through these problems, nothing is. So I'll make a counter-point: let's say we're back in the old slavery days. I'm sure Abe did his fair share of listening and talking with folks from the South. But eventually, there just ain't no compromising and something had to be done. And so it was done. Ultimately, I think, for some issues, there is si…
It cost more than half a million lives to end slavery at that particular time. What is the appropriate life per slavery-year exchange rate? Because if for one less year of slavery you would spend 10,000 human lives, and 20 years of peaceful compromise would have ended slavery, then your war was a mistake.
There's no way to even estimate such things beforehand, so the calculation you propose is pretty useless.
I'm not saying that the decision for the war was right or wrong, but that you can't answer the question with a seemingly objective multiplication of numbers (it's the garbage-in-garbage-out principle in action).
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I also found it interesting that this article is hugely concerned with making someone feel loved for expressing a desire to literally have everybody killed who had an abortion. I think at some point, the severity of an ideology has to outweigh the desire to accept a person as who they are. We have been somewhat culturally conditioned by the common tropes of storytelling that biography excuses, and in fact makes accep…
It's not saying the other person's beliefs are justified, it's saying that if you want to change their beliefs, you have to understand how they got there in the first place. If you approach it like a logical debate you're not going to convince anyone. It's not about saying all the facts, it's about helping people reprocess their feelings into more reasonable conclusions.
From Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and influence people": ''' "I don't blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do." An answer like that will soften the most cantankerous old cuss alive. And you can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does. Take Al Capone, for example. Suppose you had…
Not only does it soothe the other person, this approach is ACTUALLY helpful in improving oneself i.e. how one approaches an argument or a difference of opinion. Once you say this and mean it, you are no longer thinking about how wrong or stupid the other person is. You are no longer frustrated by someone else's apparent incompetence. Instead you start thinking how to share with the other person, the influential thoug…
I love the sentiment that the author was trying to convey. The example that was provided was beautiful. It is really important to realize that usually it does not work out as beautifully as was presented in this particular example. My experience in active listening is that perhaps 1 out of 20 times do you get a good outcome as was the case in this example. Generally, the person will simply yell things at you about th…
I also found it interesting that this article is hugely concerned with making someone feel loved for expressing a desire to literally have everybody killed who had an abortion. I think at some point, the severity of an ideology has to outweigh the desire to accept a person as who they are. We have been somewhat culturally conditioned by the common tropes of storytelling that biography excuses, and in fact makes accep…
The article says:
> people who have them should be arrested for murder
Also, this is said by someone who considers abortion to be murder, so isn't surprising.
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> merely using emotion in their logic. Truth often goes deeper than facts and logic.
Could you please explain how truth goes deeper than facts? I am missing something
It can't tell you what objectives are important nor what risks are acceptable. Those are both transitive properties: something is important to some people, something might be acceptable to some people.
There's no objective morality and no objective politics. Even if we try to limit discussion to "facts", things fall apart fairly rapidly once we start talking stochastic events and statistical morality. Controversial subjects get bogged down with duelling sets of statistics each making subtly different claims about causation.
One of the useful things about legal training is that it forces you to separate facts from law. Facts may be true or false but only law and ethics can make claims about what is right and wrong.
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I also found it interesting that this article is hugely concerned with making someone feel loved for expressing a desire to literally have everybody killed who had an abortion. I think at some point, the severity of an ideology has to outweigh the desire to accept a person as who they are. We have been somewhat culturally conditioned by the common tropes of storytelling that biography excuses, and in fact makes accep…
> for expressing a desire to literally have everybody killed who had an abortion The article says: > people who have them should be arrested for murder Also, this is said by someone who considers abortion to be murder, so isn't surprising.
> Also, this is said by someone who considers abortion to be murder, so isn't surprising.
The article actually does a pretty good job of convincing me that she doesn't consider it to be murder as such, she just wants people who do it to get the same punishment, because she feels they are throwing something away that is unattainable to her.
Can't stress enough that only listening to the ones with the same view is very dangerous .