How to listen when you disagree • Hacker News Board

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#181

Post by hashkb » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 6:41 PM UTC

joslin01 wrote: post #109

hashkb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may have read into this too far and/or protected a bit much onto it. How do you figure the OP is helping you attack an opposing position?

The point parent is making is that the one's own stubbornness (that they are indeed correct) forces them to skip a step -- is what they are saying true and/or what is their logical positioning? Instead, OP says "first find out how they got to that position in life" which you gotta understand does come across pretty smug since it implies superiority of opinion/belief and degenerates the disagreer as if they are merely…

I have been a coldly logical operator for the bulk of my career. Despite arguing from a position of obvious correctness against positions of obvious incorrectness, as clearly proven by me, and agreed with by many spectators, I often found all I was doing was upsetting people and creating bad relationships.

You're not going to be able to convince someone who is disagreeing with you from an emotional place, no matter how much logic you throw at them. In addition, you're making it worse each time you do this, because you're ignoring what they're saying, and what they're saying is really important to them.

Listening with empathy is how you bring people to the table. It's also how you understand when to walk away. When you try to forcefully convince someone out of their emotional beliefs without understanding how they got there (and you aren't coworkers or running out of air or something) they will think you are an asshole. The less emotional / more logical person is in the best position to open with empathy.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#182

Post by Rachine » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

"When someone has a point of view we find difficult to understand, disagreeable, or even offensive, we must look to the set of circumstances that person has experienced that resulted in that point of view." True

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#183

Post by hashkb » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

WWKong wrote: post #140

bcoates wrote: post #73

"Hear the Biography, not the ideology" This is just another way of attacking someone else's position, with the added bonus of letting you be intolerably smug while you do it. You're not communicating in good faith unless you're willing to concede the possibility that the other person is actually right about something. At the very least you need to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. This, on the othe…

Tell me more. Why do you feel this way? What is your story?

Damn, you wrote the comment I meant to write. I led with a judgment.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#184

Post by hashkb » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 6:46 PM UTC

zw123456 wrote: post #103

hashkb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you keep your mouth shut most of the time, and listen, as the article suggests... you'd have better outcomes. Although you may have to redefine "good outcome"... if you're hoping that by listening more you'll be more effective at persuasion, that's missing the point (but true).

Yes, not saying anything is the key for sure. In my case a good outcome was just having my sister not hate me. So, you are right, it worked in that case. But it was hard. I probably have more to learn.

Totally, me too. I always thought empathy was a magical quality of empathetic people; now I understand it's a thing you do and a skill you practice like any other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication got me started. Everything in it is super obvious... but also hard to remember in the moment.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#185

Post by hashkb » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 6:47 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #102

zw123456 wrote: post #61

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…

> downright evil

Can you define this? Just asking.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#186

Post by hashkb » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 6:49 PM UTC

zzalpha wrote: post #5

Eh, perhaps I'm cynical, but listening to someone, and coming to understanding regarding how they might have developed there beliefs, sounds nice, and it's very compassionate, but I question if it's actually a step toward compromise, or simply understanding. After all, for an increasing number of issues, in the end, the beliefs themselves are so polarized they leave no room for compromise. To this woman, it doesn't m…

> beliefs are so starkly polarized into black-and-white

This would be less of a thing if we all listened more, instead of hearing the first few words from across the aisle, tuning them out, and preparing to retort back. I think your conclusion is begging the question.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#187

Post by groby_b » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

mgraczyk wrote: post #120

groby_b wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - if you say "judge on facts and data alone, without listening", how will you know all the facts? How will you know you did not miss some data? Sure, for some debates, there is a preponderance of evidence that a specific view is right. For many things in the public light, the debate is not that simple, though. Many of our hotbutton political issues are very complex and nuanced. To stay with the article's…

> if you say "judge on facts and data alone, without listening", I didn't say "without listening". I meant that it is better to pay attention to facts instead of positions or opinions. It's not important that your conversation partner believes X or claims that "Y is obvious". Instead you should pay attention when your conversation partner points on "people measured X in in such and such a way and found Y". Collect ev…

I wish you good luck with this approach. I prefer to understand people I disagree with - many arguments are rooted in personal history, not naked facts.

I tried the "purely fact driven, ignore emotions" approach - it did not lead me to a point where I was happy. (It tends to stunt relationships, in my experience)

I hope it plays out better for you.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#188

Post by gilleain » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 8:38 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #180

gilleain wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> she doesn't consider it to be murder as such, she just wants people who do it to get the same punishment Right, and the point is that the writer would likely never have found this out in the course of normal argument because the discussion would have got caught up in the rights and wrongs of jailing people for making choices about procreation. There's the expression "love the sinner, hate the sin" that surely appli…

> There's the expression "love the sinner, hate the sin" that surely applies to more than just religious sins. It is possible to disagree with someone but not hate them for it, even if their ideas might be hateful to you. I'm not sure how this is a response to my comment. If you read my other comment, that's pretty much my point. I'm sorry if that was not clear.

You're right, my response was a bit confused. I absolutely agree with your original point that we shouldn't lose sight of the goal of challenging horrible opinions just to try and better understand someone.

I was really just pointing out that understanding the reasons why can better lead you to what their opinion really is. That's all. The 'love the sinner' stuff was kind of irrelevant.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#189

Post by axlprose » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 11:53 PM UTC

marklgr wrote: post #156

axlprose wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common sentiment, but I think it underplays just how much phenomena logic and factual observation can analyze/explain, and in turn we easily forget and underestimate just how much it can truly accomplish[0]. I mean, literally all of our modern scientific and technological progress has been built on top of it, so what inherent quality makes these tools ineffective for discovering these other things th…

Noe one denies the virtues or achievements of logic, but as you know, the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything ie. to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. As of today, it's clearly no…

> the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything

Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture?

Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition.

And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues...

> The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out.

That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of.

The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.

Re: How to listen when you disagree

#190

Post by woodandsteel » Sat, Aug 06, 2016, 12:01 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #54

enraged_camel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>If listening and understanding other people isn't the first step to working through these problems, nothing is. It is the first step, but it only works if the other side is also willing to take it with you. If you are the only one changing your position, it is not a mutual compromise, by definition.

No. But even in the worst case, if there is no possibility of compromise and it comes to force, you are in a position to use the force with sadness rather than hatred. That's much better for you, and it's even better for the other side , especially if you win.

>you are in a position to use the force with sadness rather than hatred

That's a very wise thought.