Against Persuasion
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
We don't live in that world. Even here on HN, there are sometimes really strident voices trying very aggressively to advocate and defend their viewpoint. But it's worse off of HN. It's everywhere. It's social media, and TV, and advertising, and spam phone calls, and and and. Nobody has time to fairly consider even a small fraction of the attempts to persuade us. We just reject without consideration all these attempts, because it's the only way to keep any kind of space for ourselves in our own heads.
There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part. That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very well defined though the results are stochastic rather than deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games".
But such techniques are merely tools without specific morality or ethics - never give the human a free pass on morality or ethics because only humans can make such decisions.
Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings, but exceptionally skillful thinking in things like logic and epistemology must be learned...but for people to learn them, they must be taught. As it is, numerous errors can be easily found even in intellectual spaces online, demonstrating that even the cream of the crop is far from perfect....and as for the less intellectual places (the overwhelming majority), well we're all familiar with how bad those are.
> Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings
You seem to be conflating openness to persuasion as a component of personality, and openness as a learnable mental skill.
It isn't inconsistent to assert that being open to persuasion is in fact both.
Most people I encounter find (heuristically) this belief/philosophy to be "wrong"/bizarre if not downright offensive, but I sincerely believe that this type of thinking (a bias towards conclusiveness and away from epistemic soundness and curiosity, and this is but one example among many) is one of the biggest root cause problems of problems on this planet. A prime example of where this is causing serious (life and death) problems is with vaccine hesitancy - people love to hate on anti-vaxxers, asserting that they "are" "stupid", but rarely have I encountered a "smart" critic who has the cognitive ability (openness) to even consider the possibility that their perception of the situation is incorrect (if not downright harmful from a causality perspective).
A (likely offensive, as a demonstration of my point) way to think about my stance/conceptualization that might help communicate my frustration: I feel as frustrated with pro-vaxxers (or, ~neurotypical ~Western human beings in general) as pro-vaxxers feel with anti-vaxxers...and ironically (or not), it seems at least as difficult to reason with them (which I believe well demonstrates the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon).
Which studies?
This sounds like one of those new-agey empathic business tutorials which are actually hidden racism, classism and eugenicism 101s.
Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater.
A silly distinction - the most skilled debater is the one who makes you think their idea is the best.
It seems possible that if stubbornness is a acquired trait, it is one because it confers a survival advantage.
1. I know Aumann's Agreement Theorem and the appropriate lemmas about information transfer and prior modification (i.e. if I start failing to modify my priors with repeated conversation, I am failing or the other person is failing, either of which leads to our conversation failing at converging => we should exit)
2. I try to place myself in situations where the difference in outcome is a large multiple of the difference in knowledge of reality. This biases me to accept input well, since I want positive outcome and biology will ruthlessly optimize me toward it. Not every situation is like this. Sometimes, the part of reality you want to optimize against is specifically the people, ignoring the underlying reality. e.g. Though I had a respirator with P100 filters on all exhale and inhale valves I took it off and wore my standard N95 mask when on a plane when asked to. The truth didn't matter there as much as the part of the truth which is "don't piss off flight attendants".
3. I force skin in the game. For instance, I took all my money out of Vanguard and actively managed it in 2019 on a 5x lever. My idea was that I could beat the market, and I did. I also believed in early Feb that despite having advance warning from my friends in Asia about COVID-19 that it was a huge deal, that American bureaucracy was likely to be sophisticated and evidence-based. Since I knew the correct actions to be taken in response, I assumed they knew, and I assumed they had the wherewithal to make it happen. It appears that none of these things are true. But it was a good lesson. It helps me understand how some people I am distantly related to make all that money on defence contracts in Virginia - the bureaucracy is actually not sophisticated, it is merely large.
4. I model us all as message-passing elements that incur a cost per message. I make a good effort to pass you information that has been effective to me to encourage you to do so to me. Multiple elements doing so will lead to easier misinformation detection, less variance in information availability, etc. This is good for me since I am a very capable execution machine. I can only lose in the world in the ways I care about because I don't have information, not because I can't execute.
The consequence of the message-passing element idea is that I don't try to convince, i.e. if I know that there is a red apple at the corner of Bush and Sansome and I tell you this and you say "oh yeah? Prove it!" I will not attempt to do so. I have given you the information but the cost of ensuring good provenance is high in an untrusted information network with few repeated interactions. So, what I do is that I attempt to repeat interactions as frequently as possible with a limited set of elements so that provenance-information is cached and I am operating on the trusted subnetwork. For my part, I try to make falsifiable claims so that other people can either add or remove me from their trust network. For HN, I have an extension that removes comment-threads started by low-information low-provenance individuals. I know I will fail sometimes at not being one of these people and I'll accept that risk and let others choose to do the same to me.
How are those individuals identified by the extension?
I would say neither clearly holds the power. The Senate is split 50-50. The conservatives hold the Supreme Court, and the liberals hold the House and the Presidency. And those have flipped in recent elections. So both sides are fighting as hard as they can, because they are this close to winning control. But "fighting as hard as you can" is not conducive to thoughtfully listening to the other side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall)
Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have titles like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change". (Not that the left doesn't produce books with similar titles, but they don't get wide distribution, while you've heard of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg).
Your statement is probably true, but it's as a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. If one side insists long enough that that the other side is literally evil, they won't be understood no matter how hard their opponents try.
Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals. Instead, the response is usually to do the same thing even harder -- which works, because it generates enthusiastic support from the far right and grudging support from the center, while compromise bores everybody.
It eventually resulted in Trump, whose primary skill is in being deliberately offensive. And it would have worked again, had a literal pandemic not intervened. He remains incredibly popular with the right -- not because he tries to understand liberals, but because he specifically rejects the notion that there's anything there to understand.
This conclusion is repugnant, and I rejected it for a very long time. But it seems inescapable. And I have no idea what to recommend, because it seems clear that no amount of me trying harder to understand is going to help. I do believe, however, that additional calls for equivalence are detrimental. They deny the reality that the split is asymmetric, and therefore shunt us into lines of thought that will continue to prove ineffective.
I am a big fan of the organization Braver Angels, which is working to reduce polarization and facilitate conversations between people with different viewpoints.
One of their biggest struggles is that they get significant participation from the "blue" tribe, but have trouble recruiting "red" tribe members. Some of this may be skepticism from the red tribe that they will be treated fairly, but I wonder how much is simply lack of interest in understanding others.
Talk about assuming the worst about people! Let me present an alternate theory: The "blue tribe" is surprised by a "red tribe" reaction more than the "red tribe" is surprised by the "blue tribe".
I read about a study in the lead up to the 2016 election. Conservatives were asked to voice liberal opinions and vice versa. The conservatives were able to voice opposing viewpoints significantly better than those who leaned left wing.
This blog came up while searching for a source on that research and has some other information you might find useful. I can relate to the author's feeling of frustration very well! [0]
[0] https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand...
> For instance,when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights.
This, for instance, seems to boil down to an appeal to authority or appeal to tradition, which, yes, is in the name "conservative" but seems quite circular to use as a reason to hold the position.
"Your position is reasonable on the basis of the dimensions it considers but it fails to consider these other important dimensions" is also MILES away from how popular conservative pundits represent liberal positions.
Socially speaking, I would say that conservatives were generally fair game to make fun of or put down in some way most of the time. Sometimes it would be making fun of rednecks or hillbillies or maybe the Amish. Luddites were fair game to be made fun of. Oftentimes it was less about humor and put downs, but more about moral superiority. This was just my experience, and I'm sure other liberal/progressive/whatever people are struggling to feel accepted in their conservative social circle.
Now that I'm conservative, I talk a lot less about what I think in mixed company. It's simply too risky.
I'm not too surprised that you find conservative arguments unconvincing. In general, purely based on reasoning, I find liberal arguments to be a bit better (on average). Sometimes, they are a lot better. The question for me, is how much weight to put on reasoning. How much value does reasoning have? My personal experience is that reasoning works well for writing software or fixing a bug. It doesn't work as well when I try to use it to decide how I should run my life. In fact, my own reasoning has led me into the pits of hell. That changed my perspective, quite a bit!
I truly hope that you and your friends and coworkers can keep peace and good will towards each other.
Last Wednesday's Jackson County Sentinel (http://jcsentinel.com/) has an editorial by Danny Gardner (https://muckrack.com/daniel-gardner-1/articles), "White House blames misinformation for low vaccination rates."
"Cubans have begun a revolution for freedom...begging US to help them gain their independence. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that Haitians or Cubans who come to America by Sea 'will be returned'.
"Meanwhile, Mayorkas continues to insist that our Southern border 'is closed' while hundreds of thousands of migrants from around the world stream across the closed border to the extent more than one million have crossed this fiscal year. [My note: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...]
"Escalating violent crime rates continue to ravage cities across America. [Note: https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270] The 'Defund the Police' movement is alive and well and being cheered on by representatives in Congress. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is dividing parents, teachers, and children into racial and political identity groups in the name of ending racism....
"From January to the middle of May, fourteen states enacted 22 new voting laws. In Philadelphia last week President Biden claimed, 'We are facing the most significant test of our Democracy since the Civil War...' Are new voting laws tantamount to the Civil War?
"...In fact, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki earned the title of Miss Information with some of her comments about monitoring and correcting Facebook and other social media accounts that spread misinformation about COVID, particularly about vaccines.
"...More than 34 million Americans have contracted Covid-19, and well over 33 million recovered. Should they be forced to take the vaccine? How many have died after taking the vaccine? How many have encountered adverse reactions after taking the vaccine? [Note: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...]
"Last year about this time and through the end of the year, the LEFT relentlessly attacked the notion of producing a safe vaccine that could help end the pandemic. The LEFT didn't get onboard with the vaccine until after President Biden was inaugurated. [I do not remember this.] Why? Was it a question of science?
"No one doubts, or should doubt that social media is full of misinformation. That is not news. The real news is the White House's threats to control what its current residents consider to be misinformation. Let's try an experiment: What if President Trump had won? Would some still refuse to take the vaccine? Would the LEFT enthusiastically encourage everyone to take the vaccine?
"Misinformation is not the problem. Politics is the problem. Politics says the border is closed...migrants fleeing Haiti or Cuba will be returned to their failed states...police are making violent crime rates soar...we can end racism by separating people by race...new voting laws are Jim Crow laws. Politics says we will tell you what the truth is and censor what anyone else says.
"Maybe misinformation is the problem? Where is all of this misinformation coming from?" [Elisions mine, my fingers are tired of typing.]
There's a lot of opinions there, including some hidden ones. (Cuban (and Haitian?) immigrants are good, Mexican, Honduran, and Guatemalan are bad?) Some of them I can see as worrying, although I have this strange feeling that Gardner is accusing the LEFT of doing things the right was doing for years. Anyone remember "alternative facts"?
I have a conservative friend who is very concerned about the illegal immigration issue. I'm not sure what his problem with it is, considering I try to avoid getting involved in rants. And especially since some of his best friends are involved in the construction industry, and we're surrounded by poultry operations, both of which might possible have some undocumented workers. I do wonder about his thoughts on the "wall", since he's a retired wildlife biologist and might possibly be concerned about blocking migration routes.
Anyway, back to the Sentinel. Saturday's copy has a letter to the editor from a local: "With the Maricopa County, Arizona adit of the 2020 election results in progress the question of whether the 2020 election was stolen and/or full of significant fraud. [Yeah, that's a sentence fragment. This one's a bad one. But that doesn't mean the opinions are wrong or invalid.] Previous analysis and reports have documented what appears to be a large amount of fraudulent voting, especially in the battleground states, an especially in big cities controlled by the Democrats.
"...Why did the [federal?] courts refuse to hear [cases about election fraud]? ... There were many reasons, but it seems from a Supreme Court standpoint the were influenced by leaving it to the state courts to rule in their own states. [Note: Sho' 'nuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25754949] Furthermore, one of the key considerations in the Supreme Court refusing to take on an election case was the threat of violence from the Left. [WHAT?!] The Left (i.e., Democrats) had been rioting, looting, and burning almost continuously since May 2020.
"...threat of violence...the violence of the Democrats and the support of the RINOs...Biden won Arizona by 10,000 votes, but recent preliminary audit results identified 107,000 fraudulent ballots. [I cannot find a reference for this. Maybe https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-elections-arizona-gover...]
"Virtually any and all forensic audits of one of the suspected culprits, Dominion voting machines, have been blocked completely. Antrim County, Michigan remains an obvious example of voting machine fraud with an actual ballot [count] flipped 30% of the voted so that Trump won that [county] by 65 percent to 35 percent. [Note: I think https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-elections-arizona-gover...]
"...So many, many people believe the election was stolen. This must be resolved before the next election. It would be great to conduct said audit and find that fraud was minimal and didn't affect the outcome of the election.
"The United States had a great four years under President Donald Trump who I consider to be our greatest President of the past 100 years. Why? He told the TRUTH! His actions "Made America Great Again". Now we are ruled by a political party that is "Making America Poor," and doing great harm to the prosperity and integrity of the USA. Our Founders produced a country that has been the greatest country ever.
"It was a country based on Biblical standards, men and women who were dependent on God, and people who were obedient to God's will. Trump wasn't perfect nor have the people been, but great things have been done.
"Corrections have been made. In large part, our current leaders have abandoned God's instructions to follow their own. Democrat Congressman Gerald Nadler said it so well, 'God's will is no concern of Congress.'"
Now, I (as I linked to above) did a look-see at the court cases about 2020 election fraud. In the ones that actually presented evidence, that evidence was examined by the courts carefully---many specifically mentioned allowing the plaintiffs extra latitude due to the importance. However, in all the cases, the evidence was very weak. (I didn't see any mentioning violence from the Left.) At the federal level, most of them were completely out of place. (And a surprising number died on a precedent set by G.W. Bush in 2000.) Audits have been performed (And by people with skills and experience. Cyber Ninjas? Really?); they just didn't provide the result this writer and many other conservatives seem to have wanted. So I don't have much enthusiasm for the opinion that the election was stolen. Sorry.
I was also in Texas when Lloyd Benson retired and his "safe" district was divvied up to ensure that Travis County would never elect another Democrat (https://ftp.txdot.gov/pub/txdot-info/tpp/maps/texas-senate.p...). So, yeah, I look at the recent spate of election laws with a certain amount of skepticism.
As for being dependent on God's will, let's just say I'm an atheist. Let's further say that, in my historical view, governing based on God's instructions was kind of a bad idea. For moral and ethical reasons.
That leaves me with a final set of opinions that I can't really argue with: I'm a despicable, anti-American, violent liar. Which may well be true. Heck, I might even have committed a capitol crime (https://www.amazon.com/Treason-Liberal-Treachery-Cold-Terror...).
> Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals.
One of the big theories in The Righteous Mind can be used to explain this. The Moral Foundations Theory lists 5 drivers of moral judgments, 5 reasons why people may feel things are 'right'. Then it gives data showing that liberals feel 2 of these strongly and 3 weakly, while conservatives feel all 5 about as equally strongly.
By that theory, the reason that conservatives need not work as hard to understand liberals is that they feel all the same moral impulses liberals do, and more, while liberals only feel 2/5ths of the conservatives' impulses.
The same theory suggests that conservative persuasion will be more effective on liberals than liberal persuasion on conservatives. This then leads to election losses, which leads to hand wringing about how liberals don't understand conservatives, so they can't convince them to vote liberal.
> The same theory suggests that conservative persuasion will be more effective on liberals than liberal persuasion on conservatives. This then leads to election losses, which leads to hand wringing about how liberals don't understand conservatives, so they can't convince them to vote liberal.
How so? My impression would be that then 2 out of 2 liberal arguments would then have appeal to conservatives, but only 2 out of 5 conservative arguments would work the other way.
Interestingly enough Jonah Goldberg is pretty much never-Trumper.
Reactionaries, motivated by fear, fueled by resentment, keep upping the ante.
Liberals, conservatives (philosophical, not partisan), everyone else just can't bring themselves to believe the anti-majoritarian rhetoric is sincere.
Technological progress always disrupts society. Immigration always fuels xenophobia. Expanding the franchise always triggers backlash (retrenchment). Inequity always begats right wing populism.
The only notion I have is calm everyone down. Tap the breaks on tech. Stop advocating for immigration. Enfranchise people on the down low.
Most importantly, reverse inequity. Get the ginni index back down. By whatever means possible.
Persuasion is a two-way street. Rhetoric is not. If you dislike the way someone says something, then don't conflate that with the actual thing they're saying.
The author obviously thinks persuasion is “a two-way street,” that asking questions is good, and that Socratic dialogue leaves people more enlightened: it helps make their ignorance more precise.
A person of a more libertarian bent, like myself, would assert that it's the conflation of government and society, the political and the social, that's the problem. They are separate spheres of human activity. That same sort of person would tell you that politics is a method for conflict resolution, given the inescapable fact of force in human relations.
Politics is about force. The social, by contrast precludes the use of force. Society is about cooperation.
If you accept the above view, you try to reign in what politics applies to. But that is not at all what our politics is like today. Today, we try to do all sorts of things through the power of government. We inject force into aspects of society that should instead be left to cooperation. In fact, we go beyond that. We consider that use of force moral, since it's in the service of the pursuit of "utopia."
I don't expect non-libertarians to agree. I just want to point out that no one should be shocked at all the fighting in the political sphere. Moreover, I would further assert that no one should kid himself or herself that "openness" or "persuasion" is the solution. Lastly, I would point out that when the question "how should government accomplish such-and-such" is posed to someone of libertarian bent, no amount of persuasion is possible, one way or the other. All arguments are superficial. At the bottom, they ignore the point that government shouldn't.
Essentially, this essay argues that sometimes it is rational to ignore attempts at persuasion altogether – there is always someone more adept than you at arguing their point, and since they are so convincing you are incapable of distinguishing the truth, so you fall back on your Bayesian prior.
Maybe he was on the autism spectrum?
If people still read the Classics, this would be widely known as table-stakes.
And it seems to have worked, to a degree. Over 2,000 years later, everyone from layman to politician invokes his name and death as often as they do Jesus. Not existing is often a really good way of kind of existing seemingly forever.
He chose to remain faithful to speaking truth (or what he believed to be true and asking questions to humbly discover it) rather than acquiesce to a bunch of manipulative tyrants. Such actions not only commit you to stand by the truth in thought, word, and deed, but they inspire others to do the same and thus disperse the evil of the world. It was a blow to the systemic lies of myth and sophistry employed by the powerful of the world.
Socrates did not choose death. He chose truth while accepting that he would be killed by those in power. Big difference, except for a utilitarian.
Now whether he should have chosen exile, I don't know. In some sense, what he chose is heroic and more inspiring than skipping town. Christian martyrdom is like this. A Christian remains steadfast in the truth even to the point of death. This is a faithfulness to Truth that cannot be destroyed by evil men who would use fear to part us from the truth and toss us back into the darkness and slavery of lies. In remaining faithful to the truth, the martyr truly lives and is truly happy no matter what pain comes his way, whereas some men spend decades rotting in the misery of lies. The martyr loves the truth to the point of the extinction of self. He also dies in anticipation of the Beatific Vision. This is the greatest fulfillment of a rational being wherein the doors of the soul are flung open to the infinite fullness of truth. In the vanity of the City of Man, on the other hand, men love themselves to the point of the extinction of truth and thus live in death and misery.
The truth will set you free and so in a sense Socrates died as free of a man as you might have reasonably expected a pagan to be in his position.
No, he was an actual historical person. Plato of course wrote a more literary depiction of him, not a direct transcript of his conversations.
> If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way?
You should probably actually read the dialogues (at least the Apology and the Crito) and you'll understand what happened. Socrates explicitly chose not to escape prison and to go through with the execution, and he gives his reasons in the Crito.
The smart way to die?