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Comment by nuclearnice1 | Hacker News Reader

I encounter that mode of conversation often.

I would say it is the overwhelming majority of people’s approach. They have a point of view and are emotionally committed to it. They have this commitment almost equally across opinions even if they only arrived at it by first gut reaction moments ago.

They also project this mode onto their conversation partners. For example, if you offer a counter point or drawback to a proposal, they assume you are strongly opposed to the proposal. Rather than discuss the drawback, they will launch into a stream of defenses of the proposal.

I haven’t found any reliable ways to steer people out of this. The most useful adjustment is to expect it and know that most people are just giving you depth on one intuitively appealing solution.

Simply put most people can’t think straight and therefore can’t converse logically either.

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My typical method of helping with this is to find common ground. Find something you both agree on, even if it’s only tangentially related, and then pose an argument and phrase it as such.

For example, when discussing if the Earth is flat or round, you might both find agreement in that nobody has ever fallen off the edge of the Earth. Then you might try to pose an argument as to why - which is more likely, that nobody has ever traveled far enough to fall off, or that the earth is actually a continuous plane?

I find assigning probabilities to topics often helps.

But sometimes you can’t, and that’s when you agree to disagree and politely exit the discourse.

>you might both find agreement in that nobody has ever fallen off the edge of the Earth.

You've revealed yourself as not having actually found common ground with flat earthers. Evvvvverybody knows that it's not about travel distance. You can't fall off the edge of the earth because of the ice walls. It's not like it just ends. That'd be silly. The oceans would drain out into flat space.

lol I knew that analogy was going to lead nowhere good.

But the point still stands :)

As do the ice walls

I expected since we're on HN that someone would explain it away as survivorship bias.

The first part of this sounds very closely related to something called Rogerian argument [1] which aims to find new opportunities for consensus by building on views already held in common.

The bit about assigning probabilities is interesting, precisely because I can think of very few contexts in which it would be of use to me. People seem to have little tolerance for shades of uncertainty when expressing views, whereas privately we think in probabilities all the time. It's as though we play a kind of poker where our need to conserve our 'stack' of reputational authority makes us relegate the actual ideas in contention to mere 'hands' to be represented, bluffed, and trivially discarded when a more amenable certainty presents itself.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument#Rapoport's...

> For example, when discussing if the Earth is flat or round, you might both find agreement in that nobody has ever fallen off the edge of the Earth.

So I'm not trying to argue that the earth is flat, but how do you respond if they ask for proof that nobody has fallen off the edge of the earth?

It's not like you can point to some record of all history and show that the event doesn't exist within it. You might try to explain that there is no edge to fall off of, but if you can convince them of that, then the conversation never needed to happen in the first place.

> how do you respond if they ask for proof that nobody has fallen off the edge of the earth?

The same way you should respond to all questions. Truthfully. You have no proof, and you don't care to waste your time looking for it. If that is a showstopper for the conversation, it was never worth having in the first place. Simple as that.

I think that's practically what will happen a lot of the time, but it's not very satisfying. It seems to amount to "this person won't be convinced by my unconvincing argument, so the conversation wasnt worth having". (Unconvincing in that you're basically asking them to take it on faith rather than demonstrating it rigorously).

I think that interpersonal relatedness or 'connection' relates to the degree to which people are willing to have their minds changed, or perhaps more accurately, admit to having their mind changed. Being open to admitting a change of mind requires a certain amount of vulnerability that can be difficult or impossible, depending on how well you know the other person.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that in group interactions where time is invested up front in 'ice breakers' (the non-cringey kind) or other exercises where the objective is not about the topic at hand but rather to better get to know the group participants, this can help build interpersonal relations. Seeing others as more 3-dimensional helps with social bonding and thus makes us more open to being more vulnerable.

This mode is essentially universal. Our brain is a world modelling and outcome prediction machine. It being wrong would be an existential threat in the environment it evolved to function. This is why being fundamentally wrong is extremely uncomfortable for us.

The difference is in the level of abstraction an individual takes their stand at and becomes uncomfortable when challenged. Which, I think, depends on how grounded their beliefs, knowledge or opinions are - how many layers and columns of "I'm still right" they can fall back to.

You ask people “how did you arrive at this conclusion”. That’s a good invitation to extract a walkthrough of how that conclusion was arrived at, what observations, data, evidence, references, whatever informed their conclusion about whatever subject.

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