How to win an argument with a toddler

There is a way to win an argument with a toddler. You find out what's bothering them, usually something emotional, and you validate it. "Yes! It's fun to stay up late! Yes! You don't want to eat your vegetables!" Once they feel heard, you've got a shot at getting them to do what you want.

That's a good way to win an argument with a non-toddler as well. Acknowledge that what they want is legitimate (if it is). Concede points of agreement. Talk about shared goals. Only then talk about a different path to the solution.

Our views actually shifting is something that only happens over many years and often for reasons we aren't really in control of. Me of 10 years ago would vehemently disagree with me of today on many things, and there's probably pretty much no argument I could have engaged with him to persuade him of what I obviously think are 'more correct' views. It required, most of all, life experience that isn't going to be able to be communicated with words. If it were we'd all have the wisdom of a man who'd lived for millennia. And if not all of us, then at least somebody - but that somebody doesn't exist.

One who wants to debate while rejecting the real state of mankind is oft going to just find themselves in an echo chamber.

Before having kids, I would try and explain someone's behavior in a logical sense.

Toddlers, however, are mostly driven by their current physical needs (hungry/sleepy) and whatever they're currently doing (autonomy).

We've found the most success in avoiding all boolean questions. Do you want to read a book? (when playing with trains before bedtime) Obvious no!

Do you want to read this book or that book? Oh... a decision!

It's striking how well tactics like these work outside the realm of toddlers.

Ideas in general are difficult to express and people struggle with conveying them separately from their private ideas, personal experiences, and personal reasons for believing what they believe.

If you want to be a good interlocutor, you have to deeply absorb what the other person is thinking and sometimes even help them develop their understanding with the hope that others can do the same for you. We are all toddlers at times.

  1- "Might the toddler be right?" 
  2- "Am I the toddler in this interaction?"

You can look no further than the Rationalist community who have internalized this to such a degree that cults are endemic to the community. Sure, there's positives to being open to changing one's beliefs, but like all advice, it's contextual. Some people probably do need to loosen up, but they are the least likely to do so. Those who hold their beliefs too loosely, could stand to tighten that knot a little more.

If you've made up your mind (even if, theoretically, it could be changed) why would you have an argument about it in the first place? Discussing the already settled is rather boring. Unless one is grandstanding for some other purpose, people move on once they've made up their mind. They don't keep exploring the same ideas over and over and over again once they've settled.

Argument is there to explore that to which you have not yet made a mind. Your mind won't change because there is no basis on which to change from.

If the counterparty knew the answer to that, they would sit down with Google, not engage in an argument. Debate is mainly information sharing, but also to some degree about exploring the answer to that question.

Fair point, but if somebody were actually to say that to me during a disagreement, I would assume that they were not acting in good faith.

Now instead of disagreeing about politics or whatever, you're asking a rhetorical question that insinuates "you are unreasonable."

https://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier/files/math-mag/63-2/f...

(My favorite line: "Levasseur analyzes the game and shows that on average you will have a score of n + (sqrt(pn) - 1)/2 + O(1/sqrt(n)) while the kid will have exactly n. We maintain, however, that only the most degenerate parent would play against a two-year-old for money, so the question should be not by how much you expect to win, but with what probability you will win at all.")

That's one definition, I suppose, but it's not the definition you'll find in any dictionary I've seen. The author here seems to be assuming that the only valid reason to argue is to learn. People argue for many reasons other than that.

> If you’re regularly having arguments with well-informed people of goodwill, you will probably ‘lose’ half of them–changing your mind based on what you’ve learned

Again, the author's unspoken presupposition begs to be questioned. Why do most people actually argue in the public sphere? For instance, why do we have presidential debates? The candidates certainly aren't there to learn. They are not even trying to persuade their debate partner. They are arguing to convince or persuade their viewers of something. These could be undecided viewers, or they could be viewers who have already made up their mind but may either feel strengthened about their beliefs or weakened after listening.

Similarly, if I'm debating someone online, it's often less to convince that person and more to convince anyone else who might be reading. I have heard of people in real life who have read debates I've engaged in and expressed both gratitude for my willingness to do so and that they were strengthened in their beliefs on the subject.

The article is formulaic. It doesn't make it inherently bad.

The presenting of a persona interaction, followed by a recipe on how to deal with that, is one of those discussion tricks. Whoever answers must put itself in either the toddler's position or the adult position. Both positions are disfavorable (they're flat stereotypes)

The author is actually playing neither, it is acting as an "overseer" of silly toddlers and silly adults that engage in arguments all wrong.

It is a curious thing how far these things went.

Tantrums can happen for all kinds of reasons, and adults can engage in fruitless argument for all kinds of reasons too. It's a human thing. Sometimes, even in perfectly reasonable discussions, no one learns anything. That is also a human thing.

Changing one's point of view is something dramatic. To expect that in an argument is unreasonable, it's too high of a goal.

Just making the other part understand the subject is a lesser, more attainable objective. They don't need to agree. Sometimes I feel glad when I notice that the other part found the core of the discussion, even if they are in opposition to my view. It means that they understood the subject, which is something rare these days.

Honestly, this article is now very good, because he doesn't seem to realize one of the most common reasons for "folks committed to a specific agenda" to play-act an "argument" (or a "discussion" or a "conversion") is persuasion, and not any of the other childish things he outlines.

Maybe he spends to much time in immature online spaces.

Also maybe useful for talking to middle aged toddlers.

And that's something that is quite easily dismissible.

When I care enough about someone, first of all all I don't make a point to change their mind but think of having a discussion like a way to enrich both knowledge and point of views, at the end it's not the result but the journey that's interesting. How both people develop and adapt their reasoning to arguments.

Of course you got to be two willing people to make that happen, won't ever happen on Twitter for instance.

And if I'm dealing with someone who believe something completely and utterly stupid by all standards, like the earth is flat, and I need to change his mind. The best way is to plant a seed, listen to his reasoning, think of something that doesn't fit in his story but also can't be felt as aggressive. For instance, with flat earther, I would ask, looking interested what the edge of the earth look like then. If he can show me.

For starters, I will be arguing with a dozen of “social media influencers” who shaped the opinion and identity of my opponent.

And in the end, most people are not really interested in changing their opinion. They want me to change mine, or validate theirs, but would conveniently dismiss anything that does not match their world view.

1. Demonstrate that you understand their point, and concede ground where necessary (what you think is attractive about what they are saying, what it explains well, etc)

2. Explain (not tell) why it is that in spite of that, you don't hold the position they do (maybe it leads to some other conclusion, maybe there's another core principle at work)

3. Ask, with genuine curiosity, what they think about the problem you raised, how to they resolve it in their mind?

I don't think that'll necessarily make you more likely to change their mind, but you'll certainly be more likely to learn something.

And if they aren't actually interested in discussing, and are just engaging in some kind of show boating etc, it will become immediately clear because you are only leaving open the possibility of curious, open dialogue.

questions like: would I still think this if I were happier; do I have a belief about my status that the circumstances do not reflect; do I share an ontology with this being at all; do I fear other consequences of agreeing with them?

the irony of authority is it usually means dealing with someone who doesn't have the authority to compromise, and if you don't humiliate them for this fact that hangs over everything they do, they will often at least use their discretion.

To my great surprise.

It assumes we are talking about a toddler and we are not. People find "ways" to survive - even toddlers. I knew a three year old. He found a way, and knew how to use it. It was very interesting to watch - until you realized the back story.

If something bad happened, as in he might be in trouble, he would run around the room as fast as possible and on the way create mayhem. He would knock over a paint jar, purposefully or not. Bump into another kid, knock over a chair. Soon all the adults in the room were dealing with an overwhelming set of emergencies. Todd was forgotten

This happened over and over again until the pattern clicked. Some adult had to keep focused on Todd.

It was a genius thing he came up with. He never faced consequences. One had to wonder how such a set of behaviors would evolve? Was he a bad kid? No. Mean, no. If you step back what you see is a survival skill for a very difficult situation. My guess is that the physical or psychological cost of being "caught" were so threatening that this response evolved as a life saving skill. In a three year old.

One has to think about how this person would be if they did not have some intervention. Would they evolve this particular skill into an increasingly sophisticated way? Certainly inherent in the success of this mode is a fairly strong sense of contempt for people in general. And perhaps this contempt is well earned when given by a three or even four year old. After all where was everyone else when he was in the original situation? But in an adult? Pitiful.

Fortunately for Todd, people took the time and had the care to help him feel safe without that mechanism. Unfortunately, this does not always happen, as we are seeing.

The response to this kind of pattern is the same though, for any age Todd - three or not three.

First the adults in the room have to focus on the source of the problems. And if not stopped, the blame must fall heavily on those so called adults.

Second, the distraction thing has to be addressed. The problem is not this or that is broken. The problem is the Todd.

So where are the adults in the room? We need to ask why the people in the room are not doing their job? And if we have no adults we need to get rid of the people in there. All of them.

i.e. if you couldn't sit at the table with a bunch of (insert ideology) adherents and blend right in, you probably don't understand their views well enough to dissuade them from it.

If you think you might be in the political party that's thinking in this way, then congratulations, you're probably right, and you should start using reason. To the other half, don't worry it's not you. The people I'm talking to know exactly who they are, and I don't even need to say which side it is, because at this point, in 2025, it has finally become utterly obvious to most.

What you should be doing is understanding each position and reducing the disagreement down to one (or a few) points that are either knowable (you could find the data, run an experiment, etc) or are a judgement call.

What kind of arguments are these? Are these "this episode of TV was not good" or "the earth is flat" or "I think rent is too high"? This statistic seems a) made-up, and b) as simplistic as conflating all "arguments" into one group of indistinguishable arguments.

Instead it just uses an all too familiar mechanism of labeling/ad hominem to immediately dismiss people.

Hey, bureocrat (?), I posit you're a toddler therefore you're wrong.

Great job, man. "Folks committed to a specific agenda" is just fantastic. Says who? Of course he starts with flat earther so you will say yes to the rest.

> well-informed people of goodwill,

This person is putting a show of civility but very likely he'll get mad at anyone not discussing in the constraints in the overton window of the "current year".

HN can do Better.

There was a joke about the man who was threatening to jump off a cliff. No professional could convince him otherwise with sound arguments. It took a another mental patient to make an irrational threat, cut the cliff down, to scare him off.

Edit to add link: https://idiallo.com/blog/the-cliff-of-irrational-arguments

In a world where things are increasingly becoming a part of our identity (i.e., Democrat/Republican), this presents a real problem. I agree it hardly does good to argue with people about these things, but the problem is that the list of valid things to argue over seems to be diminishing yearly.

The same basic techniques work on toddlers, teens and many adults.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it - Max Planck

If most 'scientists' rarely change their mind, there other mortals are a far cry.

No it isn't.

https://python.mzonline.com/sketches/argument/

For instance, there is a very satisfying story about the origin of a certain pandemic. I can think about how I would gather evidence about origins of an infectious disease, but I can't actually gather that evidence because that would require a time machine.

So, instead of any significant evidence we have a satisfying story. In the past we've called this kind of story a Conspiracy Theory; I would prefer a name like Low Information High Satisfaction Theory.

Those who don't, will lose. E.g. Democrats in the last election.

Don't get into a battle of wills with a kid - they don't even know they're taking part.

Or you’re the toddler. We all are at some point

Public speaking has been about specious arguments to persuade, bamboozle, and appeal to the crowd instead of to reason with them since its very inception with the Greek Sophists. Some later Roman orators tried to redeem those skills for public service, but it's obvious in the extant manuals on the topic that professional argumentation had only to do with "exchanging of ideas" to lead to an "insight" as an unanticipated side effect.

The author's preconception sounds not just modern, but even a bit naive.

That's the argument to falsifiability, put in human terms.

No it isn't.

For instance if you debate, I don't know, the virtue of legalizing illegal immigrants. One would take the position that if they didn't obey the law in the first place, why reward them: they might never care for the law if disobedience is followed by reward, and the rest of society might follow too. The antagonist would argue to be pragmatic, we need labor, they're already there, they disobeyed the law to help their families not to steal from anyone. Both points are valid, both people are right, none of them can "win" in the heat of a debate - but their arguments might move the crowd listening maybe, and they can use various tricks to this effect (humor etc), to obtain a positive vote at the end.

Both opponents, after the debate and seeing the result on the crowd, will adapt their arguments for next time, or maybe shift a little if they were shown something surprising, but after a lot of further debates with further opponents. And fundamentally, a legal fundamentalist cannot be transformed into a pragmatic economist overnight, or over a lifetime quite often.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ

Abortion, climate change, free market capitalism, tax policy, racism, or identity politics are just a few. Even though both sides generally have some valid points to support their side; rarely does anyone's argument or debate cause someone else to switch sides.

Too often both camps are firmly entrenched wIth many who feel that anyone in the other camp is not just wrong, but is evil.

Neither side wants to give an inch in the public sphere, lest it be taken as a sign of weakness. This leads to the most shrill, radical voices taking center stage on both sides.

The most extreme positions are promoted and reinforced. There are a number of vested interests in the media and political arenas who like it that way.

It's literally giving up, declaring victory and then projecting passive-aggressive superiority.

No it isn't.

I think people are unfair to bureaucrats. Bureaucrats have a job to do: they carry out policy determined by other people and encoded via a dizzying array of rules that combine specificity and vagueness in unexpected ways, many of which have a history of harm, exploitation, and public debate behind them that ordinary people have no patience to learn.

People are only interested in their own situation, and they are convinced that their situation is different. Sometimes it is. Sometimes they're suffering from an entirely natural partiality towards themselves. So they want the bureaucrat to be creative. They justify it by saying that the rules can be bent just for this circumstance, just for them, it doesn't have to apply to any other circumstance. Why can't the bureaucrat relax their rigid bureaucratic brain enough to realize that every circumstance is unique and the rules were written for other circumstances, not this one?

But that's exactly what the bureaucrat is not supposed to do. The public, their elected representatives, their interest groups, and other policy stakeholders expend incredible quantities of time in campaigns, pubic debate, open meetings, closed meetings, collection and collation of feedback, et cetera ad infinitum. It's not the bureaucrat's place to second-guess the results of that process or innovate outside the bounds decided on during that process.

In the gray areas within those boundaries, yes, the bureaucrat is happy to listen to arguments and make decisions based on reason and evidence. That's their job. Gray areas where bureaucrats get to apply judgment are inevitable, often even intentional, but the gray areas aren't always where you want or expect them to be. Bureaucrats don't have latitude to decide that a rule that went through two rounds of public feedback, got debated until 11pm at a public meeting, went through multiple rounds of drafting and review by the staff of an elected official, and was finally signed off on and announced as a shiny new policy in the media, should be changed for you because the way it applies to your situation doesn't make sense to you. They can't invent a gray area where the political process provided a bright line.

You can argue that a lot of rules were hastily dashed out by a junior aide and made it through the rest of the policy-making process without any further scrutiny. That's true. But it's not like when you become a bureaucrat they give you a special pair of glasses that show you which rules were just one person's ill-informed guess and which rules emerged from decades of painful history or hours of public debate and compromise. That would be nice to know, and sometimes bureaucrats know that information because they were around and paying attention when the rules were made. Sometimes they can bend a rule because they know that this particular rule is not important to anybody. But just because they won't bend a rule in your case doesn't mean they're narrow-minded, stubborn, or petty.

That's not the same kind of argument where people are trying to change their minds. Those are the ones you can't win or lose, because "changing your mind" is not black and white. I've had plenty of arguments where my understanding changed by a few inches, and their understanding changed by a few inches, but we were still far apart in our opinions. That's fine! That's a successful argument.

The author's world is one where there are two takes on every topic and one person is arguing Black and the other is arguing White and you should flip to the other binary sometimes when you're wrong. No. If your opinions are regularly flipping from one binary to the other, then your opinions suck. The world is much more complicated than that. Opinions are much more contextual than that. I'm never going to switch from "evolution is real" to "all life was custom-built by God" after a conversation with one person -- no matter how persuasive they are -- because my belief that evolution is real is not that fragile. It's intertwined with all my other understandings about how the world works, and I can't just flip it independently of other things. My goal when I have an argument is to improve my understanding of the world just a little bit, even if it's merely "why do people believe this shit?" If the person I'm arguing with isn't trying to do the same, they're the only one that's losing.

I do agree there’s a point past which someone is ideologically unable to be reasoned with. The classic example is neo-Nazis, of course. But also of course, there are redeemed neo-Nazis.

Coming from a conservative family and living in a deep blue state I’ve had my fair share of arguments on both sides. As other commenters have stated, it’s all about emotions. If you can make the other person feel like they are being heard and assuage their fears about X, Y, or Z, then you can make progress, even if it’s small progress.

For example, when some of the most outlandish and obviously false social media conspiracy theories first hit the scene (e.g. QAnon, the totally bizarre "JFK Jr. is alive" theory, etc.) I thought "OK, this is just bad fan fic, best to just ignore it." But then I was amazed and pretty depressed about how these theories gained traction, and sometimes in the highest levels of power. So I feel like the advice of "Just ignore toddlers having a tantrum" is pretty counterproductive when you realize those tantrums are actually serving a very useful (and in my opinion scary) purpose for the people throwing them.

If you've already decided your peer is a "toddler", correctly or incorrectly, you're definitely going to struggle to have any meaningful kind of dialog, that's for sure.

> If you’re not changing your mind, it’s likely you’re not actually having an argument (or you’re hanging out with the wrong people.)

Well, why do people argue in the first place?

Ultimately, it is probably something along the lines of "to spread one's own opinion", a cause not particularly noble in and of itself. Still, it is probably necessary. Most people are not aware of how seriously one's own perception is subjective; it feels like human nature, yet it's apparent if you look across enough people and enough culture that almost everything about our perception of issues is strongly impacted by culture, down to the language we use (though to be clear, I am not a believer in force-feeding the euphemism treadmill; fixing problems you manufactured isn't a net win for anyone. But I digress.) With that in mind, I think the importance of argument is apparent.

On an individual level, we have issues important enough to us, that we have formed opinions on. When we hear or see an argument that we disagree with, sometimes we feel enticed to debate it. In a public space, it's often more a performance than it is an actual argument between two people, but it's still an argument at its core.

In truth, there is not that much to gain from most arguments as they boil down to people who actually believe the same things but have a different framing of the situation, leading to a different outcome. You might change someone's mind by arguing with them, but only if they are both factually wrong about something and have the humility to admit it (and I think it is genuinely hard to sometimes, humans are just like that.) If they see the same exact factual information and have a different viewpoint, the real argument is one of trying to demonstrate which viewpoint holds more water. That's the real difficulty.

I don't really wind up having a lot of private one-on-one debates with people anymore. The reason is not because I don't want to grow or learn, it's because I've had a lot of debates about the issues most important to me and I feel like I understand the opposing viewpoints enough. I don't agree with them, but not because I can't figure out how someone could justify it.

Granted, there are viewpoints that I have an explanation for that I think holders of those viewpoints would not find to be particularly charitable, but that's not my modus operandi and I do adjust this when possible. In a lot of cases, e.g. abortion, gun rights, fiscal policies, I can see fairly reasonable arguments going different ways, and it often depends on what things you think are most important. This even extends to stuff that is less controversial that I have strong opinions on, like privacy rights and cryptography. The less charitable views are mostly reserved for the kinds of silly arguments you find spreading primarily from one moron to another, like conspiracies, or anything driven primarily by outrage bait.

I can see why you wouldn't argue with those people, but personally I think there are cases where you should. Ultimately, I think public debate is better than the ominous viewpoint suppression systems that modern social media deploys. (In many cases, both are worse than simply having reasonable moderation that can make subjective calls.)

Ultimately, I don't really think conspiracy nuts are toddlers or especially emotionally immature. I think a lot of them feel a disconnect from society and a distrust of authority, and find connection and possibly even a weird sense of security from conspiracy theories. Sometimes having someone to blame and grand explanations for why things are the way they are just makes us as humans feel better. But should you argue with them? At the very least, probably not for your sake or theirs, but maybe for other people's sakes sometimes.

Or maybe even more, it might be worth asking what it really means to "win" an argument. Changing the other person's view is not the definition I'd go with.

But that's really an idealized view of opinion forming that has little to do with how people actually develop their beliefs. Usually people don't want to become part-time experts in every field under the sun prior to developing an opinion on a given subject. So they will take the shortcut of acknowledging some expert or authority whose opinion they have some reason to trust. When they get into an argument, they still argue their opinion in terms of object level facts, but their actual reason for holding that opinion is largely disconnected from those facts. If their interlocutor presented an extraordinrily strong case (usually alongside some reason to distrust experts) they might still change their view. Otherwise, they will exit the discussion either feeling more confident in their view owing to the impotence of their inquisitor, or they will leave feeling uncertain in their view due to the strong front put up by the opposition. Even in the latter case, they will seldom admit to having "lost" the argument. They will rather change tacts midway through the discussion - ceding what they discover to be an inadequate line of attack for one they deem more defensable. That will often come across to the opposition as a forfeiture, an admission of inadequacy. But since they were never strongly taken to a given reasoning for their view (beyond, as I said, trust in experts, but the expert opinion does not change midway through an argument), they are indifferent to whether a given line of reasoning bears out.

I should emphasize that this is all really unavoidable, and that this is grounds for us to argue that even non toddlers (in fact we might argue, especially non toddlers) should not admit to having "lost" an argument any more than a small fraction of the time. This reflects that the goal of an argument is not usually to change minds, but rather for both sides to develop their understanding of the subject and to become more aware of why others would disagree with them.

Since I assume that the present discussion is a propos recent US political issues, what has occurred there is that some portion of the population considers trump to be an "authority" (as I have used the term above). That is, they feel that trump must necessarily have good reason for believing what he does, and furthermore that whatever actions trump takes must have good reasons behind them; this jutifies to them their choice to believe the same things and to believe those actions are good. This is questionable in the first place because trump has done very little to establish himself as an authority on political matters. He is first of all lacking in political experience prior to his first term, and second of all demonstrated during that first term very little talent for statesmanship. So to say that the policies he is implementing now must be well thought out, owing to his history of thinking out policies prior to implementing them, is not concomitant with the evidence.

In the second place, there is a clear demonstrated disconnect between trump's beliefs and his actions. He tends to take actions by justifying them in one way, but will later change course by giving an unrelated justification for his prior action (none of this to say that either are really his true reason). If we defend some position on the grounds that trump agrees with it at one point in time, we are liable to end up arguing against that position some time later on the same grounds. If the likelihood of contradicting ourselves is so high, then we cannot reasonably assign a high probability to the correctness of whatever position we are initially defending. (Or in other words, whereas I previously stated "the expert opinion does not change midway through an argument", this is liable to be false when we take trump as the "expert")

We might attempt to persist in defending trump on grounds that we agree with his actions rather than his words. I would find that questionable as well, since he has never been reliable in acting in a single direction. His recent flip-flop on illegal immigration, which previously seemed like a core issue of his, seems like a good demonstration of this.

Given all this, we come to the conclusion that those defending trump are defending the personage of trump rather than any particular belief or policy. He has developed, in other words, a cult of personality under which his followers will agree with anything he says or does (with some very limited exceptions like vaccines), even if they previously argued in strong terms against those same actions or beliefs. Such a cult of personality is not necessarily toddlerish, but is nonetheless highly regrettable.

https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Edit: if the connection isn't clear, I mean the aspect of it being difficult to argue rationally about opinions you've made part of your identity, since changing the opinion would be difficult.