Argue well by losing | Hacker News Reader

Argue well by losing

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117 pointslevosmetalo37 comments

  How to compose a successful critical commentary:

  1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that 
  your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."
  2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general
  or widespread agreement).
  3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
  4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

I wish that hackernews could be like this. It would be like laying down troll poison. Even the most hardcore jerks don't like when the only response they get is to be killed by kindness.

I read the book "Getting To Yes" by Roger Patton. It's highly recommend and considered to be the manual on negotiation. And the main point of advice from it was: Be Nice. Argument and negotiation aren't supposed to be about who is louder or more aggressive. Calmly laying out points that are backed up by facts works better every time.

Online arguments tend to be low stakes affairs. I can understand why so many hn discussions devolve into personal attacks and accusations. I can only hope that people behave differently in person. The best way to win an argument is to turn it into a niceness contest where everybody walks away feeling better for the experience.

I agree about the principle. Few remarks:

1. I think being forthcoming about it is very important. Especially when it comes to obvious unclear points/mistakes which are easy to correct. You should do that before attempting the commentary. The main reason is to save time (if correction is obvious, you might as well do it yourself) another is to show good attitude ("I try resolve this issue instead of nitpicking, see ?")

3.Imo it just derails the point. Good thing to do when dealing with unknown/emotional people, just adds clutter between "let's get to the point" people. Nothing wrong with that at some point but if you use it as first thing in the discussion it looks like tactic to influence emotions of other person.

I for one often get annoyed by too many niceties. I feel like someone tries to convince my emotions and not my intellect. It quickly becomes patronizing It takes time. It make me very suspicious of manipulation attempts; afterall if your point/offer is good, why not just present it and let me think about it. I don't want to be more likely to accept your point because you are nice to me. I want to take objective look at it, so keep being overly nice to after the discussion and/or everyday situations which doesn't involve resolving issues. I am not saying diplomacy is useless - it's great in every day relations and/or when dealing with emotional people. Among people who are good at discussing and just want to get to the point it should be kept to minimum.

>"Getting To Yes"

The title would be off-putting to me. I don't want to get to yes. I want to take possibly objective look at your point and I want you to take fair look at mine. The more I respect you the more I want eliminate emotions: positive or negative when discussing things.

And based on your viewpoint, how successful are you at convincing others to "Get to Yes"? There must be numerous situations where you may have had to deal with people and convince them of the strength or correctness of your ideas. Do you dryly put forth the facts and let the chips fall where they may? Or do you give your ideas a fighting chance of being accepted, especially when your un-emotional, unequivocally-logical suggestion may well be the only viable way out of a situation? Do you ever have to build consensus amongst a team of smart, driven people who may not all be Turing-complete automatons?

>>And based on your viewpoint, how successful are you at convincing others to "Get to Yes"?

If my goal is to get others to say yes it's not a discussion anymore. It's exercising power, manipulation, damage control. You name it. In such situations I am all for using emotional means - those get things done with people.

>Do you dryly put forth the facts and let the chips fall where they may?

Not "dryly", I usually have a lot of passion in finding ways to express my point clearly and convincingly. Other than that yeah, if I respect my discussion partners I will not go into condescending niceties. If I don't respect them as good arguers and just want to convince them then I roll out Dale Carnagie attitude - appeal to emotions, make them like you, make them accept your view because of it. It gets things done. It's also anti-intellectual in my view.

>unequivocally-logical suggestion may well be the only viable way out of a situation?

If I am sure (or arrogant) enough to think that my view is the only acceptable one then it's no longer about discussion. It's manipulation/exercising power mode.

>Do you ever have to build consensus amongst a team of smart, driven people who may not all be Turing-complete automatons?

If they are smart I assume I don't have monopoly for truth so I would avoid means appealing to emotions as far as I could. Maybe after all I am wrong and I don't want them to be more likely to accept my view because I am nice. If I am arrogant enough to think they are smart but I am smarter and my goal is to convince them then again - let Dale Carnagie guide me.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate showing respect. I appreciate making sure my discussion partners appreciate that I made effort to understand their view. Those matter a lot among the most rational of people. If on the other hand someone starts with: "Let me first say I've learnt a lot from you, I really appreciated your view on this that and that. I think you are smart person blablabla" and follows with stuff of this kind before getting to the point I am immediately suspicious, with time impatient and then irritated.

I think such discussion culture is counter productive. It becomes socializing/power struggle - the merits of the argument takes secondrary position. It becomes important who is nice, who is liked, who is charismatic, who is good at invoking positive emotions. I don't want that anywhere where merits matter.

I believe you may be saying that if your goal is to make somebody say "Yes", then the toolset adequate for the job is one based around manipulation. One may manipulate through direct force, emotional means, whatever it takes. It is a waste of time and irritating -- perhaps condescending in that it is an obvious manipulation? -- to say things like, "Let me first say I've learnt a lot from you, I really appreciated your view on this that and that. I think you are smart person blablabla" before getting to the point. Like you said, it distracts from the actual important points of the argument. In fact, such an approach towards discussion is, as you point out, counter-productive.

You're right. It's manipulation. Building consensus, too, is a form of manipulation. Some of it is irritating, especially if it is delivered in the form you quoted. My hackles rise, too!

From your comment, I am seeing that the real issue is when the manipulation is overt, when someone expresses something in a way that is clearly intended to push you in a direction rather than actually respect and accept your buy-in.

But that leads me to seeing that this really just another form of pathos. In a conversation, the average person wants to feel respected, that their opinion has merit. This is part of rhetoric. In fact, where action and tone are lacking, some people may genuinely need the additional words of appreciation that set you and me off. My point is that logos is not the only valid appeal, and I would propose that nobody is absolutely rational, meaning that degrees of the other forms of persuasion are acceptable and useful means.

To address your first point, all persuasion is manipulation. Somewhere I read that all speech is a form of persuasion, though the reasoning behind this assertion may be a bit contrived. Instead of elaborating on that point, I want to suggest instead that even if it is not "all", even if it is just "most", we could see instead that manipulation is not an evil in itself. Clearly there is nothing wrong with asking somebody where they would like to eat as your means to coerce them into joining you for dinner. Obtaining consensus or bringing someone to agree with you is not, itself, an evil or even irritating.

Armed with all the appeals of rhetoric and following these steps with respect to the audience's needs, I think the four steps listed at the top of the thread are acceptable means in polite society of persuasion, or, if you prefer, manipulation.

Addendum: I just tried the four steps. Was this post a successful example? Did I overdo it?

I completely agree that people who employ persuasion tactics to win with weaker arguments are manipulative, patronizing, and probably counterproductive. I get irked when I feel like I'm being treated with kid gloves.

That being said, I think there's something to be said about recognizing when someone is debating you with winning in mind. Then it's probably worthwhile to change gears and employ some persuasion techniques. But instead of using them to win the argument, use them to turn a zero-sum debate into a positive-sum discussion.

But, yes, if you're already in a productive discussion, these sort of finding-common-ground techniques are probably harmful, but debating someone who wants to win is a losing proposition (unless the real goal is persuading an audience).

I think your method is great for black and white situations. If arguing over 2 + 2 = 4, then yes get to the point. How many arguments really go that way though? More often than not arguments boil down to each persons experience and opinions formed through that experience.

It is also important to remember that emotions are always involved. If there was not any emotion why would the discussion be happening in the first place? Presumably both parties care about what they are arguing for.

While I agree with these fine principles, it's worthwhile to realise that they have only limited applicability in daily life for a simple reason: they are time-consuming. Hence they are difficult to apply when time is scarce or when little is to be gained from the outcome of a disagreement. A resource-intensive strategy like the one outlined is most appropriate in high-stakes disagreement.

The scarce time and little to gain arguments are persuasive to me. I've also encountered many personalities who react negatively to frank disagreement. If there's little to gain, maybe the best solution is not to disagree. If time is scarce, but the issues is critical, maybe agreeing faster can work. Personally I'm working be less frank and bring these principles into more daily use.

>1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

There's a closely related concept with a pretty catchy name, which is something that's often useful for making concepts stick; perhaps HN could make use of it. That concept is the "steel man":

>Sometimes the term "steel man" is used to refer to a position's or argument's improved form. A straw man is a misrepresentation of someone's position or argument that is easy to defeat: a "steel man" is an improvement of someone's position or argument that is harder to defeat than their originally stated position or argument. [1]

It can be used as a noun or a verb, e.g.

>We will want to "steel-man" NASA's argument. [2]

This can be considered a stronger version of the idea in 1. since it deals with improving not only the expression but also the substance of the opposing side's argument.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/hab/rocket_science_and_big_money_a_c...

Thanks for this. This is how I argue, and I never knew someone had come up with a term for it.

It also allows you to let other people win, sometimes, even if they consistently argue badly or illogically. It's good to let other people win as often as you can (at least for me.)

Another similar concept is the "Ideological Turing Test": can you answer questions from your ideological opponent's perspective so well that a third party can't tell you actually hold other views?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test

Until you can pass it, you may be wasting time disputing a thin caricature of the actual opposing viewpoint. And as you do well on such a test, you are often helping to "steel-man" the viewpoint. (On the other hand, any time you are steel-manning an unsubscribed position, you might also be hinting at your true perspective, when you deploy extra effort against certain critiques.)

It also goes by the name of principle of charity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

>I read the book...

I freaking love this. The books that get mentioned casually here at HN rock! I have no idea who you are man, but thank you!

This works very well, especially in Sales situations. Once you can put things into someone else's words, they know you understand their point.

Two challenges to this approach:

1) It takes time. Lots of time. Sometimes decisions need to be made quicker.

2) If there is an unequal power distribution, sometimes you don't need them to consent. ("I know you disagree with the approach, we aren't equals. You wouldn't get the contract without our blessing. You have to do it our way even if you don't agree.")

On #2, it's true that when power is unevenly distributed you can save time by just bypassing getting the other party to buy in. But in the same way that taking shortcuts in your code is thought of as accruing technical debt, I'd argue that doing this accrues "social debt" -- you save time now, but at the cost of storing up potential trouble in the future if the power distribution ever changes. Flatten someone like a steamroller too many times, and the first thing they're going to think of when they actually get some power is how they can use it to screw over that guy who's always screwing them over.

And just like with technical debt, it can be valuable to go back and pay down your social debt from time to time too -- by doing favors for those people you've rolled over in the past, to help reduce the ill will that generated.

Very true. It's important to invest in strategic relationships, but sometimes you have to lay down the law.

For example, many companies shirk their customer support duties, even on high ticket items. You wind up spending a disproportionate amount of time as a customer trying to mathematically prove that what you found is a defect, and not some undocumented bug. At some point, rather than seeing the world from their eyes, you have to say, "I need this fixed or I'm pulling the plug."

These are outlier case though, and to your point, there is social debt every time you have to pull rank.

It sounds like you feel that Hacker News would be a better forum for debate if people followed this procedure. I think we agree that Hacker News sometimes has a troll problem, and I've learned from you that part of that problem is that people here don't really know how to argue. Isn't going through all of this rigamarole a pain in the ass though? Do you really expect the best of human argumentation to come from a social news aggregator?

In the past I frequently tried to begin arguments / discussions by carefully going over what I thought of as background assumptions. (To me, this is at least closely related to the proposed step 1, restate your opponent's position clearly.)

My experience suggests that if you do that, the other party will never stop disagreeing with you no matter how far up the chain you go. Many, many, many arguments never happened in my mind, while having happened quite heatedly in the other person's, because of this.

There was another phenomenon which might be related: a person would start telling me about a problem of theirs (I used to think it was weird for people I barely knew to do this, but I've come to suspect that people just like venting about problems they're experiencing), I'd rephrase it to be sure I understood what they were saying, and they would say something along the lines of "thanks, that was really helpful" and go away happy.

>>My experience suggests that if you do that, the other party will never stop disagreeing with you no matter how far up the chain you go.

Absolutely true.

There was a MOOC about argumenting at coursera I think. The proffessor had the same viewpoint. One of the lessons was that you have to start at a common reference point and argument from there. If you and the other person have no common reference points, you will never resolve your difference of opinion ever.

Regarding your last paragraph, people explain their current problems as a coping mechanism . But when people do that, what they're really looking for is someone to understand them. It's an emotional thing, and you provided it.

Moreover, paraphrasing is one of basic tools in psychotherapy. Obviously it's used as a part of a larger process, and depending on therapist' aims it may have various forms, from a clarification or a simple restatement, to a more reflective proposition or interpretation

I completely agree.

Global warming debates are well-suited for this: first get the "denier" to agree that the physical mechanism is valid. If you can't agree on physics, then there's no point in continuing. If you can, great, at least he/she can't question the physical mechanism when they're back into a political/economic corner.

Thought-provoking article. I often battle friends on Facebook over issues of politics, economics, and stuff, and I definitely notice that people are generally more interested in winning than learning. In fact, that's the model cable news shows and presidential debates teach us. It's all about introducing some obscure fact or anecdote that your opponent can't possibly know off-hand to force them to have to research enough to rebut, acquiesce to your position, duck and counter with their own obscure fact, throw an exasperated ad hominem, or quietly slink away. But none of those tactics involve actually trying to learn some better picture of the truth or examining your own belief schema.

I think we've kind of moved to a post-fact society in this sense. Every position has it's own set of miscellaneous facts that seem to support it, and those facts are typically unverifiable, or at least certainly unverified. Factual debate seems to quickly descend into partisanship. I've come to believe that it's far more interesting and useful to debate principles instead.

I don't think it's that we're post-fact in the sense that data in unverifiable; most data is verifiable. But there are enough websites and online communities out there to support any point of view, so that people find a peer group that supports their theory, especially one's fears on this complex world. Anti-vaxxers are a huge example of this. Try to find information about specific vaccines and you'll be deluged in anti-vax pages that sound rather scientific. The information is out there, but so is the disinformation.

> I often battle friends on Facebook over issues of politics, economics, and stuff, and I definitely notice that people are generally more interested in winning than learning.

Of course. If you want to learn something, talk one-on-one or seek out authoritative sources. If you're engaging in a dispute in a public forum in front of millions of spectators, like it or not, the debate exists to convince others, not each other.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Why? Well, suppose you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove that he is non compos mentis. Then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? You have made him feel inferior. You have hurt his pride. He will resent your triumph. And – A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.

Carnegie, Dale (2010-09-30). How To Win Friends And Influence People (Kindle Locations 1972-1977). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Is it universally true that being shown wrong in an argument leads to resentment, preventing learning? Surely that happens sometimes. But always?

It's just methodologically unconstrained anecdotes, but if I look back at my personal history of changing my mind on things, occasions where I was shown by others to be an idiot, and the associated shame and humiliation, have been powerful forces for me to rethink and improve my position. Maybe there are different kinds of personality: those who react to a good argument by learning, and those that react by ressentiment and aggression. This has been thematised in social though as the distinction between a normative and a cognitive learning style.

When I argue about things with similarly-minded friends, we all win all the time -- the aim is never to make the other person agree with yourself, but for both parties to agree on what's correct (which is sometimes what you think, sometimes what they think, and sometimes a third thing entirely).

It's a shame that my "similarly-minded friends list" is in the single digits :(

(It's not even that most people are stubborn and loud - quite the opposite - it's that they interpret constructive criticism (sometimes even neutral discussion) as conflict and shy away from it)

You can prove somebody wrong without making them feel like an idiot about it.

I love being wrong, personally.

A similar idea is the "Ideological Turing Test" [1] whereby a person attempts to convincingly assert the ideas they disagree with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test

While the rest of the article has some really great points, what I really love about this is all in the beginning and is perfectly summed up with this quote by Professor Daniel H. Cohen (in which he is conceding victory to a hypothetical opponent):

> "So who won that argument? Well, the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won, even though I’m the only one who made any cognitive gain."

I've been practicing something similar for at least half a decade now. I call it (with a strong sense of irony), "I'm Always Right." By learning how to be wrong ALL THE TIME, I'm actually becoming increasingly ALWAYS RIGHT.

The hardest part is being able to see when somebody else is actually making a better point than I am.[1]

Then I 'lose' the argument by agreeing with them. In the bigger scheme of things, I've actually won because I've just gained something - new knowledge and a new point of view. My intellectual 'opponent' has gained nothing but a temporary feeling of victory. I'm actually happy for both of us. This isn't some trick. I really do change my mind about things all the time as I learn more and listen more. After a while, being wrong feels so right. :-)

[1] The REAL challenge is to recognize this EVEN if you are actually doing a much better job of debating (or think you are) than your 'opponent'.

Also check out Fred Kofman on youtube, his Verbal Aikido is great while very basic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6N9nvk8bvE also check out his other work.

I recently read Crucial Conversations. It is big on finding a shared purpose in a conversation, and maintaining a feeling of safety. I recommend it strongly.

"Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together" is another good one.

http://www.amazon.com/Dialogue-The-Art-Thinking-Together/dp/...

An important part of any argument is expressing any values or priorities you might have. So it's still possible to disagree with the conclusion, even if you agree on the facts. People should just be able to acknowledge diversity in priorities or "biases". A lot of times this just doesn't happen. People want to frame the disagreement in an objective sort of way.

that reminds me of Monty Python's arguing clinic sketch

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