Hang out with people who are smarter than you are, so that you get lots of practice being the one who’s wrong in an argument.
Remember that when you are right, your goal is not to emit true statements but to cause the other person to believe true ideas. The default implicit model of argument is that if they don’t get it at first, you just have to hit harder; try instead to think of convincing someone as navigating a maze or solving a puzzle, a complex and delicate process that may require lots of backtracking if you mess up.
You shouldn’t expect any single strategy to solve all possible problems. The course of action I recommended is, I believe, a good way to fix the problem described in the original post. If you also want to solve this different problem, you will probably have to also take a corresponding different course of action.
Hang out with people who are smarter than you are, so that you get lots of practice being the one who’s wrong in an argument.
That could be easier said than done if you live in a fairly isolated environment. I would love to find a group of people who are all smarter than me and would want to hang out and debate various topics, but I have no clue where to go. My university doesn’t seem to have very many people that I can chat with, and even the people at the graduate mathematics courses I took at one of the neighboring universities were not very stimulating for the most part. I think this is largely due to the quality of the schools, but there is little I can do about that (at least that I know of) for the time being beyond waiting for grad school and chatting online; this might be the only non-specialist community site where I find multiple people who consistently know more than I do.
Hanging out on the internet can work for this. LW is my personal smarter-than-me hangout of choice.
(It would probably be a good idea to list some other candidates, to help maintain the metaphorical biodiversity of the meme pool. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any. Suggestions?)
Hang out with people who are smarter than you are, so that you get lots of practice being the one who’s wrong in an argument.
Remember that when you are right, your goal is not to emit true statements but to cause the other person to believe true ideas. The default implicit model of argument is that if they don’t get it at first, you just have to hit harder; try instead to think of convincing someone as navigating a maze or solving a puzzle, a complex and delicate process that may require lots of backtracking if you mess up.
This seems useless at learning how to deal with people who are wrong, and instead reinforces the “life is an academic debate” meme.
You shouldn’t expect any single strategy to solve all possible problems. The course of action I recommended is, I believe, a good way to fix the problem described in the original post. If you also want to solve this different problem, you will probably have to also take a corresponding different course of action.
That could be easier said than done if you live in a fairly isolated environment. I would love to find a group of people who are all smarter than me and would want to hang out and debate various topics, but I have no clue where to go. My university doesn’t seem to have very many people that I can chat with, and even the people at the graduate mathematics courses I took at one of the neighboring universities were not very stimulating for the most part. I think this is largely due to the quality of the schools, but there is little I can do about that (at least that I know of) for the time being beyond waiting for grad school and chatting online; this might be the only non-specialist community site where I find multiple people who consistently know more than I do.
Hanging out on the internet can work for this. LW is my personal smarter-than-me hangout of choice.
(It would probably be a good idea to list some other candidates, to help maintain the metaphorical biodiversity of the meme pool. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any. Suggestions?)