I get the feeling sometime that people tend to be “blunt objects”, that there is a tendency to see one issue that does have some importance, or a few, and then go slamming against that issue and things that resemble it. Then your slamming becomes an issue and other people start hammering against your whole position and related views. If this system works at all, it hopefully works by this pounding back and forth settling somewhere close to where we think things ought to be, based on the relative ‘objective’ merits that give a bit more fuel to one side or the other. Being built to be successful packhunters and foragers on the savannah and not the perfect disputants, I think people are applying what limited resources they have or think they have in attempting to settle fine points with large unwieldy views, the sort of broad conceptions that did the job in the savannah. Hopefully by policing ourselves and/or increasing our own ability to handle lots of nuanced information at once we can apply more precision to things. Then instead of flinging the issue around like a tetherball, we could carefully place it in a measured and thoughtful position to best satisfy our collective desires. Anyway just some thoughts and an analogy I find viscerally enjoyable.
IAWYC, but I want to caution against too much arguing by analogy. I can always find a neat-sounding analogy for any problem (especially facets of human psychology), but that as persuasive as such analogies often are to sympathetic audiences, they tend to have very little predictive power.
That being said, they can be very pithy and memorable, so they’re a good tool when they’re justified.
Good point and agreed. Here I sought just to share a descriptive analogy I found interesting, in agreement with Yvain, but any description could even unintentionally be used later for argument (by myself too of course), so that’s something for me to watch out for, thanks.
I get the feeling sometime that people tend to be “blunt objects”, that there is a tendency to see one issue that does have some importance, or a few, and then go slamming against that issue and things that resemble it. Then your slamming becomes an issue and other people start hammering against your whole position and related views. If this system works at all, it hopefully works by this pounding back and forth settling somewhere close to where we think things ought to be, based on the relative ‘objective’ merits that give a bit more fuel to one side or the other. Being built to be successful packhunters and foragers on the savannah and not the perfect disputants, I think people are applying what limited resources they have or think they have in attempting to settle fine points with large unwieldy views, the sort of broad conceptions that did the job in the savannah. Hopefully by policing ourselves and/or increasing our own ability to handle lots of nuanced information at once we can apply more precision to things. Then instead of flinging the issue around like a tetherball, we could carefully place it in a measured and thoughtful position to best satisfy our collective desires. Anyway just some thoughts and an analogy I find viscerally enjoyable.
IAWYC, but I want to caution against too much arguing by analogy. I can always find a neat-sounding analogy for any problem (especially facets of human psychology), but that as persuasive as such analogies often are to sympathetic audiences, they tend to have very little predictive power.
That being said, they can be very pithy and memorable, so they’re a good tool when they’re justified.
Good point and agreed. Here I sought just to share a descriptive analogy I found interesting, in agreement with Yvain, but any description could even unintentionally be used later for argument (by myself too of course), so that’s something for me to watch out for, thanks.