This advice has more to do with serious written criticism, but I like spreading it around.
You should 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."
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
Me quoting Judith Curry quoting Daniel Dennett quoting Anatol Rapaport.
I only ran across this fairly recently, but it makes explicit some vague intuitions I had had before. The few times I consciously have put it into practice so far, I have found it rather time consuming but beneficial. I’m not sure whether I have learned to back away from pointless controversy or how to make points more persuasively, but it has helped me get away from looking at arguments as soldiers in an army kind of thinking.
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly
When I debate people on the internet, I find that much of the time the other fellow does not have a clear position. That when I gently and politely ask questions aimed at clarifying the person’s position, I get evasions, ad hominems, strawmanning, weaseling, and attempts to change the subject.
Of course I usually limit my debates to topics where I’ve though pretty carefully about the subject. And I’m most interested in topics where popular views are questionable.
Notice that “re-express your target’s position clearly” was not the entirety of Rapaport’s advice, or even of that line of his advice.
I agree. Still, that part of his advice—to state the other person’s position very clearly—is not going to work out in practice a lot of the time. Before you can state someone’s position “clearly vividly and fairly” you have to understand it. And the person has to actually have a position which can be stated “clearly vividly and fairly.”
When I find someone else’s argument puzzling, it is often for a reason that they didn’t anticipate. Because they didn’t anticipate that I would find a particular step puzzling in a particular way, they didn’t explain this step, at least not in a way that I understood.
Thus, I need them to (1) be willing to do the work of understanding which step I found puzzling and why, and (2) be willing to do the work of addressing my idiosyncratic confusion. (They will perceive my confusion as idiosyncratic, because this is the first time that they are encountering it.*)
Both of those steps require some work on their part. Moreover, they need to do this work to bridge a step that seemed obvious to them, and hence which seemed like it could be missed only by someone who is, in a certain sense, unusually stupid. This automatically puts me under suspicion of being “not worth the time”, either because I’m stupid or because I’m asking in bad faith. (See Expecting Short Inferential Distances.)
So, most people aren’t willing to undertake this work unless they have some sympathy for me. The other lines of Rapaport’s advice serve to build this sympathy, so they should happen before I attempt the “re-express clearly and vividly” stage.
When I do attempt a “re-expression” as part of my process of understanding their argument, my first attempt is accompanied by something like “Here is my attempt to restate what you are saying, but I know that it is probably wrong. This attempt is just to give you something to work with as you address the error in my understanding of your meaning.” (Here’s an example of my doing this.)
This may seem overly humble or deferential, but, in my experience, it is effective and literally true. This kind of expression really does make people more willing to attempt a helpful reply, and their replies really do fill in gaps in my understanding of their position. (Again, see the above example. I didn’t entirely resolve my confusion, but I did come way understanding my interlocutor’s position better.)
* However, if I continue to profess confusion over this step, and I haven’t made myself sympathetic by following the rest of Rapaport’s advice, then my professions won’t be chalked up to idiosyncratic confusion, but rather to willful stupidity or bad faith.
Thank you for providing an example. By the way, it looks to me like lukeprog never actually clarified for you what he meant by “mathematicians succeed and fail on this issue in a wide range of degrees”
As I added in my reply to him, his reply did help me with other parts of his argument. But I needed more iterations of questions and clarifications before I could understand that particular phrase better.
This doesn’t seem to me like wasted effort, though, because I expect that what he did clarify would have helped me to understand that particular phrase, had we continued to discuss it. So, while I can’t explain that particular phrase better than I could before, I expect that I am closer to understanding it. Certainly, partial illumination of the argument surrounding a specific sentence is normally the preamble to full illumination of that specific sentence, if this full illumination ever happens.
That’s generally consistent with my experience. As I alluded to at the start of this exchange, when I seek clarification of someone’s position, it’s unusual for the person to actually provide it. No matter how polite or respectful I am.
Which is why the idea of stating the other fellow’s position clearly is actually of limited utility at best in practice. At least on the sort of topics I am interested in grappling with.
This advice has more to do with serious written criticism, but I like spreading it around.
Me quoting Judith Curry quoting Daniel Dennett quoting Anatol Rapaport.
I only ran across this fairly recently, but it makes explicit some vague intuitions I had had before. The few times I consciously have put it into practice so far, I have found it rather time consuming but beneficial. I’m not sure whether I have learned to back away from pointless controversy or how to make points more persuasively, but it has helped me get away from looking at arguments as soldiers in an army kind of thinking.
When I debate people on the internet, I find that much of the time the other fellow does not have a clear position. That when I gently and politely ask questions aimed at clarifying the person’s position, I get evasions, ad hominems, strawmanning, weaseling, and attempts to change the subject.
Of course I usually limit my debates to topics where I’ve though pretty carefully about the subject. And I’m most interested in topics where popular views are questionable.
Notice that “re-express your target’s position clearly” was not the entirety of Rapaport’s advice, or even of that line of his advice.
I agree. Still, that part of his advice—to state the other person’s position very clearly—is not going to work out in practice a lot of the time. Before you can state someone’s position “clearly vividly and fairly” you have to understand it. And the person has to actually have a position which can be stated “clearly vividly and fairly.”
When I find someone else’s argument puzzling, it is often for a reason that they didn’t anticipate. Because they didn’t anticipate that I would find a particular step puzzling in a particular way, they didn’t explain this step, at least not in a way that I understood.
Thus, I need them to (1) be willing to do the work of understanding which step I found puzzling and why, and (2) be willing to do the work of addressing my idiosyncratic confusion. (They will perceive my confusion as idiosyncratic, because this is the first time that they are encountering it.*)
Both of those steps require some work on their part. Moreover, they need to do this work to bridge a step that seemed obvious to them, and hence which seemed like it could be missed only by someone who is, in a certain sense, unusually stupid. This automatically puts me under suspicion of being “not worth the time”, either because I’m stupid or because I’m asking in bad faith. (See Expecting Short Inferential Distances.)
So, most people aren’t willing to undertake this work unless they have some sympathy for me. The other lines of Rapaport’s advice serve to build this sympathy, so they should happen before I attempt the “re-express clearly and vividly” stage.
When I do attempt a “re-expression” as part of my process of understanding their argument, my first attempt is accompanied by something like “Here is my attempt to restate what you are saying, but I know that it is probably wrong. This attempt is just to give you something to work with as you address the error in my understanding of your meaning.” (Here’s an example of my doing this.)
This may seem overly humble or deferential, but, in my experience, it is effective and literally true. This kind of expression really does make people more willing to attempt a helpful reply, and their replies really do fill in gaps in my understanding of their position. (Again, see the above example. I didn’t entirely resolve my confusion, but I did come way understanding my interlocutor’s position better.)
* However, if I continue to profess confusion over this step, and I haven’t made myself sympathetic by following the rest of Rapaport’s advice, then my professions won’t be chalked up to idiosyncratic confusion, but rather to willful stupidity or bad faith.
Thank you for providing an example. By the way, it looks to me like lukeprog never actually clarified for you what he meant by “mathematicians succeed and fail on this issue in a wide range of degrees”
Agreed?
Yes.
As I added in my reply to him, his reply did help me with other parts of his argument. But I needed more iterations of questions and clarifications before I could understand that particular phrase better.
This doesn’t seem to me like wasted effort, though, because I expect that what he did clarify would have helped me to understand that particular phrase, had we continued to discuss it. So, while I can’t explain that particular phrase better than I could before, I expect that I am closer to understanding it. Certainly, partial illumination of the argument surrounding a specific sentence is normally the preamble to full illumination of that specific sentence, if this full illumination ever happens.
That’s generally consistent with my experience. As I alluded to at the start of this exchange, when I seek clarification of someone’s position, it’s unusual for the person to actually provide it. No matter how polite or respectful I am.
Which is why the idea of stating the other fellow’s position clearly is actually of limited utility at best in practice. At least on the sort of topics I am interested in grappling with.