Originally, I had earned a reputation on the server for my patience, my ability to defuse heated disagreements and give everyone every single chance to offer a good reason for why they held their positions. That slowed and stopped. I got angrier, ruder, more sarcastic, less willing to listen to people. Why should I, in the face of a dozen arguments that ended without any change? [...] What’s the point of getting people mad? [...] what’s the point in listening to someone who might be scarcely better than noise
This seems like the core of it right here.
You started out decently enough when you had patience and were willing to listen, but your willingness to listen was built on expectations of how easily people would change their minds or offer up compelling reason to change your own, and those expectations aren’t panning out. You don’t want to have to give up on people—especially those who set out to become rational—being able to change their minds, or on your own ability to be effective in this way. Yet you can’t help but notice that your expectations aren’t being fulfilled, and this brings up some important questions on what you’re doing and whether it’s even worth it. You don’t want to “just give up”, yet you’re struggling to find room for optimism, and so you’re finding yourself just frustrated and doing neither “optimism” nor “giving up” well.
Sound like a fair enough summary?
There is, of course, the classic solution: Get stronger. If I could convince them I was right or get convinced that they’re right, that would nicely remove the dissonance.
The answer is in part this, yes.
It is definitely possible to intentionally steer things such that people either change your mind or change their own. It is not easy.
It is not easy in two different ways. One is that people’s beliefs generally aren’t built on the small set of “facts” that they give to support them. They’re built on a whole lot more than that, a lot of it isn’t very legible, and a lot of the time people aren’t very aware of or honest about what their beliefs are actually built on. This means that even when you’re doing things perfectly* and making steady progress towards converging on beliefs, it will probably take longer than you’d think, and this can be discouraging if you don’t know to expect it.
The other way it’s hard is that you have to regulate yourself in tricky ways. If you’re getting frustrated, you’re doing something wrong. If you’re getting frustrated and not instantly pivoting to the direction that alleviates the frustration, you’re doing that wrong too. It’s hard to even know what direction to pivot sometimes. Getting this right takes a lot of self-observation and correction so as to train yourself to balance the considerations better and better. Think of it as a skill to be trained.
* “Perfectly” as in “Not wasting motion”. Not slipping the clutch and putting energy into heat rather than motion. You might still be in the wrong gear. Even big illegible messes can be fast when you can use “high gear” effectively. In that case it’s Aumann agreement about whose understanding to trust how far, rather than conveying the object level understanding itself.
And, of course, there is the psychological option- just get over it.
The answer is partly this too, though perhaps not in the way you’d think.
It’s (usually) not about just dropping things altogether, but rather integrating the unfortunate information into your worldview so that it stops feeling like an alarm and more like a known-issue to be solved.
Hardly seemed appropriate to be happy about anything when it came to politics. Everyone is dreadfully underinformed, and those with the greatest instincts towards kindness and systemic changes may nevertheless cause great harm
This, for example, isn’t an “Oh, whatever, NBD”. You know how well things could go if people could be not-stupid about things. If people could listen to each other, and could say things worth listening to. If people who were about “kindness” knew they had to do their homework and ensure good outcomes before they could feel good about themselves for being “kind”. And you see a lot of not that. It sucks.
It’s definitely a problem to be solved rather than one to be accepted as “just how things are”. However, it is also currently how things are, and it’s not the kind of problem that can be solved by flinching at it until it no longer exists to bother us—the way we might be able to flinch away from a hot stove and prevent “I’m burning” from being a true thing we need to deal with.
We have to mourn the loss of what we thought we had, just as we have to to when someone we cared about doesn’t get the rest of the life we were hoping for. There’s lots of little “Aw, and that means this won’t get to happen either”, and a lot of “But WHY?” until we’ve updated our maps and we’re happy that we’re no longer neglecting to learn lessons that might come back to bite us again.
Some people aren’t worth convincing, and aren’t worth trying to learn from. It’s easier to let those slide when you know exactly what you’re aiming for, and what exact cues you’d need to see before it’d be worth your time to pivot.
With Trump in office, I struggled to imagine how anyone could possibly change their view. If you like him, any argument against him seems motivated by hatred and partisanship to the point of being easily dismissed. If you don’t, then how could you possibly credit any idea or statement of himself or his party as worthwhile in the face of his monumental evils.
Let’s use this for an example.
Say I disagreed with your take on Trump because I thought you liked him too much. I don’t know you and you don’t know me, so I can’t rest on having built a reputation on not being a hateful partisan and instead thinking things through. With that in mind, I’d probably do my best to pace where you’re coming from. I’ll show you exactly how cool all of the cool thing Trump has done are (or on the other side, exactly how uncool all the uncool things are), and when I’m done, I’ll ask you if I’m missing anything. And I’ll listen. Maybe I’m actually missing something about how (un)cool Trump is, even if I think it’s quite unlikely. Maybe you’ll teach me something about how you (and people like you) think, and maybe I care about that—I am choosing to engage with you, after all.
After I have proven to your satisfaction that not only do I get where you’re coming from, I don’t downplay the importance of what you see at all, do you really believe that you’d still see me as “a hateful partisan”—or on the other side, “too easily looking past Trump’s monumental evils”? If you do slip into that mode of operation and I notice and stop to address it with an actual openness to seeing why you might see me that way, do you think you’d be able to continue holding the “he’s just a hater” frame without kinda noticing to yourself that you’re wrong about this and weakening your ability to keep hold of this pretense if it keeps happening?
Or do you see it as likely that you might be curious about how I can get everything you do, not dismiss any of it, and still think you’re missing something important? Might you even consider it meaningful that I don’t come to the same conclusion before you understand what my reasoning is well enough that I’d sign off on it?
You still probably aren’t going to flip your vote in a twenty minute conversation, but what if it were more? Do you think you could hang out with someone like that for a week without weakening some holds on things you were holding onto for less than fully-informed-and-rational reasons? Do you think that maybe, if the things you were missing turned out to be important and surprising enough, you might even change your vote despite still hating all the things about the other guy that you hated going in?
The question is just whether the person is worth the effort. Or perhaps, worth practicing your skills with.
This seems like the core of it right here.
You started out decently enough when you had patience and were willing to listen, but your willingness to listen was built on expectations of how easily people would change their minds or offer up compelling reason to change your own, and those expectations aren’t panning out. You don’t want to have to give up on people—especially those who set out to become rational—being able to change their minds, or on your own ability to be effective in this way. Yet you can’t help but notice that your expectations aren’t being fulfilled, and this brings up some important questions on what you’re doing and whether it’s even worth it. You don’t want to “just give up”, yet you’re struggling to find room for optimism, and so you’re finding yourself just frustrated and doing neither “optimism” nor “giving up” well.
Sound like a fair enough summary?
The answer is in part this, yes.
It is definitely possible to intentionally steer things such that people either change your mind or change their own. It is not easy.
It is not easy in two different ways. One is that people’s beliefs generally aren’t built on the small set of “facts” that they give to support them. They’re built on a whole lot more than that, a lot of it isn’t very legible, and a lot of the time people aren’t very aware of or honest about what their beliefs are actually built on. This means that even when you’re doing things perfectly* and making steady progress towards converging on beliefs, it will probably take longer than you’d think, and this can be discouraging if you don’t know to expect it.
The other way it’s hard is that you have to regulate yourself in tricky ways. If you’re getting frustrated, you’re doing something wrong. If you’re getting frustrated and not instantly pivoting to the direction that alleviates the frustration, you’re doing that wrong too. It’s hard to even know what direction to pivot sometimes. Getting this right takes a lot of self-observation and correction so as to train yourself to balance the considerations better and better. Think of it as a skill to be trained.
* “Perfectly” as in “Not wasting motion”. Not slipping the clutch and putting energy into heat rather than motion. You might still be in the wrong gear. Even big illegible messes can be fast when you can use “high gear” effectively. In that case it’s Aumann agreement about whose understanding to trust how far, rather than conveying the object level understanding itself.
The answer is partly this too, though perhaps not in the way you’d think.
It’s (usually) not about just dropping things altogether, but rather integrating the unfortunate information into your worldview so that it stops feeling like an alarm and more like a known-issue to be solved.
This, for example, isn’t an “Oh, whatever, NBD”. You know how well things could go if people could be not-stupid about things. If people could listen to each other, and could say things worth listening to. If people who were about “kindness” knew they had to do their homework and ensure good outcomes before they could feel good about themselves for being “kind”. And you see a lot of not that. It sucks.
It’s definitely a problem to be solved rather than one to be accepted as “just how things are”. However, it is also currently how things are, and it’s not the kind of problem that can be solved by flinching at it until it no longer exists to bother us—the way we might be able to flinch away from a hot stove and prevent “I’m burning” from being a true thing we need to deal with.
We have to mourn the loss of what we thought we had, just as we have to to when someone we cared about doesn’t get the rest of the life we were hoping for. There’s lots of little “Aw, and that means this won’t get to happen either”, and a lot of “But WHY?” until we’ve updated our maps and we’re happy that we’re no longer neglecting to learn lessons that might come back to bite us again.
Some people aren’t worth convincing, and aren’t worth trying to learn from. It’s easier to let those slide when you know exactly what you’re aiming for, and what exact cues you’d need to see before it’d be worth your time to pivot.
Let’s use this for an example.
Say I disagreed with your take on Trump because I thought you liked him too much. I don’t know you and you don’t know me, so I can’t rest on having built a reputation on not being a hateful partisan and instead thinking things through. With that in mind, I’d probably do my best to pace where you’re coming from. I’ll show you exactly how cool all of the cool thing Trump has done are (or on the other side, exactly how uncool all the uncool things are), and when I’m done, I’ll ask you if I’m missing anything. And I’ll listen. Maybe I’m actually missing something about how (un)cool Trump is, even if I think it’s quite unlikely. Maybe you’ll teach me something about how you (and people like you) think, and maybe I care about that—I am choosing to engage with you, after all.
After I have proven to your satisfaction that not only do I get where you’re coming from, I don’t downplay the importance of what you see at all, do you really believe that you’d still see me as “a hateful partisan”—or on the other side, “too easily looking past Trump’s monumental evils”? If you do slip into that mode of operation and I notice and stop to address it with an actual openness to seeing why you might see me that way, do you think you’d be able to continue holding the “he’s just a hater” frame without kinda noticing to yourself that you’re wrong about this and weakening your ability to keep hold of this pretense if it keeps happening?
Or do you see it as likely that you might be curious about how I can get everything you do, not dismiss any of it, and still think you’re missing something important? Might you even consider it meaningful that I don’t come to the same conclusion before you understand what my reasoning is well enough that I’d sign off on it?
You still probably aren’t going to flip your vote in a twenty minute conversation, but what if it were more? Do you think you could hang out with someone like that for a week without weakening some holds on things you were holding onto for less than fully-informed-and-rational reasons? Do you think that maybe, if the things you were missing turned out to be important and surprising enough, you might even change your vote despite still hating all the things about the other guy that you hated going in?
The question is just whether the person is worth the effort. Or perhaps, worth practicing your skills with.