On settled issues: this may or may not be obvious around here, but I think that it’s unreasonable to expect of yourself to seriously entertain the possibility that you will change your mind, if you are debating an issue that, in your mind, is settled. There is a meme that you’re supposed to always be open to that possibility (“I could always be wrong”), and it always made me a little uncomfortable, until I identified it and ejected it. Like you’re supposed to expect to hear something new and mind-broadening, but you can’t bring yourself to it. And if you try, you just feel let down afterwards because let’s face it, usually it doesn’t happen.
But if I have, say, a 99% confidence in my position, my initial expectation that the person I’m talking to will change my mind can’t honestly go above 1% (except if they are a high level Dark Arts practitioner, perhaps). In fact, it normally will be even smaller: my interlocutor is not guaranteed to bring up the best arguments, ones that will correctly aim at and dissolve my most important objections. Or I may fail at making my position clear enough for them to do so in the first place. Or the gap in shared assumptions may simply be too great to cover before we get bored.
In any case, if I talk to someone who I think is wrong, then as an obvious consequence of my confidence level, I should expect to find their reasoning flawed or unconvincing, and I will mainly be trying to understand their position so I can see where they went wrong. Should I feel bad about this? Does it make it pointless to talk to me? I say no and no.
What makes me feel like I’m an honest arguer rather than a hostile one (whenever I’m succeeding at this of course) is not my prior for changing my mind, but what I’m doing with what my “opponent” is saying. I have a model of reality, and I know they have a model of reality, and I try to understand just how both these contraptions work. What are the moving parts, how do they interact, what do they depend on, and how either model leads to predictions and decisions and outcomes. I expect something to be missing or malfunctioning, but as long as I’m really trying to understand the operation of it, then I am hopefully doing what the other person wants me to be doing. I mean, they are trying to explain their beliefs and want me to understand them, and I’m trying to understand them. If the other model has unexpected strength, in this mindset I expect myself to pick up on that.
But I don’t know if it’s possible for a human to do that if they have an actual motivation to persuade you. I mean, if you’re a parent, you find out something socially problematic about your child, and from the doorway inside your mind that’s on the way to genuine communication comes a deafening scream of “What will people thiiink!”
On settled issues: this may or may not be obvious around here, but I think that it’s unreasonable to expect of yourself to seriously entertain the possibility that you will change your mind, if you are debating an issue that, in your mind, is settled. There is a meme that you’re supposed to always be open to that possibility (“I could always be wrong”), and it always made me a little uncomfortable, until I identified it and ejected it. Like you’re supposed to expect to hear something new and mind-broadening, but you can’t bring yourself to it. And if you try, you just feel let down afterwards because let’s face it, usually it doesn’t happen.
But if I have, say, a 99% confidence in my position, my initial expectation that the person I’m talking to will change my mind can’t honestly go above 1% (except if they are a high level Dark Arts practitioner, perhaps). In fact, it normally will be even smaller: my interlocutor is not guaranteed to bring up the best arguments, ones that will correctly aim at and dissolve my most important objections. Or I may fail at making my position clear enough for them to do so in the first place. Or the gap in shared assumptions may simply be too great to cover before we get bored.
In any case, if I talk to someone who I think is wrong, then as an obvious consequence of my confidence level, I should expect to find their reasoning flawed or unconvincing, and I will mainly be trying to understand their position so I can see where they went wrong. Should I feel bad about this? Does it make it pointless to talk to me? I say no and no.
What makes me feel like I’m an honest arguer rather than a hostile one (whenever I’m succeeding at this of course) is not my prior for changing my mind, but what I’m doing with what my “opponent” is saying. I have a model of reality, and I know they have a model of reality, and I try to understand just how both these contraptions work. What are the moving parts, how do they interact, what do they depend on, and how either model leads to predictions and decisions and outcomes. I expect something to be missing or malfunctioning, but as long as I’m really trying to understand the operation of it, then I am hopefully doing what the other person wants me to be doing. I mean, they are trying to explain their beliefs and want me to understand them, and I’m trying to understand them. If the other model has unexpected strength, in this mindset I expect myself to pick up on that.
But I don’t know if it’s possible for a human to do that if they have an actual motivation to persuade you. I mean, if you’re a parent, you find out something socially problematic about your child, and from the doorway inside your mind that’s on the way to genuine communication comes a deafening scream of “What will people thiiink!”