There’s a skill I learned in a creative writing class once: the ability to shut up completely and accept feedback. If someone said they felt your character was unsympathetic, you weren’t allowed to explain the deeper aspects of his/her personality you were hinting at, or accuse the reader of missing the point. The reason being that in general authors don’t get a chance to argue with their readers: your writing stands or falls on its own merit. So hearing a person’s unmassaged reaction was useful and valuable feedback that you could use to actually improve the text and do better next time. Trying to change their mind was a waste of everybody’s time.
The only reason I bother relating the whole anecdote is that I think it generalizes to a useful life skill. My specific point is just that I think it would be good to keep separate the attempt to discover a person’s natural reaction to the word ‘rationality’ and the attempt to change their conception of it. Obviously changing a person’s mind about rationality is something we’ll want to get better at eventually, but we should first focus on learning what our starting point is. Resist the urge to defend rationality, and focus on getting as much useful information as possible about just what we’re up against.
Lastly, as others have noted, props for actually going out and getting data. Arguing is fun, but empiricism is a much greater ally.
There’s a skill I learned in a creative writing class once: the ability to shut up completely and accept feedback. If someone said they felt your character was unsympathetic, you weren’t allowed to explain the deeper aspects of his/her personality you were hinting at, or accuse the reader of missing the point. The reason being that in general authors don’t get a chance to argue with their readers: your writing stands or falls on its own merit. So hearing a person’s unmassaged reaction was useful and valuable feedback that you could use to actually improve the text and do better next time. Trying to change their mind was a waste of everybody’s time.
The only reason I bother relating the whole anecdote is that I think it generalizes to a useful life skill. My specific point is just that I think it would be good to keep separate the attempt to discover a person’s natural reaction to the word ‘rationality’ and the attempt to change their conception of it. Obviously changing a person’s mind about rationality is something we’ll want to get better at eventually, but we should first focus on learning what our starting point is. Resist the urge to defend rationality, and focus on getting as much useful information as possible about just what we’re up against.
Lastly, as others have noted, props for actually going out and getting data. Arguing is fun, but empiricism is a much greater ally.