Comment by a4isms
6 days ago
Here's a simple idea: You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
And three interpretations to consider:
0: The default: That person is irrationally attached to being wrong. Best to walk away, argumentation will be futile, and I have a life to lead.
1: Whoa! Sometimes that person is me.
2: If they didn't reason themselves into it, how did they get into it? What if their position represents their values, not some perfectly architected strategy for maximizing some hypothetical measure of rightness? In that case, if I wish to discuss it with them, I should be talking about their values and my values and where they intersect, rather than arguing right and wrong?
I have personally found all three of the above useful at one point or anther.
My style of online participation has been shaped by 2 ideas:
1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia 2. Writing is rewriting.
I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back to replies immediately, and sometimes I revisit days later, after I've had time to put it in my day-to-day context. It's not a hard and fast rule.
Posting stopped being about convincing someone else maybe 20 years ago (around age 30). I do post to look back and understand myself. To others, I'm sure this sounds like existential navel-gazing and self-centered blathering, but I don't mind.
I do the same, except mostly I delete the responses. The writing was important to me, but the reading is rarely important to someone else. It would be wasting their time.
I would guess I post about 40% of the comments I write.
Lincoln famously wrote and never mailed letters as a way to vent emotions.
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> I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter.
"Sorry this letter is so long as I did not have time to make it shorter."
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
1000% this. I write to force myself to think deeply and crystallize my opinion on things.
> What if their position represents their values
One of my best professors often asked me:
"what are you trying to achieve here?"
Every time they asked this, it always put me into a deep thinking mode. In some cases it did trigger defensive mindsets, but I think having to actually engage by taking a step back and think deeply is for the best if you want to have any hope of changing your mind on something.
In some cases it's worth arguing even if you know you can't win in order to provide pushback against really dumb ideas. This doesn't happen nearly enough in standardisation work, where a small number of professional meeting-goers can railroad through unbelievably bad, broken standards because no-one pushes back.
Anyone who's ever worked on a standards body will be getting flashbacks at this point.
“What can I do to resolve this?”
“Hmmm. I cannot go back in time, but if you’d like I can sit quietly with a contrite look while you spew abuse at me for 10 minutes. Does that work?”
> You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
this is a pithy think to say but its really not true, and every person that has lost their religion and been convinced by rational argument is a counter example.
> this is a pithy think to say but its really not true, and every person that has lost their religion and been convinced by rational argument is a counter example.
And what of people that were convinced by rational argument that a God must exist? To some (Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz, etc) it is irrational to deny such existence:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
You also seem to imply that rationality is a single monolithic thing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Justice%3F_Which_Rationa...
Do people really lose their religion because of logic and reason? I’ve never seen this. There is usually some deeper story. If someone asks me why I don’t believe, despite being raised in the church, I’ll simply say it didn’t make sense and babble on about reason and logic if they push. This is just a shield to avoid sharing the truth with people I don’t trust on a very deep level.
Yes. Your experience is not every experience.
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> every person that has lost their religion and been convinced by rational argument is a counter example.
Do you know any specific examples of this? All examples I know are like people collected some experiences, they needed some mental map for it, and they've built one that doesn't involve religion. In the process of building they really listened to rational arguments, but rational arguments were not the reason for the change, they were the means.
The author of the article complain that people do not listen to their arguments, but if we take a closer look, and look for bigger things, not things like the best way to write bubblesort, people are not ready to change their views while in an argument. They could listen for arguments, but they wouldn't change their position. It would be stupid to change the position in a heat of an argument. It may be stupid to change the position as a result of an argument. People needs time and may be a lot of conversations to look at things from different angles, to think it through. And after that it is very hard to pinpoint what was the reason of the loss of the religion. People talk with other, get new ideas, and they live their lives applying these ideas to the reality. Sometimes it leads to changes in their worldview.
I was reading the article and it made me think. I read through the comments here, and yours was resonating a bit with what was on my mind. So, I apologize for butting in.
The article was quite interesting, and basically was something I already noticed myself in a way. But it bugged me immensely that the author seemingly just gave up on the whole issue, that nothing can be done.
I don't want to go hard on the author, it's just my subjective feeling I got, but halfway through article went into some business leader speech, like something intended for a LinkedIn post. It also irks me when I see stuff like that getting weaponize into another tool for the cutthroat, capitalistic hellhole we live in, as if it didn't already done enough damage. And it smelled to me like some LLM writing, but that could just the author using a bit of marketing-esque, and that's what a lot of LLM training data consist of. Though, again don't want to sound harsh, just pressed some buttons in me that are not the author fault probably.
When I read the article, I just thought that there could be some way to change other person mind, while not engaging in fruitless arguments. And it kind of relates to your comment, but I think it could be more productive to instead engage with another person argument, and hear them out. And instead of directly attacking, just ask to explain their argument, not adversarial, but as one interested in the idea and curious about it. Make the position more like student - teacher, in a way. And that could maybe made the other person engage with their argument, to think through more deeply about it and rationalize it. And if it's incorrect that could be step forward to change their views.
Of course, that is simplifying the issue, and I'm not a smart person that could tackle it. Or it's something that was already known about, and just not working in most cases, anyway. I'm just maybe too naively hopefull that some more kindness in the world instead of treating every other person as a competition would provide something better.
I always interpreted it more as saying that the person has to reason themselves out of their position.
A similar saying that I think I picked up here would be, "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you."
> I always interpreted it more as saying that the person has to reason themselves out of their position.
But that interpretation would make the second half a moot point, wouldn't it?
> You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
If you want to say a person can only reason themselves into any position, it could become "You can't reason someone out of a position."
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I had a little chat recently with a glaciologist and he told me about a student who had come from a very religious family. The guy had to learn all about the formation of Earth, etc, and decided to give up geology because it would put him at odds with his family and friends and he decided that they were more important.
So, you could say he rationally decided to keep his irrational beliefs.
Isn't that just point #2 from above? He rationally decided that his friends and family, and the values he is a part of, are more important to him, then being in geology, and some deep truth that it would supposed show him. Maybe he just didn't care enough about _this_ truth, compared to being part of the world he is in.
People aren't convinced by rational arguments. Someone who does not believe in god will not be convinced to believe by a proof of god's existence, and someone with faith will not become an atheist because someone debunks the proof.
The rational arguments form a structure that beliefs can hang on, but the core process of changing ones mind is not rational. Like many people, I have changed my thinking on many topics over the course of my life, and arguments that I used to find convincing I now consider to be filled with holes, and arguments I used to think were paper-thin now seem stronger than steel. You can find a rational argument for most beliefs, and you can tear down a rational argument for most beliefs.
Reason just isn't how we form our beliefs at all, it's how we convince ourselves that the things we believe are true.
> Someone who does not believe in god will not be convinced to believe by a proof of god's existence
I'm sure some atheists could be convinced. The rule "all atheists will reject evidence of God" seems false. The rule "all atheists will accept evidence of God" also seems false. Life is more complicated than that. It depends on the atheist and on the evidence.
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> Someone who does not believe in god will not be convinced to believe by a proof of god's existence.
But of course that's not true. I would believe in a God with proof of their existence. I simply have not encountered such proof that hold up to my standards of proof of such an extraordinary claim.
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But you DID NOT reason themselves out of a religion. You might have planted a seed that then the other person developed on their own. Still no small feat, but it's fundamentally different.
This is conflating all religious following with lack of reason. There are those that are fully unreasonable and those that find it reasonable from their current perspective.
It's also conflating holding a rational position as coming to hold that position by rational means
You can believe the right thing for the wrong reasons, and I would argue all humans are in that bucket nearly all the time.
3. Are you really really sure that person is wrong?
Excellent!
> 0: The default: That person is irrationally attached to being wrong. Best to walk away, argumentation will be futile, and I have a life to lead.
Disagree here, because:
* Most of us have an irrational attachment to many of our positions. Arguing may or may not be futile, but if you can't "walk away" from most people (except if you sit at home and do nothing, and maybe not even then).
* These people may well be your coworkers on your project or at the organization you work for. So there is no "walk away", you're working with them and will continue working with them.
Ever heard of quiet quitting. The momen someone labels you as what you describe - they will do minimum they have to do to interact with you and then move on with their day.
Being hard wired to non logical believes is just not good in this regard.
With people I'm invested in, like a community (which includes co-workers), I start with some experience that they are good people, which provides an incentive to ask whether options 2 or 3 (or both) would work. Option 3 in particular leaves open the possibility that I will be convinced to support what they have in mind once we move from "that seems unreasonable" to "this is aligned with your values, could it align with some of mine?"
> You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
That's demonstrably not true, people deconvert from religion and other irrational beliefs all the time.
I don't really like that quote, what is a position but an opinion and how do you reason about options? It doesn't really make sense. Its like when liberals say "reality has a liberal bias", its not a very useful thing to say either because it doesn't work that way in practice. Why do you support abortion? Why do you oppose abortion? People will give perfectly reasonable answers to either question.