Comment by ordu
5 days ago
> 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.