7 ms·

"Hear the Biography, not the ideology" This is just another way of attacking someone else's position, with the added bonus of letting you be intolerably smug w

by bcoates 10y ago

"Hear the Biography, not the ideology" This is just another way of attacking someone else's position, with the added bonus of letting you be intolerably smug while you do it. You're not communicating in good faith unless you're willing to concede the possibility that the other person is actually right about something. At the very least you need to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. This, on the other hand, is a way of reconciling the fact that you obviously don't have a good reason to believe the things you do (otherwise, you wouldn't be threatened by the mere fact that someone disagrees with you) with your preference to believe that your views are in some meaningful way correct: obtain ammunition against the other by "discovering" the real reason they believe such obviously wrong things, then being the superior person by empathizing with this poor benighted creature.

SapphireSun 10y ago
Yes and no... you can easily turn this technique around on yourself. People often hold abstract beliefs for concrete reasons, and it's often more important to get to those concrete things as it's a much more powerful basis to understand them. It might get you somewhere in understanding why other people hold the opposing view (allowing you to argue more effectively) or you might learn something. Regardless, you're more likely to make a friend even if you continue to disagree.
hashkb 10y ago
I think you may have read into this too far and/or protected a bit much onto it. How do you figure the OP is helping you attack an opposing position?
- joslin01 10y ago
  The point parent is making is that the one's own stubbornness (that they are indeed correct) forces them to skip a step -- is what they are saying true and/or what is their logical positioning? Instead, OP says "first find out how they got to that position in life" which you gotta understand does come across pretty smug since it implies superiority of opinion/belief and degenerates the disagreer as if they are merely using emotion in their logic. I think ideally you first want to let the battle of logic fly then get into biography details if it's a very sharp disagreement. It may be worthwhile for both sides to hear each other's upbringing and catalyst -- though you might not take the other's lens as your own, it nevertheless will add a little wisdom
  - Swizec 10y ago
    > merely using emotion in their logic. Truth often goes deeper than facts and logic.
    - axlprose 10y ago
      This is a pretty common sentiment, but I think it underplays just how much phenomena logic and factual observation can analyze/explain, and in turn we easily forget and underestimate just how much it can truly accomplish[0]. I mean, literally all of our modern scientific and technological progress has been built on top of it, so what inherent quality makes these tools ineffective for discovering these other things that are yet to be understood, like emotion? Discussing things like mathematicians trying to solve a hard math problem would probably help our communications more if anything, compared to say, carrying out discourse like we're all Deepak Chopras... [0] This idea is described pretty well by the whole "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" discussion: https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
      - marklgr 10y ago
        Noe one denies the virtues or achievements of logic, but as you know, the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything ie. to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. As of today, it's clearly not the case--computers are excellent at computing, but they are pretty dumb. Humans must be around to select, prioritize, assign values, interpret, and put it all together. Otherwise, computers only spit the most mundane truths out of facts plus logic, and that was precisely one of the decisive criticism of positivim.
        axlprose 10y ago
        > the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture? Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition. And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues... > The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of. The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
* At the very least you need to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.* We were all taught Debate ("Trying to prove your point") instead of being taught to Dialectic ("the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions."). I have many conversations about Religion and Theology and as soon as I detect the other party is dead set on proving their ideas correct instead trying to find the truth, I understand immediately we won't get anywhere.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  Well said. If I detect that then I usually try to disarm them by saying that we don't need to agree and for most things... that's ok.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Everyone's position on anything is influenced by their background, including your own. In order to understand a point of view, it is useful to know where it comes from. It can help you knock that view down, perhaps, but it can also help you to come to that same view yourself, or recognise its value.
trjordan 10y ago
If you're hearing the biography so you can attack the ideology, you're missing the point. Ideology is nearly pointless to discuss. Instead, the author suggests talking about topics that are more personal. By talking about experiences, you can expose the nuance that's so easily blown away by swapping talking points. Perhaps the author and the woman both agree that people should be less cavalier with pregnancy, and there's a productive way forward. Perhaps they both agree it's a heartbreaking issues and more people need support to deal with it. Even abortion is not so black and white, and arguing about it abstractly is a much less fruitful way to find common ground.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  > Even abortion is not so black and white, and arguing about it abstractly is a much less fruitful way to find common ground. So my common response to strong ideological positions is to take a hypothetical which exposes something I feel uncomfortable with if I were to accept that ideological framework. The world is pretty much all shades of grey to me (indeed to an extent which occasionally offends), so I find ideological certainty very hard to relate to. It's not that I think they're wrong and I'm right, I'm not attacking their position, I just want to get my head around the fact that when faced with all the ramifications of their position - they're still certain. These conversations are really interesting to me, and I love talking to people who see the world so differently.
pessimizer 10y ago
The article does smell a bit of "If you can just shut up and listen, you may find out that the people you disagree with aren't stupid, they're actually traumatized or mentally ill. Maybe they don't need to be attacked or imprisoned; instead, they could be medicated, or counseled. Maybe when you listen, you're the counselor..." That's the least generous interpretation, though. I think he was doing a personal art project and fishing for an experience that would confirm the truism that the problem in politics is that angry people should just calm down and listen to each other. This is what he got, so this is what he had to use in that narrative.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
FooHentai 10y ago
>This, on the other hand, is a way of reconciling the fact that you obviously don't have a good reason to believe the things you do (otherwise, you wouldn't be threatened by the mere fact that someone disagrees with you) I don't agree that this is the only reason someone would be threatened by disagreement, or even the main reason. You can feel threatened by disagreement on the basis of the other party acting on their belief, and how that outcome would affect you. As a relevant example, you can feel threatened by someone disagreeing with your stance on abortion if you are pro-choice, because the down-stream implication of pro-life beliefs is legislation and societal constraints that remove your ability to choose. If we're just debating in a vacuum then sure, you would only feel threatened as some kind of ego response. But in the real world beliefs tend to result in real-world consequences, and those consequences are the root cause of feeling threatened by disagreement.
vacri 10y ago
> This is just another way of attacking someone else's position, with the added bonus of letting you be intolerably smug while you do it. Ah, yes. The author is so intolerably smug, the way he didn't advance his own message to the woman, and asked her to speak more of her own experience. I know that I, for one, can't handle it when someone ask for more information without expressing any statement of judgement - I mean, the sheer smugness of it is just intolerable. > This, on the other hand, is a way of reconciling the fact that you obviously don't have a good reason to believe the things you do Even though the author clearly and concisely explains why his own opinion is different to the woman's? It's not like it's a complex or hard to read article. There's a considerable amount of projection going on in your comment. I find the commentary about smugness quite ironic, really.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
it depends if one is set out to dominate; in this case the mode of discussion will probably be adversary. maybe understanding the motives of your peer is one of the requirements for domination (you can't dominate someone who you don't understand at all), but understanding does not imply domination. there is another problem: your peer will probably not be ready to share much of his background for fear of your motives; if you know that your words can be used against yourself, then you will not be ready to talk too much.
WWKong 10y ago
Tell me more. Why do you feel this way? What is your story?
- hashkb 10y ago
  Damn, you wrote the comment I meant to write. I led with a judgment.
  - bcoates 10y ago
    Judging from the responses, I'm not the only one that missed the subtlety on the first read. Good Job.
CPLX 10y ago
It's really not quite so complicated. The technique espoused by the OP is a humble one, intended to build empathy, which it seems to me are two traits with considerable intrinsic value.

by bcoates 10y ago

SapphireSun 10y ago

Yes and no... you can easily turn this technique around on yourself. People often hold abstract beliefs for concrete reasons, and it's often more important to get to those concrete things as it's a much more powerful basis to understand them. It might get you somewhere in understanding why other people hold the opposing view (allowing you to argue more effectively) or you might learn something. Regardless, you're more likely to make a friend even if you continue to disagree.

hashkb 10y ago

I think you may have read into this too far and/or protected a bit much onto it. How do you figure the OP is helping you attack an opposing position?

joslin01 10y ago
The point parent is making is that the one's own stubbornness (that they are indeed correct) forces them to skip a step -- is what they are saying true and/or what is their logical positioning? Instead, OP says "first find out how they got to that position in life" which you gotta understand does come across pretty smug since it implies superiority of opinion/belief and degenerates the disagreer as if they are merely using emotion in their logic. I think ideally you first want to let the battle of logic fly then get into biography details if it's a very sharp disagreement. It may be worthwhile for both sides to hear each other's upbringing and catalyst -- though you might not take the other's lens as your own, it nevertheless will add a little wisdom
- Swizec 10y ago
  > merely using emotion in their logic. Truth often goes deeper than facts and logic.
  - axlprose 10y ago
    This is a pretty common sentiment, but I think it underplays just how much phenomena logic and factual observation can analyze/explain, and in turn we easily forget and underestimate just how much it can truly accomplish[0]. I mean, literally all of our modern scientific and technological progress has been built on top of it, so what inherent quality makes these tools ineffective for discovering these other things that are yet to be understood, like emotion? Discussing things like mathematicians trying to solve a hard math problem would probably help our communications more if anything, compared to say, carrying out discourse like we're all Deepak Chopras... [0] This idea is described pretty well by the whole "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" discussion: https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
    - marklgr 10y ago
      Noe one denies the virtues or achievements of logic, but as you know, the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything ie. to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. As of today, it's clearly not the case--computers are excellent at computing, but they are pretty dumb. Humans must be around to select, prioritize, assign values, interpret, and put it all together. Otherwise, computers only spit the most mundane truths out of facts plus logic, and that was precisely one of the decisive criticism of positivim.
      - axlprose 10y ago
        > the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture? Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition. And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues... > The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of. The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

* At the very least you need to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.* We were all taught Debate ("Trying to prove your point") instead of being taught to Dialectic ("the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions."). I have many conversations about Religion and Theology and as soon as I detect the other party is dead set on proving their ideas correct instead trying to find the truth, I understand immediately we won't get anywhere.

exclusiv 10y ago
Well said. If I detect that then I usually try to disarm them by saying that we don't need to agree and for most things... that's ok.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Everyone's position on anything is influenced by their background, including your own. In order to understand a point of view, it is useful to know where it comes from. It can help you knock that view down, perhaps, but it can also help you to come to that same view yourself, or recognise its value.

trjordan 10y ago

If you're hearing the biography so you can attack the ideology, you're missing the point. Ideology is nearly pointless to discuss. Instead, the author suggests talking about topics that are more personal. By talking about experiences, you can expose the nuance that's so easily blown away by swapping talking points. Perhaps the author and the woman both agree that people should be less cavalier with pregnancy, and there's a productive way forward. Perhaps they both agree it's a heartbreaking issues and more people need support to deal with it. Even abortion is not so black and white, and arguing about it abstractly is a much less fruitful way to find common ground.

Ntrails 10y ago
> Even abortion is not so black and white, and arguing about it abstractly is a much less fruitful way to find common ground. So my common response to strong ideological positions is to take a hypothetical which exposes something I feel uncomfortable with if I were to accept that ideological framework. The world is pretty much all shades of grey to me (indeed to an extent which occasionally offends), so I find ideological certainty very hard to relate to. It's not that I think they're wrong and I'm right, I'm not attacking their position, I just want to get my head around the fact that when faced with all the ramifications of their position - they're still certain. These conversations are really interesting to me, and I love talking to people who see the world so differently.

pessimizer 10y ago

The article does smell a bit of "If you can just shut up and listen, you may find out that the people you disagree with aren't stupid, they're actually traumatized or mentally ill. Maybe they don't need to be attacked or imprisoned; instead, they could be medicated, or counseled. Maybe when you listen, you're the counselor..." That's the least generous interpretation, though. I think he was doing a personal art project and fishing for an experience that would confirm the truism that the problem in politics is that angry people should just calm down and listen to each other. This is what he got, so this is what he had to use in that narrative.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

FooHentai 10y ago

>This, on the other hand, is a way of reconciling the fact that you obviously don't have a good reason to believe the things you do (otherwise, you wouldn't be threatened by the mere fact that someone disagrees with you) I don't agree that this is the only reason someone would be threatened by disagreement, or even the main reason. You can feel threatened by disagreement on the basis of the other party acting on their belief, and how that outcome would affect you. As a relevant example, you can feel threatened by someone disagreeing with your stance on abortion if you are pro-choice, because the down-stream implication of pro-life beliefs is legislation and societal constraints that remove your ability to choose. If we're just debating in a vacuum then sure, you would only feel threatened as some kind of ego response. But in the real world beliefs tend to result in real-world consequences, and those consequences are the root cause of feeling threatened by disagreement.

vacri 10y ago

> This is just another way of attacking someone else's position, with the added bonus of letting you be intolerably smug while you do it. Ah, yes. The author is so intolerably smug, the way he didn't advance his own message to the woman, and asked her to speak more of her own experience. I know that I, for one, can't handle it when someone ask for more information without expressing any statement of judgement - I mean, the sheer smugness of it is just intolerable. > This, on the other hand, is a way of reconciling the fact that you obviously don't have a good reason to believe the things you do Even though the author clearly and concisely explains why his own opinion is different to the woman's? It's not like it's a complex or hard to read article. There's a considerable amount of projection going on in your comment. I find the commentary about smugness quite ironic, really.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

it depends if one is set out to dominate; in this case the mode of discussion will probably be adversary. maybe understanding the motives of your peer is one of the requirements for domination (you can't dominate someone who you don't understand at all), but understanding does not imply domination. there is another problem: your peer will probably not be ready to share much of his background for fear of your motives; if you know that your words can be used against yourself, then you will not be ready to talk too much.

WWKong 10y ago

Tell me more. Why do you feel this way? What is your story?

hashkb 10y ago
Damn, you wrote the comment I meant to write. I led with a judgment.
- bcoates 10y ago
  Judging from the responses, I'm not the only one that missed the subtlety on the first read. Good Job.

CPLX 10y ago

It's really not quite so complicated. The technique espoused by the OP is a humble one, intended to build empathy, which it seems to me are two traits with considerable intrinsic value.