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There's a nice general lesson from double cruxing that you can apply outside of one on one arguements if you care about holding consistent beliefs. Always argu

There's a nice general lesson from double cruxing that you can apply outside of one on one arguements if you care about holding consistent beliefs. Always argue for your weakest crux. I.e. out of all the necessary premises of some position you hold, always keep the hardest to defend premise close to the front of your mind. This is counterintuitive because people reflexively try to bury their weakest assumptions. What's more: we're rewarded for presenting strong arguments. But if there's some fact that, if disproven, would cause you to change your mind and you aren't really confident that that fact is true - you should care the most about finding out if it's false, or at the very least becoming more certain in your belief about it.

alansammarone 8y ago
This is a very good point - as long as your goal is really and only to have the opinion that is closest to the truth, and you're completely open to changing it when new evidence comes. In other words, if you are really discussing because of the right reasons (which should of course always be the case). But in many contexts, this is not the end goal. The end goal is to either make one feel better about its own beliefs, or to exert social pressure/gain social status. You can often kind of tell who is really discussing to find the underlying truth based on this very observation.