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My typical method of helping with this is to find common ground. Find something you both agree on, even if it’s only tangentially related, and then pose an argu
by borski 4y ago
My typical method of helping with this is to find common ground. Find something you both agree on, even if it’s only tangentially related, and then pose an argument and phrase it as such.
For example, when discussing if the Earth is flat or round, you might both find agreement in that nobody has ever fallen off the edge of the Earth. Then you might try to pose an argument as to why - which is more likely, that nobody has ever traveled far enough to fall off, or that the earth is actually a continuous plane?
I find assigning probabilities to topics often helps.
But sometimes you can’t, and that’s when you agree to disagree and politely exit the discourse.
- goostavos 4y ago>you might both find agreement in that nobody has ever fallen off the edge of the Earth. You've revealed yourself as not having actually found common ground with flat earthers. Evvvvverybody knows that it's not about travel distance. You can't fall off the edge of the earth because of the ice walls. It's not like it just ends. That'd be silly. The oceans would drain out into flat space.
- borski 4y agolol I knew that analogy was going to lead nowhere good. But the point still stands :)
- nullsense 4y agoAs do the ice walls
- itronitron 4y agoI expected since we're on HN that someone would explain it away as survivorship bias.
- noibl 4y agoThe first part of this sounds very closely related to something called Rogerian argument [1] which aims to find new opportunities for consensus by building on views already held in common. The bit about assigning probabilities is interesting, precisely because I can think of very few contexts in which it would be of use to me. People seem to have little tolerance for shades of uncertainty when expressing views, whereas privately we think in probabilities all the time. It's as though we play a kind of poker where our need to conserve our 'stack' of reputational authority makes us relegate the actual ideas in contention to mere 'hands' to be represented, bluffed, and trivially discarded when a more amenable certainty presents itself. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument#Rapoport's_rules https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument#Rapoport's...
- ifyoubuildit 4y ago> For example, when discussing if the Earth is flat or round, you might both find agreement in that nobody has ever fallen off the edge of the Earth. So I'm not trying to argue that the earth is flat, but how do you respond if they ask for proof that nobody has fallen off the edge of the earth? It's not like you can point to some record of all history and show that the event doesn't exist within it. You might try to explain that there is no edge to fall off of, but if you can convince them of that, then the conversation never needed to happen in the first place.
- AngriestLettuce 4y ago> how do you respond if they ask for proof that nobody has fallen off the edge of the earth? The same way you should respond to all questions. Truthfully. You have no proof, and you don't care to waste your time looking for it. If that is a showstopper for the conversation, it was never worth having in the first place. Simple as that.
- ifyoubuildit 4y agoI think that's practically what will happen a lot of the time, but it's not very satisfying. It seems to amount to "this person won't be convinced by my unconvincing argument, so the conversation wasnt worth having". (Unconvincing in that you're basically asking them to take it on faith rather than demonstrating it rigorously).