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My 2¢: Don't tell someone they're wrong. You'll never convince them, even when you're right. It's not worth the ink (or the blood pressure). Instead, guide th

• eeeoio 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Is upper perspective based on real life or internet disagreements?
  • grugagag 4y ago
    It raises questions about emotional maturity and development when one derives pleasure from someone else's anger. Just saying..
    • NateEag 4y ago
      I believe OP was engaging in sarcasm.
  • lazyasciiart 4y ago
    What happens when you move out of forensics and start arguing about real life decisions that you’d like to influence? You just give up?
  • nkrisc 4y ago
    Sounds like you already lost long ago. I hope things get better for you.
• WanderPanda 4y ago
  Let‘s go and start gaslighting everyone
  • dang 4y ago
    "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • epgui 4y ago
      Even though WanderPanda's comment could have been written with more care (and thank you for your work in pointing this out), FWIW I think it's possible to charitably interpret it in interesting ways.
    • WanderPanda 4y ago
      Sorry if it came across too blunt, I actually mostly agree with parents point but just wanted to highlight the thin/ill-defined line betwee his approach and what I think people mean by gaslighting. This is interesting in my opinion because they seem to be so similar conceptually but are actually connotated in a very positive and negative way respectively.
      • dang 4y ago
        I think I misinterpreted you! but that's one of the problems with low-information/provocative posts. Your follow-up post here is of course totally fine.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Responding to "the gas light's dimmer" by suggesting they get a lux meter is rather the opposite, I'd say.
• lucaspfeifer 4y ago
  Calling someone wrong, in the extreme sense, could be taken as an insult. Whereas when calling an idea wrong, the scope of negativity is limited to that idea. Even better is to focus only on the right, and minimize the time spent on the wrong.
  • newZWhoDis 4y ago
    Sure, but uh… sometimes some people deserve it. I’m uncomfortable with this notion that we should always tiptoe around people no matter what
    • lucaspfeifer 4y ago
      Not tiptoe around people. Address their misconceptions efficiently without insulting them.
• teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  Not sure how to measure my success here, but having realized this myself I try to be the kind of person I want others to be and actually accept painful information into my head. That doesn’t mean I always agree with the latest opinion I hear, but I don’t close down just because what I’ve heard hurts my ego. It helps that I have friends that are willing to cautiously challenge my beliefs The change I’ve made is from wanting others to be wrong to wanting myself to be right.
• SilasX 4y ago
  The way I put it is, “Don’t tell me I’m wrong. Instead, improve my understanding to the point that you don’t have to.” (If your correction doesn’t translate into an improved general understanding, then you should reconsider whether it’s actually correct.)
• mjklin 4y ago
  Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind — - Emily Dickinson
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Quite a few of her poems are real bangers. Thanks for posting this one.
• Uehreka 4y ago
  Ehhh… Sure you won’t convince the person you’re talking too, but it’s often worth it because if you really destroy their argument in a way that’s visible to bystanders, you could quietly convince a lot of them (since they can change their minds quietly without any ego cost).
  • NateEag 4y ago
    I think when you "really destroy their argument," the average human bystander thinks "... what a jerk." If you quietly make a few good points, don't push too hard, and ask sincere questions to help you understand the other person's perspectives, the average human will think "that guy is a class act. He had a good point, too." Convincing anyone other than a hyper-rationalist of almost anything significant is more about emotions than it is about cold, hard facts. And most humans, for better or for worse, are emphatically not hyper-rationalists.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      It depends if your relationship with that other person exists in a vacuum or not. If that other person is being manipulated by cult like behavior from some other party it can be very difficult to convince them of anything. The other party has no problem with lying then doubling down on the lies forever.
  • majormajor 4y ago
    "Destroy their argument" as a tactic is likely to get you in trouble eventually because few people are always right about being right. The first time one of those bystanders sees you come in hot when you're wrong - or even just when they think you're wrong, since many arguments are fuzzier - you lose a lot of credibility you may never get back.
    • Uehreka 4y ago
      Depends on the context. On HN, sometimes I’m dead wrong, sometimes I’m spot on. I’d bet that there are people who downvoted me when I was wrong, upvoted me when I was right, and didn’t realize I was the same person. Heck, I’ve probably done that to other people on here too.
• BeetleB 4y ago
  > Instead, guide them towards the path to figuring out for themselves that they're wrong. Build a foundation of truths and facts they can evaluate their own beliefs against. But before you do that, examine the context. Would they care to even find out the truth? In over half the cases, I submit to you that they do not. Assuming that they value the truth as you do makes much of this submission relevant. Very often, they want to have a conversation, and there are needs behind it - and usually "discover the truth" is not one of them.[1] Trying to guide them towards the path of truth is, simply put, derailing them. That's not the path they seek. [1] I mean I'm sure it is for me and you, but we are in the minority.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    > That's not the path they seek. Nope. But sometimes a good shove down that path is the right thing to do. I've seen a lot fewer posts in an extended family chat about drag shows after posting my own comment about how we were all entertained by Klinger, Mrs. Doubtfire, Bugs Bunny, Monty Python, et.al. Have they changed their views? Not that anybody has said, but the quiet is nice.
    • atoav 4y ago
      This is the right thing to do. Their media diet might not present them with a lot of pieces that don't fit their pre-existing world view. So giving up in resignation would rob them of yet another window into a more complex world.
  • atoav 4y ago
    > Trying to guide them towards the path of truth is, simply put, derailing them. That's not the path they seek. If they actively want to lie to themselves you are not gonna easily stop them. But sometimes you still gotta put up the signposts for them to discover. Because guess who is more likely to walk down the wrong path: A) someone who is never presented with facts that don't fit into their world image B) someone who sees these facts constantly and from all different kinds of directions Influencing someone's world view is a incredibly slow process. So even observing the difference one made is hard. And sometimes you don't do it for them, but yourself, because you have to live with not having done enough if they end up drifting into a cult.
• roenxi 4y ago
  The situation is much more complicated than can be dealt with by a single strategy. Human group discourse is a bit of a hydra where most individual people employ a single strategy but any strategy has its time and place and the group elevates speakers based on the moment. Eg, in an executive setting (military, business) there often isn't time or need to convince everyone. If you have a person who is consistently right, they should be in charge and they probably have a habit of telling other people they are wrong. In an academic setting it gets more extreme, incorrect arguments have to be just flat out demolished. There can't be tolerance for untruths in an academic setting or the academic culture collapses. And yet both cultures will also have extreme diplomats who just refuse to argue and sometimes get given the spotlight when it seems appropriate. Broadly speaking "Don't tell someone they're wrong." is an effective high-status technique. But it also degenerates badly towards groupthink and tolerance of damaging idiocy if that is the only tactic acceptable to a group of people. There needs to be diversity.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Fair enough. I can certainly agree with the idea of tailoring your speech to your audience.
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Instead, guide them towards the path to figuring out for themselves that they're wrong. Build a foundation of truths and facts they can evaluate their own beliefs against. If they change their mind, great. If they don't learn, you're no worse off than you were before (and your blood pressure will remain lower). I had a manager who would quietly disagree with things we said, then try to gently steer us toward the answer he wanted by asking a lot of leading questions. "Socratic method", he called it. He thought he was doing us a great favor by helping us discover the correct answer through his questioning. There was a problem: He was sometimes wrong. In certain domains, he was frequently wrong. He often misunderstood a situation and would launch into multiple days or weeks of leading questions designed to gently guide us to the "correct" answer, often leaving us with "something to think about" that we were supposed to ponder overnight. Some times we'd spend days trying to guide him back to seeing where he was wrong, or why he was asking the wrong questions. Once he convinced himself he was right and we were wrong, it was hell to stop his socratic method questioning and get him to look at the facts again. It was awful. I spent so much of that job trying to guess what he was thinking. We always had to reverse engineer what he wanted us to say with his questions, because he wouldn't just tell us like adults talking to each other. If I learned anything from that job, it's that I can't stand working with people who won't communicate directly. We lost so much time because he thought he was being clever by not telling us when he disagreed with us.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Of course poor communication skills will cause problems. It's well worth asking for clarifications in such situations; I have few problems playing the dumb oaf and admitting my lack of understanding if it gets someone to ELI5 their point. And generally, someone who brags about using the Socratic method out loud will gladly display their brilliance you've blundered past. In the end, I'm not advocating for confusing the person you're communicating with, I'm advocating for not butting your head against their beliefs; against their ego. Perhaps this advice is better suited to online debates, but I've also seen it too often in real life to waste my time trying to change someone's beliefs.
    • lazide 4y ago
• themitigating 4y ago
  "Instead, guide them towards the path to figuring out for themselves that they're wrong." Time?
• renewiltord 4y ago
  Imho that's true in a corporate setting where the primary problem you're solving is organizational dynamics. But when the problem is the actual problem, it's better to just go right for it. People will learn since you will also be wrong often when you try to state your model of the world. Some implied fact will have turned out to have not actually been implied. So in a startup where org dynamics are not dominant since the org is small - just go right for the facts that you can both agree on and then find the disagreement fast. OP article is a bit long winded, though. LLM assisted perhaps?
• deleted 4y ago
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