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Nobody ever changes their opinion on things with anything remotely like a high degree of frequency, and that's not a particularly bad thing. The "real" point of

• eitally 2y ago
  This advice/wisdom should be included in every parenting guide!
• jarbus 2y ago
  I've been trying to figure out how to talk to folks on the right, and I keep looking for something, anything, I can say to make them realize the danger we are in. Reading this comment was therapeutic, because I think it's completely on the money. We can't change people's minds in a single argument; we can just try and nudge them in the right direction and hope they join us eventually.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    One thing I've found helpful is to coax them to imagine dems in charge. You can't outright mention dems in charge, because they will (mostly correctly) point out that dems _have_ been in charge of our institutions for a long time. You have to understand their position: They don't feel in danger. They feel in power - the opposite of danger. Asking them to perceive danger is asking them to give up their feeling of power - tantamount to admitting everything they voted for is void. But the path I found was to tease out that expansion of powers are permanent, making any changes from expansion of powers temporary. And we don't want temporary positive changes, do we? With all this legislative power, couldn't we just, you know, pass laws? I've also come to accept that we should (for the sake of progress past issues) just: * build the border wall, but suddenly nobody seems interested - what gives? * slash costs to balance the budget, but suddenly nobody seems interested, what gives? etc The problem with true discussion of these issues is that you find yourself mostly in agreement with each other's viewpoint (at least subject to their "axioms"), and have to mellow out a bit. You can't really stand still and say "Come over here" all the time.
    • mattmaroon 2y ago
      Why is the expansion of powers permanent? Do you think they’ve never been reversed in history? That there weren’t times when {insert government branch here} didn’t have more than it does now?
    • xanthippus_c 2y ago
      Yeah, like they often don't have issues with their local cops, but you ask them about ATF or BLM and all of a sudden these outside it's these ridiculous outsider authoritarians, who don't know anything about what it's like where they live, trying to ruin things.
    • KerrAvon 2y ago
      “Mostly correctly” is 100% false. Count the number of years under GOP presidents since 1980 vs the number under Democrats. SCOTUS has been dominated by Republican judges — and the chief justice has been a Republican — since the 1970’s.
      • jvanderbot 2y ago
        You'd be hard pressed to find a conservative college dean, non-profit CEO, or even a librarian. There's a belief (which I think is mostly true), that most government agencies are left-leaning in practice if not in appointed leadership. Add to that the growing (perceived!) left-leaning policies in the military and major industrial players, and you might see what they mean.
        • spencerflem 2y ago
          I'd be hard pressed to find a lefty college board of directors, or CEO. I'd believe govt agency staffers, since conservatives by and large want to destroy those agencies and not work there. The military is a weird place and contains multitudes
          • jvanderbot 2y ago
            Well, I guess I'd roll it back to say there have been high profile, widly circulated perceived-to-be-far-left policies pushed or adopted by traditionally not-that-liberal organizations. Like "DEI" in military. It's all over conservative zeitgeist and looks like a massive power creep to them.
  • otherme123 2y ago
    Is this ironic? Because if this is serious, note that maybe you are the stubborn person here, the one that is wrong, the one that must be nudged to the right direction and join them eventually.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • Dumblydorr 2y ago
      It’s possible parent comment is referring to factually proven issues, such as climate change, that the right has its own set of propagandistic facts for. I’d say the any group of people has areas of less factitious basis for their beliefs. But, We all should want to employ truthful factual real, non-propagandistic ideas, eh? Is this controversial? If we don’t have ground truth, real facts, what can we base anything off of? Our policies will fail, our dollars will be wasted, and division will grow.
      • waterhouse 2y ago
        One danger with "factually proven issues" is cherry-picking facts or otherwise taking them from context. For example, there might be stats on which a president sucked for most of his term, but in the last few months those stats were decent (or vice versa); and then supporters of the president might shout those last few months' stats from the rooftops, and then do polls that show that supporters know but opponents don't know about those last few months' stats, and gleefully report, "Gosh, well, we're trying to reason with our opponents, but unfortunately they're just so ignorant, what can we do..." Another danger is people playing with definitions. A third is people claiming things to be "facts" based on cherry-picked studies (and possibly some dubious interpretations thereof). Progress can be made, but I think it requires a sophisticated approach. Paying attention to all the above dimensions, and probably to the motives of the people involved.
        • spencerflem 2y ago
          [flagged]
  • mattmaroon 2y ago
    Is it possible the danger you think we’re in isn’t real? And are you open to that? I’m not really what you’d call “on the right” but my left-leaning friends seem convinced democracy is teetering and to me that seems to be mostly just propaganda.
    • crooked-v 2y ago
      A legal resident of the US has already been illegally shipped to a foreign prison, with the Trump administration claiming it's impossible to get him back. Will it count as "danger" for you once the first US citizen gets the same treatment?
      • alabastervlog 2y ago
        Illegally firing the IGs added after Nixon's shenanigans to make sure the executive isn't just wildly doing crime constantly under a veil of secrecy, right at the start of his term, was... you know, also a bad sign.
      • mattmaroon 2y ago
        Various levels of our government under the last president prosecuted a former president for “crimes” they would not have prosecuted him for if he had not been a politician. While I despise Trump, that was lawfare, and far worse than deporting a non-citizen (though that is troubling). So where’s the danger again? Were you worried then? It’s all framing. You’re being primed by biased media to see everything Trump does as a hostile takeover and while I don’t agree with many of those things, if you keep an open mind and try to talk to intelligent Trump fans (which does require a fair amount of filtering, but they do exist) you can see the alternate frame. And that’s sort of what this original article is about, right? That was my point, the comment to which I was responding was a “toddler” getting frustrated by other people being toddlers. It’s toddlers all the way down. The first thing you should do, when you encounter a toddler, is to be really careful to ask whether you too are one. We all are most of the time and with loads of self-examination, we can occasionally overcome it.
    • tclancy 2y ago
      This feels like begging the question. But, in the interests of the topic, how should I see things when one branch of government is not only openly, but gleefully ignoring the will of a coequal branch while the third branch looks on in impotent compliance?
  • whiddershins 2y ago
    "i can't understand my son, he doesn't listen to a thing I say!" -- Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
  • whatnow37373 2y ago
    You are framing it as danger which preloads the discussion immensely. I find this is common in these situations. This already ends the talk before beginning it. Imagine starting negotiations with Putin with “How come you are such a waste of valuable oxygen?” I am not “on the right”, but I do have the ability to entertain the idea my “opponent” is actually right and I am wrong. This can be a valuable exercise to get you in a more .. sympathetic frame of mind. Let’s try to loosen you up. Let’s say we are actually not in danger and you and all the rest of you - excuse me, it’s for the exercise - “pearl clutchers” are actually ridiculously overreacting and misreading the situation. The world is dangerous right now and singing kumbaya is not going to cut it. Trump is weird and we all dislike him, but nothing you can offer will improve the situation. Try to see that viewpoint. Try to feel it. Try to imagine a world where you are wrong and your “opponent” is actually right and you were “suppressing” them all that time and in your righteous might caused tremendous harm which resulted in this correction. Next time enter the discussion with “These times are complex and there sure is a lot going on. Let’s talk because I’m confused!” instead of “I am right and why do you take so long to see that I am clearly knowledgable and you should definitely heed all my warnings (which with 98% probability come down to ‘you are basically stupid’)”
    • jarbus 2y ago
      I've largely held this viewpoint for quite some time, but everyone has a line that shouldn't be crossed. Trying to literally overthrow our democracy was a line for a lot of the Trump supporters I've met who have since turned away. It personally wasn't even the line for me. This second administration has very much crossed my line, in so many ways. We are past the point of "maybe I'm just confused?" The people I've met who still support this guy are dangerously, dangerously stupid and hypocritical. They'd have strongly opposed all of the stuff Trump has done if they didn't know Trump was the one who did it. It's terrifying watching people completely abandon the principles they used to stand for. We are dealing with a different phenomenon than just political disagreement; we are dealing with the type of delusion that gets millions of people killed, and we need to acknowledge it as such now.
      • hackyhacky 2y ago
  • pmarreck 2y ago
    I have slipped to the right enough to be almost like a "translator" between leftwing and rightwing viewpoints. Put it this way, I can laugh at parodies of both of them... I see some error patterns that both sides seem to uniquely make, for example. Just 1 for each side for the sake of brevity here: Rightwingers idolize success without acknowledging the systematic boosts (or pure luck) that have often assisted it, while leftwingers are not only disgusted by success but consider it heretical. Leftwingers constantly compare a situation to some unattainable ideal and are therefore constantly complaining about the current state of affairs without offering a realistic solution; rightwingers fail to acknowledge the very real injustices that a more purely authoritarian approach to things often causes (see: three-strikes laws). Speaking as one who tests politically center, I believe that the danger is neither nonexistent nor is as high as you may believe. Note that there is some merit to the rightwing claim of "MSM bias"; harping on the same cherry-picked injustice stories for outrage clicks over and over again seems to be the last remaining successful news business model (and this should worry EVERYONE).
    • ang_cire 2y ago
      > while leftwingers are not only disgusted by success but consider it heretical The entire left wing rhetoric against billionaires is that they are not in fact successful on the merits of work that everyone else is doing, they are successful in cheating the system and exploiting others. We love success that happens within the same rules that we average people all operate in. This is like saying that CoD players who are against aimbotters are "disgusted by success" when they point out that no one will legitimately have a 100/4/0 KDA (a more appropriate ratio for billionaire vs average person would be 1000000/4/0, but that would almost be too outlandish, which is why there are so many infographics showing just how conceptually confounding a billion dollars really is).
      • pmarreck 2y ago
        > The entire left wing rhetoric against billionaires is that they are not in fact successful on the merits of work that everyone else is doing, they are successful in cheating the system and exploiting others Yes. And that is false. If you don't believe me, bring that to ChatGPT and ask it to argue both sides of this claim, because I do not have time to retread this. For one thing, everyone has to abide by the rules- and if the rules are unfair, then it is the rules that deserve this scorn, not the people who played the game by them. > We love success that happens within the same rules that we average people all operate in. This is also false. I have not seen a single successful individual praised on this basis. I'd love to know of one. Musk graduated with college debt- something that I did not- and yet has attained massively more success than I, for example. Luigi, the guy who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was raised in a far wealthier family than that CEO was! Wait, how am I already getting downvoted? At least counterargue?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • alabastervlog 2y ago
    I'm a long-time politics nerd and spend more time than most people digging into the right's "evidence" for various things they believe. So much of it's simply made-up that any attempt to engage one of them is incredibly tedious, and it's the exact same bullshit every time you start talking to a new one. You'd need weeks, at least, of consistent and very-careful engagement to fix the fact-gap so you can even begin discussing actual issues. For each one of them. It's like trying to talk politics with someone and they keep bringing up how the real problem is the lawless Rebel Alliance and we need to trust Emperor Palpatine to set things right, and after a while you figure out they aren't joking or just trying to get under your skin and sincerely believe we live in Star Wars, so now you can't even talk about actual issues in the real world until you manage to convince them that they do not live in Star Wars. You try to talk about crime & policing or whatever and they start talking about how we need to clear all the criminals out of the pirate moon Nar Shaddaa, and... what the fuck do you even do with that? It's disheartening. [EDIT] Real world example: Local republican politician comes to my door while campaigning and is talking about how local crime (in our amazingly safe, rather rich small town) is WAY UP and out of control and that's why we need more money for the police. I have my strong suspicions based on practically every other time this claim has been made by a Republican, and also the fact that our town is conspicuously safe and rich, but I don't fact-check her on the spot and just let her finish the spiel and politely disengage, but that was like half of her message (the rest was, I shit you not, about trans athletes, JFC). Of course the police department's own stats fail to back up any of what she was saying, when I check right after the conversation. I mean, obviously they do, there was no reason to expect otherwise, but I did check, because that's how I roll. Without even digging into the other half of what she was presenting, half of her message right off the bat, half of what she chose to present as important, was over a completely made-up issue. Not real at all.
    • iinnPP 2y ago
      They probably have data that these talking points have the best positive reaction rate for the area on average. The fact that it didn't matter to you isn't important to them, it's the aggregate as that is the end goal. They may even disagree with it entirely and agree with your stance.
  • gowld 2y ago
    "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into."
  • iinnPP 2y ago
    Given the downdittles: I mention two leaders at the end and am not referring to Trump for either. As someone who loves to converse with either side, it's more often one side than the other that will listen to reason, and argue outside of logical fallacies. I get vastly more violent threats/lame insults from one side. I get an overwhelming amount of definition problems from one side. Which are easily solved using any dictionary (though this is becoming less true) I get things like "True X, Y, Z or Proper X, Y, Z" overwhelmingly from one side. And I get vastly more conspiracy theories not grounded in any reality from one side. I know of many people from both sides that hold disgusting views such as: I want to do X,Y,Z but am mad if anyone else does this exact thing to me. Every one of these people do so on protected grounds (in Government) of one form or another. Recently, I have noted people who scream at a leader and bootlick another while claiming each are of the other's style of governance. It's quite remarkable.
  • arminiusreturns 2y ago
    As someone who has completely straddled both worlds (Arizona/Texas redneck raised, worked in woke VC/SV companies, with a social circle across the board): I view it as planting seeds, and harvesting them later. Before that can be done though, a person generally has to understand how entrenched a person is in being a stenographer. I have found on both "sides", there are a certain amount of people that literally do no thinking for themselves at all, and only regurgitate. I've tried for years to work different angles on them, and those seeds mostly still lay dormant and un-sprouted... “The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies... is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.” - Carroll Quigley
  • dclowd9901 2y ago
    I've found that putting arguments into simple, general terms tends to make people rethink their positions. I had an argument with my dad a while back about single payer health care. A lot of people on the left might frame it like "don't you think everyone is entitled to access to health services?" But an idea like this is like nails on a chalkboard to my dad, who believes everything should be merit based, even access to health care. Instead, phrasing it as "wouldn't you prefer it if we paid the same amount of money every month and when we go to the hospital we don't have to worry about any out of pocket costs?" This really nailed the point home to him. It's not about entitlements or whatever. It's about people not being destroyed financially by bad health. We skip over the feely stuff, we skip over the specifics of cost. We can both agree that this mechanism makes a lot of sense for most people, and the current system is rather arbitrary. Anyway, he's still firmly a MAGA trumper but I do think on the aspect of health care, he does see single payer as a viable alternative.
    • x-complexity 2y ago
      > Instead, phrasing it as "wouldn't you prefer it if **we** paid the same amount of money every month and when we go to the hospital we don't have to worry about any out of pocket costs?" This really nailed the point home to him. I can already hear the nails on this one, because the goal has now been camouflaged. Nowhere in that statement is there an allowance for people to not pay into the system: Everyone is forced to pitch in, even if they don't want to. An exit door must be available, no exceptions.
• deleted 2y ago
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• pmarreck 2y ago
  I don't completely agree. (I know... How meta.) I have worked to be as rational as I will personally tolerate, and it has been difficult, but I've achieved some success. The key is to divorce your identity from your beliefs about the world, and to realize that the opposite of never admitting you're wrong is "always being right", which is of course impossible, so if you are TRULY interested in becoming MORE right, then the only reasonable option is that you must sometimes lose arguments (and admit it to both of you). Are most people interested in doing this? No, and in that sense you have a point. But it's available to everyone, and who wouldn't want to be more right? The other difficult thing to do is to aim this at yourself with full candor and work through that. Interestingly, now that ChatGPT has access to all the conversations you've had with it, and assuming you've opened up to it a bit, you can ask it: "You know me pretty well. Please point out my personal hypocrisies." If you want to make it more fun, you can add "... as Dennis Leary/Bill Burr" etc. What it said when I tried this was fascinating and insightful. But also difficult to read...
  • nluken 2y ago
    > divorce your identity from your beliefs about the world I understand not totally subjugating your personal identity to ideology, but I'm struggling to see how someone could practically completely separate these two things. To use a somewhat trite but personal example, I'm gay, so that aspect of my identity will necessarily affect my perspective on certain issues. Conversely if someone were to convince me rationally that homosexuality was wrong, it would necessitate a pretty dramatic change of my identity no? Not every issue exists on that clear a spectrum, but you can imagine the views necessitated by different pieces of personal identity adding up over a lifetime.
    • pmarreck 2y ago
      Fortunately for you, there is no good argument that homosexuality is wrong. But honestly, it does take a certain nontrivial amount of understanding to realize that- an understanding of things like: the list of the most common informal logical fallacies (or... all of them, because why not, and once you learn them, you see them everywhere). And those aren't someething that is typically taught in school (I had to pursue them on my own time). (A while back I found a personal webpage that systematically shot down every single homophobic argument using reason and those fallacies... and I haven't been able to find it since, unfortunately.) So, among many other injustices that might be rectified (or at least ameliorated) by a broader understanding of fallacious arguments, homophobia would definitely be one of them. (Also, personal note, I'm sorry about any injustice you've had to endure because of your orientation and others' lack of understanding.)
• timcobb 2y ago
  > Nobody ever
• apwell23 2y ago
  > The "real" point of an argument is not to persuade the other side (though that is what you aspire to nonetheless) but to exchange views to me real point is just entertainment
• geye1234 2y ago
  It takes time to have a serious debate. You both need to figure out what your unstated premises are. If you disagree on these, you won't get anywhere by arguing downstream of them. Politics is even worse, because you are supposed to have an opinion, but at the same time, most matters require a detailed understanding of the facts that few people have the time, brains or inclination to understand. Add the tribalism and this gets even worse. It's incredibly rare to find someone whose general political opinions are well thought-through. Mine certainly aren't. I could regurgitate the argument for the free market or for heavy gov control of the economy, for example, and even understand them as internally-consistent syllogisms, but really all I'm doing is linking concepts together in my mind; I doubt any of them apply to any really-existing concrete situation that any given country is in. Hence I try not to comment on political threads.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  I've almost never changed my mind in an online argument but I do regularly offline. Why is that? I think it's because online nobody acts in good faith. There is no connection and trust.
  • layer8 2y ago
    Are you saying your comment here is in bad faith? ;)
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
      I'd say yours is in bad faith because you know exactly what I mean ;)
      • layer8 2y ago
        It’s actually not clear to me what you really mean, and I would dispute your generalization that nobody acts in good faith online.
  • marcusb 2y ago
    I had a customer once who would just absolutely berate people over email for the tiniest thing. Totally unbearable and unreasonable. So, whenever he would go off, I'd tell him 'look, I'll be in the area [this afternoon|later|whenever]. You going to be around if I stop by?' Any conversation with him that could be deflected to an in-person discussion could be peacefully resolved in short order. Trying to convince him of anything over phone or email was an exercise in frustration control. I heard somebody say at a conference one time, talking about how much more productive in-person meetings are in reaching agreement, "there's a lot of bandwidth in a room". I think there's a lot of truth to that. 0 - ironically, this was at a ISP network engineering conference
  • pitaj 2y ago
    I think you can have two people who, both acting in good faith, can completely lose it over textual communication. Even a phone call can make the same discussion ten times easier.
• harrall 2y ago
  I notice people tend to argue about X when it's actually a proxy argument for Y, but they don't know themselves that it's Y. Y is a legitimate concern or fear, but X may not be. But everyone wastes each other's time arguing about X. If you figure out Y, you find common ground and compromise and that's when you find solutions.
  • dpig_ 2y ago
    In my experience the Y is often the even more profound disagreement between two people, and explicit discussion of Y could be enough to obliterate a relationship completely.
• anon84873628 2y ago
  >Nobody ever changes their opinion on things with anything remotely like a high degree of frequency, and that's not a particularly bad thing For a great discussion of that, cue Slate Star Codex "Epistemic Learned Helplessness" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
• mppm 2y ago
  > The "real" point of an argument is not to persuade the other side (though that is what you aspire to nonetheless) but to exchange views. Maybe this is just a matter of definitions, but for me the point of an argument is to convince or be convinced. When two incompatible views exist on a subject, at least one of them must be wrong. Some topics of conversation allow for diverging views or values, but then we are just talking or sharing experiences, not arguing. That said, it is my experience as well that actually changing someone's (or my own) mind on an important issue is unlikely. Especially on complex topics with partial and uncertain information, like political issues, our life experience and cumulative knowledge significantly influences our selection of sources and interpretation of the facts, so converging on a common point of view may require the exchange of a prohibitive amount of information, even among rational arguers. Productive argument usually occurs in a sort of semi-echo chamber, with people who mostly agree with us on the context, and are only arguing about the top layer, so to say. But when trying to argue about the deep stuff, we are mostly just "exchanging views", in the end.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • Bjartr 2y ago
    > When two incompatible views exist on a subject, at least one of them must be wrong This isn't strictly correct if the source of incompatibility is differing assumptions / axioms. Both views can be correct in their own context and incorrect in the other context.
  • Vegenoid 2y ago
    > When two incompatible views exist on a subject, at least one of them must be wrong. Rarely can any significant argument be boiled down to something so simple that this is the case. What if there are two incompatible views on the course of action that should be taken to lead to some desired outcome? You really can't just say that one of them must be wrong. There is a whole web of tradeoffs, assumptions, and odds to consider - you can't simply determine "right" and "wrong".
  • Cheezemansam 2y ago
• hattmall 2y ago
  I feel like I change my opinion more than my outfit, but after reading that I'm not so sure. Maybe I stick to my guns more than I realized.