When I was young, I never backed down in an intellectual argument. Part of the reason, admittedly, was that I was starved for abstract debate. Before the internet, anyone who wanted to talk ideas had to corner an actual human willing to do the same. Another big reason, though, was that I didn’t want to look stupid. A smart person always has a brilliant riposte, right? And if you shut up, it must be because you’re stumped.
At this stage in my life, much has changed. Public debates aside, I now only engage in intellectual arguments with thinkers who play by the rules. What rules? For starters: remain calm, take nothing personally, use probabilities, face hypotheticals head-on, and spurn Social Desirability Bias like the plague. If I hear someone talking about ideas who ignores these rules, I take evasive action. If cornered, I change the subject.
Why? Because I now realize that arguing with unreasonable people is foolish. Young people might learn something at the meta-level – such as “Wow, so many people are so unreasonable.” But I’m long past such doleful lessons. Note: “Being unreasonable” is not a close synonym for “Agrees with me.” Most people who agree with me are still aggressively unreasonable. Instead, being reasonable is about sound intellectual methods – remaining calm, taking nothing personally, using probabilities, facing hypotheticals head-on, spurning Social Desirability Bias, and so on.
In classic Dungeons & Dragons, characters have two mental traits: Intelligence and Wisdom. The meaning matches everyday English: high-Intelligence characters are good at solving complex puzzles; high-Wisdom characters have a generous helping of common-sense.
Using the game to illuminate life: Running out of things to say in an argument is indeed a sign of low Intelligence, just as I held when I was a teenager. A genius’ supply of rebuttals is ever full. At the same time, however, joining a fruitless dispute is a sign of low Wisdom. You have better things to do with your life than tell hyperventilating people all the reasons they’re wrong. A really wise person won’t merely break off such exchanges, but stop them before they start – and get back to work on his Bubble.
Here, in short, is wisdom: Be not a hostage to your own intellectual pride.
P.S. How do you know if a person plays by the rules until you actually engage them? Most obviously, watch how they argue with other people! If that’s inadequate, give promising strangers a brief trial period, but be ready to disengage if things go south.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Aug 6 2020 at 9:11am
AT LAST–here, finally, I can say that I agree with you. In abundance. And I trust you won’t call me unreasonable for saying so.
Or did that violate the rules? 🙂
Philo
Aug 6 2020 at 12:12pm
Your post has the proviso, “Public debates aside”; that is, it applies only to one-on-one conversations. Debate with an unreasonable interlocutor can be worthwhile if there is an audience. And listening to unreasonable people can be worthwhile, giving you an idea of what views you must refute in order to make your own case as convincing as possible to the semi-rational portion of the general public.
Jose Pablo
Aug 6 2020 at 1:35pm
Are “debates” (or even “intelectual arguments” of any kind) useful?
I have never ever seen somebody convincing somebody over anything.
I think it was you, Bryan (in a podcast, if I remember well): a brilliant mind was explaining that he has never been convinced of anything by reading a “paper” on the topic. No matter how brilliant or well argued.
And it is well known that “knowledge” evolve not because the new ideas on any particular field “convince” the old practicioners but because, eventually, all the old practicioners end up dying.
Aaron Stewart
Aug 6 2020 at 2:09pm
We need to discard the idea that “convincing” is an action that one person does to another. I don’t think it ever applies in cases that actually matter.
The only person that ever convinces me of anything is me. No, I’m probably not going to change my mind about something mid-discussion because you made a great argument. If my mind changes, it will be sometime later when I’m standing in the shower, or driving to work. It may be directly because of something you said, but ultimately my mind only changes if I do the work of wrestling with the idea.
Why is it so rare that one person convinces another of something? I think it’s basically a matter of computational complexity. Conversations and debates happen linearly in time. If you have a lot of intellectual horsepower, you can take in an argument and quickly determine whether it clashes with other beliefs or ideas, or whether it matches this or that pattern (e.g. logical fallacies).
But to change your mind is to take in an idea on a complicated subject about which you have already thought a lot, and on which you have significant priors, and determining whether that idea is consistent with your other ideas, determining whether and how your priors need to be adjusted to fit in the new idea. That is a process that should take exponential time — you can’t do it in real-time during a debate/conversation/argument. If you were to try to do that in real-time, 90% of the “conversation” would be silence, and there would be an overwhelming temptation for one party or another to fill that silence, preventing the process from happening.
TL;DR: We should not expect that even honest, good-faith people will actually change their mind during a debate or argument. That shouldn’t be a goal of an argument. If they change their mind, it will be sometime later when he or she has convinced himself or herself. Even so, that doesn’t mean the debate isn’t worthwhile.
nobody.really
Aug 6 2020 at 3:18pm
Max Planck, Scientific autobiography (1950), at 33. This is often paraphrased “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
John Hare
Aug 6 2020 at 4:33pm
I have been convinced to change my position on occasion. The credibility of the opposition is normally more critical than the quality of their debate skills.
RPLong
Aug 7 2020 at 8:35am
Why should the purpose of a debate be to convince someone of something? I often join debates and discussions to test out the robustness of my own ideas or my ability to defend them. Sometimes I join discussions to learn more about what I disagree with. Sometimes I debate issues even with people who argue in bad faith and break the rules because I want spectators to know that there are people in the world who hold my point of view, and that they can remain calm and on-topic even in the face of unreasonableness.
There are so many reasons to debate others that have nothing to do with convincing anyone of anything.
James
Aug 6 2020 at 3:58pm
If you are arguing with someone that yells and screams at you, you are surely better off ending the discussion. But if they are breaking your other rules it may be worth continuing the conversation long enough to point out that in order to defend their position, they had to break rules that you would feel embarrassed to break yourself and so they have inadvertently provided you with yet another reason not to embrace their position.
Capt. J Parker
Aug 7 2020 at 12:07pm
This was a great post.
Dr. Caplan’s rules for worthwhile intellectual debate:
1) Remain calm
2) Take nothing personally
3) Use probabilities
4) Face hypotheticals head-on
5) Avoid social desirability bias like the plague
1 and 2 seems self explanatory. We have a link expounding on 5. Can we hope for more insight regarding 3 and 4?
Brandon Berg
Aug 7 2020 at 1:04pm
I’ve never played D&D, but in a tabletop role-playing game, where a character’s decisions are made by human players, wouldn’t wisdom, in the ordinary English sense of the word, be more a property of the player than a character attribute?
Looking it up now, the D&D wisdom stat sounds more like perception than accrual wisdom, but I don’t know all the subtleties, of course.
Phil H
Aug 8 2020 at 4:28am
While there’s obviously a lot of sense here, it also feels like BC is setting himself a task that is slightly too easy. Sure, one can walk away from unreasonable people. But given that 99(.99)% of the population is unreasonable, this is the very definition of an ivory tower position.
It seems to me that the goal – particularly for an educator! – must be to be able to engage with and ultimately persuade (a) those people who interact reasonably and rationally with us; but also (b) some fraction of those who do not as well. And we want to draw some people in the (b) group over into the (a) group. That process will not necessarily be achieved through cerebral means, but maybe through some affective processes as well.
Procrustes
Aug 8 2020 at 12:10pm
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting a tomato in a fruit salad.
Capt. J Parker
Aug 10 2020 at 3:06pm
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1016885-tomato-fruit-salad
Emma
Aug 9 2020 at 5:43am
This would unwittingly exclude a lot of people who are the most affected by the topic from the debate. The more someone is impacted by something, the harder it is for them to speak dispassionately. However, they may have relevant insight that could have helped others inform their opinions. At best, excluding this group is arbitrary (they could have had good ideas), at worst, it makes the discussion significantly less informed – particularly on issues where the topic involves psychological harm* or details. **
Basically, excluding people who aren’t ‘calm’ harms the content of the discussion, it might be worth listening to content (and then deciding what’s convincing or not convincing) rather than caring so much about the aesthetic of how the content is communicated.
*e.g. Someone who only knows about the topic abstractly may not accurately estimate the psychological harm of something like sexual harassment without talking to someone able to provide that account. Most people able to provide that account are likely to be emotional about it.
** e.g. A doctor who has worked in an inefficient medical system his whole life, and seen people die from it, might be emotional about it. He could also be more skeptical about the ability of certain sweeping policies to work, based on his experience. That would be helpful insight to have in the discussion.
William
Aug 12 2020 at 2:23pm
Dear Bryan, if now you only engage in intellectual arguments with thinkers who play by the rules, does this mean you will never return to Twitter – ever ever?
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