But I rarely engage in a proper argument, a contest between two articulated positions. What I find dumbfounding is that things often break down with simply trying to encourage a person or group to put forth their own systems. I think it is rather positive and respectful to give a person an audience to detail how they live and interact. “What are your protocols?, How to you measure wealth?, What are your ethics like?” Not unlike a data “handshake” on a network to know what kinds of signals we are dealing with. I am not sure if saying to a person “But of course you must have some systems, how else would you live as a social organism?” might feel confrontational enough to be construed as argumentation, but it feels more like chronic incredulity on my end.
It’s not so much a matter of making descriptive models of how a person works only for understanding, but as a basis for how we make prescriptive models together as a basis for social organization.
