How do you convince the willfully blind?

wrath
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You’ve got to get them talking. Don’t explain to them, ask them to explain to you. If someone demands evidence of climate change, you ask them to explain the evidence in favour of climate change. When they can’t or won’t, you then get to explain to them that a person who demands evidence but doesn’t seek it out is being willfully ignorant. How do you know the evidence is wrong, if you don’t know the evidence? Etc.

Stepping back from the argument at hand to criticise the person’s way of thinking is useful, but do try not to drift into ad hominem. “Ill informed” is good, “stupid” is not helpful. Be prepared for people to try to put those words into your mouth too, as in “you think I’m some kind of idiot!” Stay focused. No, I don’t think you’re stupid at all, but you’ve admitted yourself that you’re not well informed on this particular subject. It will help a lot if you do actually have some respect for the person you’re arguing with.

Speaking of respect, active listening is a great way to really engage someone beyond just shouting your arguments at each other. Ask questions, and repeat their answers in your own words to show that you’ve understood. Sometimes you don’t need a structured argument in five parts with introduction and conclusion. Sometimes you just need to get their side of the story, show that you understand it and that you are sympathetic to their point of view, and then you just say “nah. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong.” Hopefully they’ve given you enough information that you can explain in simple terms the problem with their argument, and the fact that you really, honestly heard them out and you still don’t buy it is much more disquieting than to tell them that they’re wrong from the outset. Maybe you’ve heard it all before, but maybe not, and if you’re really going to set about convincing someone that what they think is wrong then maybe you owe them the courtesy of finding out exactly what it is that they think.

If someone is truly wrong, there’s always an inconsistency to be found by asking questions. If someone believes the Bible over their own eyes, ask how they trust their eyes to read the Bible. If you can’t find the inconsistency, you may need to reassess your own point of view. Always be willing to accept that you could be the one who is wrong, however unlikely it may seem to you.

Remember that people are prideful, and our culture places a penalty on admitting fault. Don’t expect a stubborn person to say “gosh, you’re right,” but if you can show the fundamental dissonance in their thinking and suggest a better alternative, they may quietly come around. In my experience it takes about a fortnight for someone to forget the argument and decide that they’ve had the revelation all by themselves. You don’t get to say I told you so, but that’s not what you’re in it for, right?

No you didn’t.

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You know, the word “think” as used in this sentence is synonymous with “believe”. And I’m not interested if you have invented some distinction, the important definition of any word is that of the listener, not the speaker.

Sometimes I find you really interesting; other times you just seem obtuse.

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Well, that won’t work.

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If you intend to substitute words I use with the ones you would rather refute, that’s fine with me. But it would be more honest if you don’t quote them in my name.

The distinction I mentioned is that between a methodology (here as “works”) and any value judgements. Why I make this distinction is that people can use various methodologies without needing any underlying belief. Sure, there is some recursion here when I qualify it as working better, because better certainly conveys a value judgement, that one method might be generally more applicable than another.

This sounds like a model of one-way communication then, since ideally I might suppose that we are each both speaking and listening, and take the small effort to mutually clarify our terminologies from the outset. One party denying the others participation in the semantic process sounds to me like solipsism.

In any case, it seems reasonable to me that one cannot do somebody else’s science for them.

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Don’t give me that…

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Don’t try to convince them and persuading @popobawa4u to debate with them seems to be the only winning move.

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I wonder how much crossover there is between deniers and people who don’t believe in the burden of proof and insist that you have to find the evidence to back up their argument?

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There’s all sorts of people who are willfully blind for all sorts of reasons, I only know of three tactics that have been useful to me in the past.

Some people don’t have opinions as much as they hold beliefs that protect them from needing to have an opinion, the only thing you can do is, not debate them directly, but to get them involved in different social circles, make them spend time with people who don’t share their views, after a while, they.ll start to take on some of those views too.

Other people don’t change their mind until they have personal experience with the subject, in a sense, these people are honest, they’ll believe their own eyes but will avert them unless they have a choice. Just wait. Patiently.

And others, they only hold a belief until its uncomfortable to do so, when you ge the chance to talk to these people, you hold true to your beliefs and beat them over with talking points just as they will try to do the same, it’s a staring contest, a battle of wills to see who caves in first. its usually you since you actually believe what you say, because you care.
These people don’t care, which is why they don’t know the truth. changing is uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than being proved wrong again and again.
If you hold out longer than they do, if you dispassionately assert your beliefs, (never mind the evidence, they don’t care about evidence, you’re wasting your time), if you can manage to out talk them, you’ll score a point. Score enough points you may win them over to your cause.

The problem with debates like the one in the video is that they’re mainly entertainment, and they manage to entertain everybody on both sides, debates are meaningless when the thing in question is a fact. Just beat them at their game, talk the longest, talk the loudest, don’t back down when confronted with stupefying feats of mental gymnastics that serve as a crutch because of a lack of opinion.

/rant

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I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, sorry. Are you positing some kind of ur-blockhead who wouldn’t respond to my suggestions, or are you saying that it’s unfair of me to expect my (for want of a better word) adversary to do my arguing for me? Because that’s not really what I was getting at. I’m saying that if somebody says “there’s no proof for climate change,” you might ask in reply “is it that there’s no proof, or is it that you don’t know what the proof is?” Then they’ve either got to demonstrate some kind of understanding of the debate, or admit ignorance.

Since you mention the “burden of proof,” I think it’s worth mentioning that climate change is a very complex subject and the vast majority of us who accept climate change as a reality would not be able to prove the hypothesis. Certainly not in a conversational setting. We read and listen, we examine the evidence, weigh it against our personal experiences and make a guess based on the balance of probabilities but we don’t know anything for sure. We accept the scientific consensus but that consensus has been wrong before.

My point then is that the “willfully blind,” as per the topic title, typically claim a confidence in their position to which their understanding of the subject gives them no right. Proving climate change requires decades of research and millions, if not billions of dollars; it is orders of magnitude easier to prove that the person you are talking to doesn’t know what they’re talking about. All I’m suggesting is to go after the low-hanging fruit.

As an example I had a friend tell me that he wasn’t sure about evolution, citing the eyeball as evidence. The eye is too perfectly designed, the lens is useless without a retina and the retina is useless without a lens, so how could they have evolved together by chance? I guess he heard the argument somewhere, because I’d read it myself in The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. The easy “win” is the nautilus, an animal with a retina but no lens, but if you just blurt that out you’re liable to get “ok, but what about the cuckoo’s tongue?” and other such goalpost-shifting. Better use can be made of the opportunity. I asked my friend a few questions, something like:

  • Did you ask a biologist to explain how the eye evolved? No. We were at university so it’s not as unreasonable as it might sound.
  • Did you read any books about evolution to try to find out how the eye might have evolved? No.
  • Did you do any googling to try to find an explanation? No.
  • Did you spend any time trying to think of optical imaging systems that work without a lens? Well, no…
  • Are you in fact proposing that because you, personally, don’t see how an eye could have evolved then the entire theory of evolution is bunk?

Then we talked about pinhole cameras and the nautilus and Dawkins’ rather lovely explanation of how an eye can evolve stepwise, but instead of it being a conversation specifically about the eye it was instead a demonstration of what Dawkins calls the “argument from personal ignorance.” It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d then gone on to the cuckoo’s tongue or some other weird phenotype that I have no explanation for, because instead of eliminating one argument I was able to eliminate an entire class of arguments. It also made the point to my friend that if you want to hold a view outside the scientific consensus, you had better bloody well do your research.

Listen buddy, if you don’t want an argument you’re going the wrong way about it.

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I think you’re quite right, my post to you was rather hypocritical and wide of the mark. We’re staying at a camp site with no electricity and my phone was almost dead, so I went ahead and posted in a rush without fully thinking things through, and without doing you the courtesy of fully understanding your argument. I’m sorry about that. I’d like to engage you better but I’m about to go dark again…

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Yes it is! Theres your philosophical problem.

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It seems to me you could make that reply any time anyone says they believe anything. “Oh, you think the sky is blue - by saying so, you’re implicitly trying to convince me of it, and you think your viewpoint is superior to mine! Hypocrite!”

It’s okay to try to change people’s minds when their beliefs impact you and others. Effective tactics are worth pursuing. I think that’s what both of you are saying.

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I think a ton of the problem is that a lot of people think admitting you’re wrong is also an admission that you’re inferior. Our culture doesn’t argue in a joint search for a truth, but as a competitive game.

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Its like pointing out the stupidity of the things written in the bible to a religous extremist.You may as well be talking to a brick wall. Their belief system renders them stupid.

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A diplomat interviewed on NPR used a verbal technique for someone who disagreed with her. She would address their points and acknowledge them. Then she would ask them how they came to their conclusion. After that, she would give her own opinions in an inquisitive approach. This allowed the person time to think about their views and be more open for diverse opinions. Of course, the setting for this was at a cocktail party and not a sign-waving protest.

From my experience, this technique works well on a six-year old.

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You are conflating the two even in your post here. Telling a person that they are wrong or right is literally trying to criticize their existence rather than discuss a topic. If your goal is to overcome the problem of others identifying with poorly thought out opinions, then it seems quite pragmatic for you to not identify them with their opinions either. That’s why “you are wrong” inspires immediate ego defenses rather than inspiring one to rethink their position, compared to something like “some people might jump to this hasty conclusion”. When a choice is not tied to their identity, they are far more likely to see that there are other choices they can make.

I don’t know which culture that is, but I would not be quick to claim membership of it!

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I’m not conflating them; I never said anything about telling someone they’re wrong. Maybe rephrasing would make what I wrote clearer: “…people think admitting one is wrong is also an admission that one is inferior.” That is, admitting that one’s own opinion is wrong. But since you brought it up, why should criticizing an opinion be taken as “literally trying to criticize [a person’s] existence”? It’s a cultural perception that an opinion = existential identity.

Sorry if I was being too U.S.-centric; I thought this forum was American, but I’ve since learned that it might be more British/Canadian. What I was talking about is a pretty strong feature in U.S. culture. This is not to say that the U.S. has no academia or intellectualism, or that no one ever works together to solve problems, but we have major issues that stem from people never wanting to admit weakness. Politicians can never express doubt and they have to constantly attack their opponents, even by telling obvious lies, or they don’t get reelected; crimes are committed because people in groups don’t want to be called weak; even our courts operate in an adversarial justice system, which has its pluses but also leads to a lot of unfairness. I think some of this is true in other Western cultures; maybe you have an opinion on that. Brian Cox mentions in the video clip that “you can never get any sense” in a program that’s “adversarial,” so apparently American talk radio and cable news are not the only places where convoluted arguments, attacks, and confusion reign.

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