“You have a surprise in store. Or then, on the other hand” – here the captain gave Reith a careful inspection – “perhaps you don’t. I can’t say, since the customs of your own land are unknown to me. And unknown to yourself perhaps? I understand you to be an amnesiac.”
Reith made a deprecatory gesture. “I never dispute other people’s opinions of myself.”
“In itself, a bizarre custom,” declared the captain.
I love that line: “I never dispute other people’s opinions of myself.”
We could all save ourselves a measure of trouble, living by this principle.
Asking for detailed description and how exactly it should work, including handling at least the more frequent edge cases.
A good way to convince the colleagues that their proposals for changes in the systems don’t hold much water, without the pain and work of partial (and lousy) implementation. (Sometimes also helpful for getting them to think deeper and bring better proposals later.)
I don’t think the info here is about winning an argument, but more about facilitating communication. When one has to stop and think about all the steps, they begin to see how complex the situation actually is and the simplicity of their argument vanishes.
You don’t necessarily convert them to your argument, but make them see the errors in theirs - becoming a learning experience for both.
They only downside is that it could lead to getting nothing done because it all seems (or argued to be) too complicated.
There’s a long-standing mystery of why left groups that claim to be rigorously democratic will rarely change their elected leadership and will tend to ossify over time. One part of it is, I’d come to believe, that in most such groups, there’s an expectation that you not criticize an existing postition unless you can propose, in detail, an alternative. That considerably inhibits criticism, so you tend to get people expressing support for the existing position, or remaining silent. By the time you’ve got an alternative position thought out, the position you’re criticizing is likely to be fairly well dug-in, so you’ll need to rally some support. And this leads to why left groups are so famous for splitting.
Pretty much all arguments turn out to be definitional arguments. Unless and until all parties understand what the others involved actually mean and understand by their usage of particular words (or, worse, nebulous concepts), the argument will continue. Once you have a solid grasp of each others’ meanings, you often discover that you aren’t disagreeing at all - or, if you are, then you can at least start from the same place.
Hence this method will often work, simply because it requires that definitional phase as part of it.
The big drawback with arguments on the internet is that the definitional phase simply doesn’t happen because it’s too complicated - when you are in the same room as someone, you can usually interrupt to ask questions, whereas online there tends to be the assumption that everyone else has the same definition of the word as you (and that your definition is self-evidently correct.) Also, there are people who understand this perfectly and are deliberately taking advantage of the limitations of internet debate space to derail arguments and/or troll. It’s a lot harder to do this in a “real” environment. Thus, internet arguments will get out of hand very, very quickly.
I have similar ideals: be less opinionated – less dogmatic.
Result: less stress.
Occasionally, when people press me for an opinion, I will reply:
“I’m not interested in my opinion.”
This is not to say, strictly, that I don’t have an opinion on a particular topic. It means that I don’t want to talk about my opinion on that topic. Perhaps I don’t even want to think about it.
It is somewhat like having a room with art on the walls, and the lights turned off. I know, in principle, that I do have art on my walls. But if I don’t want to talk about (or think about) that art, I leave the lights off.
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
I agree, but the headline is framed in terms of winning arguments, so it
will attract readers who want to win arguments, when the desired outcome is
really to not try to win arguments at all, just try to learn from each
other so everyone feels comfortable exploring all their ideas.
People don’t really have dialectic arguments on the internet, since that would require a certain amount of compassion and/or intellectual honesty. If the lines are already drawn and everyone just wants to have a good shout at their ideological opponents, then I don’t think there’s any hope for mutual learning.
Then do, of course. You’ll demonstrate the strength of your position, or perhaps you’ll find that you weren’t as right as you thought you were. Either is a positive outcome.
Of course only works for certain sorts of arguments, against certain sorts of people. It’s always a good step to try - at the very least you’ll be able to find out more precisely why they believe what they believe. The reason isn’t always what you’d expect, you may be shocked to discover that they have a better idea of what’s going on than you do.
