I do think there are a subset of people who are genuinely open minded. These people are actively curious and looking to iterate toward a more accurate view of reality.
When you meet people like this there are no 'tactics' ... it's just about presenting the truth in good faith as you see it and listening actively to understand their point of view.
The problem I encounter is that many people posture as 'open-minded', but in reality they want to hear your opinion for the same reason an opponent wants you to show your cards after they've folded to a successful poker bluff. In this case it simply tells them "what side you're on" or "which tribe you belong to".
As a heuristic, I've found it's very difficult to formulate thoughtful questions if you're not genuinely curious about a topic. Therefore, I tend to use the 'questioning level of thoughtfulness' (QLOT) of my discussion partner as the signal of whether or not I'm dealing with someone who desires a good faith discussion.
> When you meet people like this there are no 'tactics' ... it's just about presenting the truth in good faith
I will argue with tactics, but it’s not necessarily out of bad faith. Usually people are terrible at having an open-minded conversation, and you need to peel back the layers because most individuals won’t tell you why they believe something.
You’ll get all these canned responses and talking points from mainstream media (Or, if we’re talking about technology, the analog would be taking points from a particular corporation or vendor). But people won’t outright say “I don’t agree with that policy because I don’t trust that person” or “I got screwed over by a traumatic experience with X therefore I’m against X”. Most people aren’t capable of engaging on that level without a great deal of emotional maturity; of course, we’re far away from reality and facts at this point but humans are emotional creatures and emotion drives our decision making.
I've found that being more like a therapist and discussing not what it is they think but trying to get to the bottom of why it is they feel as such a really good approach.
Even ignoring the issue and trying to ask them more about their values. And then going deeper and figuring out why they value those things.
And sharing the same about you to them.
A lot of disagreement I find surprisingly come from similar values but just different weights applied to how events impact those values. Or sometimes it's just different value sets, and then you have to discuss why it is we value different things.
Even if you walk away still in disagreement, because you might still just end up where you have differing values, or where you've got different weights to those values, at least you'll have an understanding of each other and why it is you don't agree on those things.
The problem is online discussions are just not conductive to this at all. You can't engage someone and really work through this process of shared understanding. Relationships online are too superficial and short lived.
> Usually people are terrible at having an open-minded conversation, and you need to peel back the layers because most individuals won’t tell you why they believe something.
What beliefs would they have? If I am having a conversation about a topic it is because I have no established beliefs about that topic. If I have firm beliefs in something, what additional benefit would be derived from discussing it? There is absolutely nothing more boring than talking about something you are certain you know everything about.
I expect I also seem closed-minded in such conversation as the most effective device I have found to be open-minded in conversation is to pick a position, any position, and see if it can be defended. Upon reflection, you can gain a lot of insight into where you fell short in understanding and learn from that.
> You’ll get all these canned responses and talking points from mainstream media
Which is fine. A weak defence is sufficient to get started. The goal isn't to "win", the goal is to learn and if canned responses greases the wheels of discussion that leads to something valuable to reflect on later, that's all that is needed. You have to start somewhere with what limited information you have available to you. After all, if you were the world's utmost expert you wouldn't be in the conversation, given the boringness and all.
Yeah and those open minded people might really be on to something there.
I didn't particularly like the premise of the article, which seems to be that the goal is to change the other's mind. But think about it, what could be more beneficial to me than having an argument that changes my mind? If I convince someone of my opinion (whether by "weapon" or by "gift") then they learned something (ideally...) but if I change my mind thanks to the conversation, then I just learned something, I got to make that improvement to myself.
A day where nobody changed your mind is a day of stagnation.
Right, that starts from the assumption that one's view is correct.
Bayesian reasoning has you start with priors, take in new information, change or adjust your credences, and possibly adjust your priors. Having that kind of conversation is far more productive, and potentially more charitable in assumption of sincerity on the other party's part.
I guess I should try to get better at asking good questions. Even if I'm genuinely curious about something, I always have trouble coming up with thoughtful questions, especially on the spot.
(I guess for me, "thoughtfulness" requires putting thought into something, and if I'm actively participating in a conversation, I can't do that. It's way easier if I have already invested time into the topic at hand at some point beforehand.)
> I tend to use the 'questioning level of thoughtfulness' (QLOT) of my discussion partner as the signal
That's easier to do if participants have aligned interests and desires. Harder when communicating with someone that is very different from yourself. In that case it's productive if the discussion is approached with patience as a learning experience. Without suspicions that the other person is only learning about you so their tribe can use it against you later.
I sometimes argue, because I feel an inner compulsion to do so — maybe as a kind of performance art — but I've given up on trying to change anyone's mind.
I spent years as a graduate student in a philosophy PhD program, and what I found is that, essentially, no professional philosopher changes any other professional philosopher's mind about anything important, ever. We're just endlessly arguing. Intelligently, usually respectfully arguing, but accomplishing nothing, getting nowhere. And philosophers are supposed to be, at least nominally, the most "rational" among us.
This is not to say that philosophers never change their minds: they occasionally do. But not as a result of arguing! It's usually more self-correction than other-correction.
I think it's better to read books than to argue. There's less personal ego involved, because you can "engage" with the author of a book in a way that's not like a sporting event. There's no winner and loser. You don't have to admit to the author that you were wrong, because you never even have to talk to the author, and the author will probably never even know that you read the book. You're almost forced to argue with yourself in this situation. You can change your own mind even if you can't change other minds.
When you argue publicly, your goal shouldn't be to change your opponent's view, but to influence the people in the audience who don't have a strong opinion yet.
I've decided that I can never expect to change someone's mind. But, I can introduce factors that are new to them that they will later consider and may change their mind.
I am trying to assess whether philosophers not changing their minds is something that is desirable or not. On one hand, they represent their theses after long periods of introspection and studying. On the other hand, their virtue signaling propensity may relate to various ego ambitions.
Definitely, debate for the shake of debate feels like an excercise for the philosopher rather than identifying why different views exist and where these fall short. In the long term, it may lead to change of the philosopher. Given everybody keeps an open mind, I don't think that this is necessary a bad thing.
> philosophers never change their minds: they occasionally do. But not as a result of arguing! It's usually more self-correction than other-correction
So, as a rational philosopher you're not trying to express an absolute truth that is generally applicable. Rather, you're iterating towards the most accurate and appropriate expression of yourself. Hmm, I think I've heard that philosophy before... existentialism?
Philosophers are paid thinkers, and they fulfill an important social function, like theologians to a God, in this case the Market. To understand them it's important to pay attention to what they ignore, most importantly: this is where all of them will agree - pawns in the great game being played by the Invisible Hand against itself.
I find it strange that this article presumes that you have all the right answers and that there isn't the possibility that you are the one who needs their mind changed. It points out that listening is valuable, but not because there's a possibility that the person you're talking to is in the right, no, you should listen to other people because studies show that listening to other people will manipulate them into seeing things your way.
I feel like if you really wanted to live in a world of open-minded people, you should probably start by being open-minded yourself.
Here's a good trick I picked up for discussing contentious things - if you're ever tempted to dish out a sick burn, try to rephrase the point into a genuine question. Then the other person will have to walk through the logic of it, and if it turns out there is a real logic to their side of things, you don't get your ego bruised, cause you just asked a genuine question.
It helps if you understand whether the person is defending their own values, or their group's values.
If you talk someone out of their group's values, you might destroy their entire life. Talking someone out of their religion is a "win" until they get shunned and lose everything they have. Are you still in the right then? What does the "objective truth" matter if you're just ruining peoples lives?
Change someone's mind on guns or abortion and you hurt them! It doesn't matter which side they start on or which side you convince them to. You're ripping and tearing at the very fabric of their social life.
Some people are unable to change their minds, but some people can't change their minds due to circumstance. It's really important to understand this before convincing anyone of anything.
If we apply this kind of belief to corporations/government/etc. we get the things that most folks at HN spend their non-tech comments complaining about. Entrenched power, inability to pursue effectiveness because "this is how its always been done" and a lot of fluff.
You are not ruining people's lives by sharing reasoning to change someone's values. You are not destroying their lives because simply talking to someone is not forcing them to accept and implement something.
Their community is not flexible enough to incorporate differing beliefs and thus not long destined for this world. Take for example, Christianity. It comes in more flavors than ice cream, and infighting occurs but is rare in the face of conversations that pit Muslims or 'heathen religions' against Christianity. flexibility
Or take Hindu social society which is literally the oldest surviving widespread religion + social group that continuously assimilates different beliefs from different pagan religions bending so far that Hindus now celebrate Valentines and Xmas Day without invalidating a single belief.
The party "destroying lives" is not the party that posits a new way of thinking.
It's a question of moral responsibility. If you cause someone to make a major change in their life, surely you'd agree that you bear at least part of the responsibility for the outcome. It's the same with changing govt. Doesn't necessarily mean the only choice is doing nothing. But that you must weigh outcomes realistically, not idealistically.
I have to disagree with this point in this context. "Changing someone's mind" is a collaborative act. If you change someone's mind about something important, they are more responsible for the change than you are, because they have more power than you over the change. You don't own the beliefs of others.
Share information when you have it. Maximize peoples' opportunities to hold informed beliefs.
No. Parent was saying you have to weigh the consequences of changing someone's mind. That's the part I disagree with, unless of course they're children. You shouldn't censor your ideas for fear of harming adults, in the name of "realism" or otherwise.
They said the instigator bears some responsibility, you replied the majority of the responsibility lies with the one whose mind was changed. These views do not seem in opposition to me.
Surely one must weigh the consequences of changing another’s mind. If there are extreme detrimental effects, perhaps it is not proper to do so.
That is inherently paternalistic and sounds reminiscent of colonial attitudes. The claim is that we're protecting the listener from the impact of their own decisions on their own life.
If you believe you can change an adult's mind in a normal situation (for example, we are not including someone isolated through prison, cults, etc. or of diminished mental capacity) then you're claiming the ability to change their mind to their detriment and their inability to see the impact of that change.
In this situation, you have done something to them like the Pied Piper, leading them away from community...except that the pied piper was only able to lead children.
I imagine the line is different for different people, but it could very well impact more than just their life. Say, for example, you have a colleague who is convinced his wife is faithful, but by coincidence you saw her at a bar with a gentleman and quite clearly it was romantic in nature. Do you mention it? When he doesn't believe you, do you try to convince him? What if he is short tempered and known to have a violent side? To be clear, I am not advocating any particular course of action here, just acknowledging there are situations where it is tricky.
The majority of the parent comment is focused on situations where you look to change someone's thinking in an expansive way. New ideas, new philosophies, new ways of thinking...
We could push the boundaries of this and say I am trying to convince a man of something that may or may not be true for his own good.
In the hypothetical you allude to: with just one observation, no matter how compellingly I've stated and restated it, his actions are his own. Otherwise you're suggesting that I told a man I saw his wife at the bar with another man and his actions are attributable to me. At that point how does one even interact in society? Frankly, anyone might be a powder keg given the day.
If we go back to some concerted effort to prove my observation leads to my conclusion which I'm pushing him to believe, I think we've exited "gentler, better" to straight up malicious.
> They said the instigator bears some responsibility, you replied the majority of the responsibility lies with the one whose mind was changed. These views do not seem in opposition to me.
I'm saying you bear no responsibility for the beliefs another develops based on information you offer, provided that said information isn't intended to manipulate or mislead. It is not a scalable perspective no matter the degree. Artists, for instance, can't worry about the mental state of every member of there audience, even to a tiny degree. This is in opposition to the parent's point.
Great comment. I suspect that we all are vulnerable to Stockholm syndrome and doing the calculation of what price we will pay for changing our mind. After all, surviving is more important than being right.
"Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness." - Viktor Frankl
Liberty without responsibility is a big pile of hot garbage. If you exercise the liberty you're talking about, you also need to at the same time exercise the responsibility I'm talking about.
I don't know about being "in the right" or not, but I do think this comment is correct in showing why it can be difficult, if not impossible, for some people to change their minds. I experienced this in my own family in regards to covid, which made for some very stressful discussions around masking and behavior when we gathered for the holidays during the pandemic. I live in one part of the country, where certain behaviors and beliefs around that were baseline assumptions, some of my siblings in a different part of the country, with the opposite baselines. To change minds would mean going against what all your friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc believed. It would mean pretty significant social distancing, unrelated to the pandemic.
We all were able to work out some measure of compromise for the duration of the visit, but, well, there's reasons we live where we live and not in the same place.
We are all, regardless of the direction of our political leaning, suspended in our beliefs by the community we are part of.
If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to try walking down Main Street in small town America with a BLM flag. It’ll be received about as well as parading a Trump 2024 flag around a coastal city.
Ithaca, NY is a college town with a top-tier university and is located in Tompkins county which went 73.5% for Biden in 2020. It happens to be a small town, but I don't know that I'd consider it representative of small town America.
It is also a liberal college town with all of the externalization that can invoke. You only need to head to Oswego, or Genesee county generally to find a lot of upstate NY conservatism, often similarly openly shared.
It's all fine an dandy until objectively false group beliefs start affecting, e.g., political policy that has an effect on everybody, not just believers.
Even if you persuaded them into changing their mind on a topic intertwined with their identity or the group they are part of, can it not be that it is for the better and, ultimately for their own benifit?
On the contrary, the article concludes on this note:
> But if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world.
That means a lot less as a postscript than as the starting point. Whereas the framing of your values as a "gift" doesn't absolutely imply they're correct, but does imply they're somehow a good thing.
There's a phrase we use for saying the right words about an important idea but not actually incorporating it into your methods: "lip service".
Do you hold any values that you don't think are a good thing? It seems as if the author is coming from the perspective that you hold these values rather close and are already willing to defend them. In those cases isn't it better to come off as offering something to a conversation as opposed to dictating what is correct?
Also, in a sense, offering up something for consideration already carries with it a sense that you're willing to discuss its terms.
> Do you hold any values that you don't think are a good thing?
No, but I could be wrong, and I'm a dangerous fool if I don't take that into account.
> offering up something for consideration already carries with it a sense that you're willing to discuss its terms.
In some idealized world of intelligent good faith discussions, maybe. In practice, false, not even close. A good idea for yourself, but not safe to assume of anyone else's motives even if they say that's how they operate, much less if they call their ideas a "gift".
I think all the author is saying is to do it yourself, not that we should be naive and assume others are doing the same. You can always give people the benefit of the doubt first, and adjust.
The author is mostly not saying that. They're principally saying "offer your values as a gift". That's not the opposite of "consider your values up for debate", not quite, but it's absolutely not the same.
I think the typical response to that question would be something like ‘The Davos crowd sees current consumption rates as unsustainable and want a lower population. Bill gates has videos talking about the imperative to reduce global population by coercing a lower birth rate.’
Note. I do think the above davos thing is true. I personally do not think Covid was intentionally introduced. But the quip on gdp growth is a good question as it highlights the asker does not understand the basic framework of the other side. And understanding the other side is the realistic goal of these discussions as a prerequisite to arriving at synthesis.
Heh, this reminds me of the one time I was able to have a short conversation with someone who I found out believed the Twin Tower attacks to be an inside job. I asked them what the motivation for doing so would be, and the reply was "it's all about the money, man!" Didn't quite know what to do with that, though unfortunately that was also about at the point I had to catch a train.
Something like instead of saying "well more people die of the flu every year than die of COVID!" you would ask "how do you think the severity of this disease compares to other things we deal with, like the flu?"
> I find it strange that this article presumes that you have all the right answers and that there isn't the possibility that you are the one who needs their mind changed. It points out that listening is valuable, but not because there's a possibility that the person you're talking to is in the right, no, you should listen to other people because studies show that listening to other people will manipulate them into seeing things your way.
Perhaps the article is being devious here. It's not easy for people to separate intentions and actions - sometimes an intention can form to rationalise a preceding action (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect). Even though your initial intention may be to manipulate by appearing to genuinely listen, you may end up just genuinely listening and rationalising that this was your intent all along. This line of reasoning could trick the most ardent zealots into accidentally genuinely listening to their enemies' point of view.
Relatedly, I think another effective persuasive technique is 'seeding'. If you can engineer a 'non-defensive' conversation with your opponent in which you seed one or two critical thoughts in their mind, although they won't be instantaneously persuaded the seeds can germinate into full persuasion later on. However, this technique requires avoidance of confrontational behaviours that cause your opponent to activate their mental defenses.
To me it felt like the article lured you in pretending to be a guide on how to change other people's minds, but the arguments seem to involve that you can only do so by being open to having your own mind change.
I mean, I scrolled back up to the title - "A Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds" - and note that it doesn't even mention other people's minds; it could refer to changing your own mind as well. Point two is about being OK with your point of view being rejected, and point three about considering the other person's point of view. And then the conclusion is:
> But if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world. Launching a rhetorical grenade might give me a little satisfaction and earn me a few attaboys on social media from those who share my views, but generosity and openness have a bigger chance of making the world better in the long run.
I also read in the article that you should listen in a genuine way.
Would it be possible that this act could change your own mind? Would that fit your definition of being open-minded?
Many of his contemporaries hated his guts and ultimately they condemned him to death. It may be a good way to keep an open mind, but it may also be a terrible way to make friends and influence people.
He wasn't condemned to death because of his annoying questions, he was condemned because he was considered partly responsible for the "Thirty Tyrants" rule of terror which replaced democracy in Athens. Socrates was vehemently opposed to the democracy, and one of the leaders of the tyrants had been his student. When democracy was restored, Socrates was condemned to death.
I think it's because the political process is all about getting people into groups where they can thus cooperate with each other as an economic bloc, a perfect lie is the optimal unifying concept in this model; something that pulls everybody together into the same single political structure.
If on the other hand all you care about is the truth, you're directly corrosive to the above. You're looking at all the edge cases where the lie breaks down, and worse yet you're spreading disintegration of the otherwise unified political bloc by infecting other agents with your same methods.
It's a matter of perspective which side is "right", because those resultant atomised and fractured political blocs that can no longer bring themselves to accept the beautiful lie that otherwise would have successfully united them are now competitive rather than cooperative, and the game gradually slips closer to zero sum with the bloc most closely pursuing the optimal strategy in the light of the cold hard cynical truth winning out at the direct expense of all the other groups, and the resulting accelerating wealth inequality that implies, having real concrete negative effects on the lives of all those people in the suboptimal factions that frankly they may never have even had a chance to join letalone have been made aware of the existence of any alternatives because of the nature of their worldviews. Is it "right" to pursue truth even if it makes the quality of life of billions much worse?
It's a frightening and enlightening thing to sit down with an ideologue and come to understand not just what they think, but how they got to think that way. The common thread I have found is that default worldviews are both extremely sticky and subject to almost no critical analysis by the people that hold them, and unifying the galaxy of irrational but widely held default worldviews that exist flatly requires extensive narrative manipulation and outright lying, and that lying and manipulation is what politics actually is.
Imho this is why widespread censorship has gone from intolerable anathema to the sine qua non for the existence of the dominant shared mass hallucination about the state of the world in just a few short decades. Like it or not, politics has won out soundly over truth past a certain social scale.
Disclaimer; acknowledging reality is not approving of it. Socrates was right and should have beeen feeding his prosecutors hemlock, not the other way around. Damn the consequences and embrace the truth, whatever the outcome has always been my view. I just also know that view is extremely unpopular today.
Do you think the author might have written it with that 'presumption' intentionally?
I'd guess that the author is trying to, as gently as possible, suggest to people that there are better ways to go about thinking about those with whom you disagree, _regardless_ of who is right or wrong. Which is really a different point than "you should be less certain about your beliefs."
> Here's a good trick I picked up for discussing contentious things - if you're ever tempted to dish out a sick burn, try to rephrase the point into a genuine question. Then the other person will have to walk through the logic of it, and if it turns out there is a real logic to their side of things, you don't get your ego bruised, cause you just asked a genuine question.
And if it doesn't they can figure it out and have a way to fuck off without losing face too much
You raise an interesting question: Does the right-leaning media publish the same type of articles? And if not, what type of "conflict resolution" content do they publish instead?
Shouldn't different people in different circumstances of life, have different opinions/philosophies/ideologies anyway?
How about this: if you want to change people's minds, work on changing their circumstances first.
This is Michael Shellenberger's philosophy around saving the planet/climate. Basically, that economic justice has to come first because only people who are comfortable and middle class can afford the mental and emotional costs associated with caring about that stuff.
And yes, achieving that result on a global scale may well involve the construction of a bunch of new oil and gas infrastructure in places like Africa and South America— well meaning westerners should focus on what can be done at home to reduce, and stop protesting exactly the kind of thing that helps more people enter the middle class.
"Middle-class-ness" in this context shouldn't be the primary goal, because it's only a proxy for "have enough time and space to care." I assure you, poor people care about the environment, but we've structured our society to prevent the working poor from having enough free time and energy to advocate for things like the environment. Poor people generally don't even have enough time and energy to advocate for themselves for things like affordable housing and the end of food deserts.
Instead of just being like "lets burn more carbon to generate wealth first," we should skip the middle steps and go directly to giving people of all classes, especially the working poor that make up the majority of the human race, a voice and access to voting rights. Give the lower economic classes a larger voice in government and I think you'd be surprised how many would vote for things like investment in clean energy.
Respectfully, saying that you have to be rich enough to have time to care is missing the forest for the trees.
One of the informal definitions of "middle class" that I've heard is "people who have enough wealth and power that they don't have to constantly think about survival, but not enough to have to worry about being a target in the political game of thrones".
> Give the lower economic classes a larger voice in government and I think you'd be surprised how many would vote for things like investment in clean energy.
What are you basing your belief on? Are you saying that people who have never had the time or means to get any sort of education or ponder over such subjects will still understand why society should care about the environment (and many other things, like technology advancement, health, research, military etc)?
I don't believe that's the case and I just can't see how you might have arrived at such conclusion (which to me amounts to: you don't need any sort of education to arrive at these conclusions).
In practice, I see a lot of people in developing countries who live in a democracy and hence, already have a voice just by being able to vote, tend to vote for candidates who have populist agendas which almost never include green energy (when that will cost the population) and forrest preservation (instead of jobs and more agricultural/logging output) or anything not directly related to their immediate wellbeing (sometimes, against even that).
Why do you claim that poor people have no education?
The OP said "I assure you, poor people care about the environment", but whether you believe that or not, the point was this: "Poor people generally don't even have enough time and energy to advocate for themselves for things like affordable housing and the end of food deserts."
Poor people clearly care about affordable housing. They have to care. You don't need a fancy education for that. But the ability to express that caring in a way that affects politicians and the political system takes a lot more time, effort, and especially money.
Who finances political campaigns, the tenants or the landlords? That pretty much explains the end results. How much money do environmental groups have available to spend vs. industry groups? Our politics is pay-to-play.
> Why do you claim that poor people have no education?
Poor countries almost universally have a much lower rate of education than richer countries. That's not just a coincidence, of course... when you have an educated population, you tend to get out of poverty pretty quickly unless you have something very stronly keeping you back (fundamentalist religion for example). See Singapore and South Korea which are highly advanced societies today, but not long ago were pretty poor.
I am talking about poor, really poor, people. The kind of people who cannot afford caring about education at all. All they have time for is chase food. You may not believe it, but people like that are the majority in much of the developing world.
Well, the United States is one of the largest polluters in the world, if not the largest, so a large part of the solution to the problem has to come from within. And the United States has over the decades been a major barrier to reaching global environmental treaties.
The richer countries are polluting a lot more than the poorer countries. The latter aren't really the biggest problem (yet). So at least in my mind, I was framing this in terms of social classes within richer countries such as the US.
There are plenty of people well above middle class who still fight against any action on climate change. I doubt that lifting poor people in developing countries out of their misery by burning more coal will help change minds in rich industrialized countries.
(I don't know what that means, it's just a fact I picked up along the way. Like how more people know English in China than in North America. Just one of those weird thoughts that seems obvious in hindsight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_education_in_China )
- - - -
> economic justice has to come first
Ecologically harmonious living is economical as well: your expenses are reduced, your health is improved, etc. In other words, ecologically harmonious living is economic justice. That's what that looks like in the real world: abundant (cheap) food, medicine, clothing, housing, etc.
The only downside to living in harmony with nature is for people who are committed to making money from waste (in the ultimate analysis.) E.g. GMO's are touted as solving world hunger, but really in practice they are used to lock-in corporate profits. The same company that sells you the poison sells you the seeds that resist the poison, seeds that you must buy each year: the contract states you can't save your own seed.
If you grow food in harmony with nature you don't need fertilizer ($$$) pesticide ($$$) GMO patented crop species ($$$) etc...
It's more profitable for the farmer and the product is healthier (reducing medical expenses, eh?)
Compare with, e.g.: Grow BIOINTENSIVE ( http://growbiointensive.org/ ) a system that uses around 5000f² (~450m²) per adult, produces a balanced complete diet, and increases soil volume and fertility year-on-year, while requiring no external inputs and little labor.
I have lots of other examples, poke me for more...
Anyway, the point is, "economic justice" is living in harmony with nature: they are the same thing.
> Like how more people know English in China than in North America.
This is definitely false. China has ~3x the population of the US, but far less than 1/3 speak English well enough to give directions on the streets of the major cities. (And indeed, your link estimates 100M to 200M English speakers in China, whereas North America has 334 million English speakers.)
Sure, but that's a much smaller group. The historical argument is that the rise of the environmental movement in the US coincided with the postwar boom. Yes, some people became very wealthy during that time, but millions of people became wealthy enough that they started wanting things like national parks, clean rivers, breathable air, and so on.
The strength in numbers is worth a lot more that asking a few zillionaires to make it happen single-handedly.
Not when the few zillionaires are in command of zillions of dollars of capital, which is by far a more effective lever to do just about anything these days than any lever available to middle class and below.
This is totally wrong. Public opinion is by far the biggest roadblock. Believing that only some evil rich people are in the way is a coping mechanism. Read David Shor or Matt Yglesias on this.
Right, 330,000,000 people in aggregate control that capital through countless layers of abstraction explicitly designed to prevent the vast majority of it from being allocated quickly. And this is in general a good thing because it’s an important mitigation against autocracy and catastrophic negligence.
The differences in the dynamics of these pools of capital are so enormous and so obvious I have to doubt that even you give your argument any credence.
Whether some is considered to be something (aka: "is") is typically just subconsciously checking off a few boxes, typically according to bias, which is affected by propaganda...and "democracy" has received a lot of marketing, and extra "guerrilla" marketing (Jan 6 coverage, etc) in the last few years.
You’re straw-manning. There is a solid argument with plenty of supporting evidence that a small minority observably has virtually all the political power in the United States[1].
That’s not to say public opinion is completely irrelevant, but when it can’t be directly controlled through mass media persuasion techniques it can be neutralized in various ways. Isn’t it interesting how the US is somehow evenly divided on so many “controversial” issues? One explanation is that those who are manipulating the public intentionally play up issues with that property.
Sentimental moment: I remember hearing this argument in the 1970s, and I even believed it then!
Fifty years later, I don't think there isn't going to be a negotiated solution with the rich. It was "us" (i.e. the biosphere) or them, and they already won, dooming our ecosystem.
Economic justice would be benificial for the world as a whole. Also, poorer countries have to go through economic growth more or less the same way as the steps the richer countries took. There are very few shortcuts possible since the growth is gradual.
Well fortunately we recently passed a tipping point. Over half the population of the world are now middle class. This is largely due to a few hundred million Chinese, and more in SE Asia generally, entering the urban middle income bracket over the last few decades. The next few years are probably going to be rough, but global incomes have been going in the right direction for quite a while.
As for fossil fuels, utility scale solar is now cheaper than coal. Global development definitely means more CO2, but we’re right at an inflection point towards renewables.
If half of people are middle class, the rest is either poor or belongs to the few percent of people who happen to own half the world's assets. Would you describe such a situation as 'fortunate'?
Oh I’m not for one moment saying the situation now is good, or acceptable. We were discussing progress and particularly the growth of the global middle class. I’m pointing out the trend, that’s all.
So shall we put the ongoing ecological and climate catastrophes on hold while we take 200 years to reach an egalitarian utopia? On the other hand, we're told that these catastrophes affect the poorest countries the most. From that point of view, environmentalism is "economic justice".
*Interesting term. Does that mean the economically better off have committed a crime, and must be punished?
I understand economic justice not as a justice system but as fairness. Everyone has the right be part of a good economy. When that is achieved, on such a level field, it is more easy to tackle important things like efficient use of resources.
If certain values are circumstantial, couldn't that just be combined into a higher-level formulation? Eg if a lower-class person values family, and a higher-class person values fulfillment, then you simply say "fulfillment is valuable when monetary and social needs are met" (aka Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1]), and that's something both people can agree on. No need to change anybody's circumstances.
Have you read the article? Do you think saying "other people make no sense" is a great way to engage in a gentler, more civilized discussion? Try to put yourself in their shoes and understand where their aguments are coming from and why you may disagree so strongly with them. Almost always, I can ensure you, it's NOT the case that "they make no sense", but that you simply have made no effort to take into account their reasoning and motivations, which may be just as valid as yours, yet lead to completely different conclusions.
If normal intelligent people doesn’t make sense to you then it is because you don’t understand where they are coming from and why they believe what they believe.
That's a damn good point. Philosophy is merely perspective's shadow (moral philosophy included!). If you want to change the way they think then change what they see.
Our #1 tool for that is drugs. So cheap and convenient. #2 is video entertainment, but that's a bit shallow and ephemeral. #3 is what... raucous demonstrations?
And speaking of demonstrations, you can't beat "scientific culture" for having a pre-existing setup for managing the "changing philosophies by changing perspectives" process. But most of us aren't scientists. (Or squishy, openminded experimentalists, even)
An interesting idea related to this: the pedagogical benefits of esotericism.
Melzer writes: “Just as education must begin by addressing the student where he is, so, as he learns and changes, it must stay with him. The internal or dialectical critique of received opinion takes place not in a single stroke but in a series of successive approximations to the truth, each of which will seem in its time to be the final one.”
As someone who's wasted too much time arguing with people online, I find it very unlikely you'll change anyone's mind that way.
If your values are so great, live them. Show by example why your values are the best way to live, by emobdying them and having an enviable life that people want to emulate. I think that would change far more minds than arguing.
> Show by example why your values are the best way to live
> I think that would change far more minds
I don't find one's personal status (in any dimension) transmits well across the internet. We may not be truly anonymous, but nobody knows you're a dog, basically. IMHO there's no way to back up a well lived life through text. And nobody is doing a docuseries on everyone.
> But just as you are not your car or your house, you are not your beliefs.
While I get what the author is trying to say here, this doesn't feel like a great analogy to me. If I'm not attached to my beliefs, wouldn't that make me aloof? Most people's beliefs are their identity. And if you detach yourself from your beliefs, it's almost like you're trying to detach yourself from self. It feels like a very relativistic mindset, which is fine, but antithetical to some worldviews.
Identifying yourself with your beliefs seems like a surefire way to stop you from changing your mind on things you might be wrong about.
I think it's better to identify with something arbitrary and static, like your heritage/nationality/ethnicity/family. Your roots. That way the identity-seeking part of you has a nice, firm rock to hold on to, and you can freely evict ideas and beliefs that aren't effectively predicting your experiences - without destroying your self-identity.
Belief-as-identity strikes me as really pernicious. It's a big problem people have with religions with orthodoxy like Christianity or Islam; these systems sustain themselves in part by training people to tie their sense of self to a particular belief about the nature of god/the universe.
Identifying as an Atheist, or Liberal, or a Conservative, or anything just lets that thing get its hooks into you. I'd like to be able to drop and change my political beliefs if it turns out I'm wrong about which form of economics leads to the greatest amount of human flourishing, for example.
Each individual ideological meme, in contrast, really wants you to build it into your self-identity, to spread its roots so deep that to extricate it would be spiritual suicide. All beliefs 'want' this, and while it's impossible to not be a slave to some meta-meta-meme, you can at least not be a memetic zombie for some object-level one! If a belief stops paying rent in useful predictions, I want it evicted, out on the street!
I purposely didn't mention any religions, because a belief doesn't need to imply religion. You can believe science is the ultimate decider, that heritage is the most important, family, friends, etc. My point is that all these things are still your belief and you need to moor yourself to something, otherwise your bound to drift around and believe in whatever is trending on social media from one moment to the next.
The idea that object level beliefs are bad is wrong. Meta level arguments are just tricks to try to confuse you into thinking one situation is like another.
> Stop wielding your values as a weapon and start offering them as a gift.
This is incredibly spot on. I might even say it differently as
“Stop treating your values as an indication of your superiority, and start treating them as a relatable story of growth.”
A lot (I mean a lot) of people I talk with are constantly trying to put on a display of how what they are is some kind of superior way of being. And it’s impossible to listen to them because they’re speaking with a childish “I’m this and your not” way of thinking.
I always try to separate facts, deduction and values.
* We can agree and disagree about the facts. This is the worst case and it is probably not worth discussing and try to change someone's mind if we disagree about basic facts.
* One can discuss the logic/deduction that goes from these facts. That's probably the most meaningful thing to discuss and one can try to change somebody's mind on that.
* People have different value systems (i.e. what's important for the society and how much). And here there is no right or wrong. At best one can agree that our values are different, and it can be worth discussing (but likely nobody will change their mind)
I'd say the last one is the worst case. For we might disagree on facts, but if we both have shared values with respect to which methods and forms of evidence are valid ways of obtaining facts about our shared reality (and which ones are not), then in principle disagreements of fact can be resolved by giving evidence.
Eg, if we both agree with the standards of journalistic integrity and can thus agree that certain outlets are reputable enough to publish retractions when they get things wrong, then we can at least agree on facts published in reputable news outlets. But, if we do not have a shared value in the form of respect for the process of journalism, then one side is free to reject any fact they don't like as "fake news", and neither the amount nor quality of news sources cited will ever change this.
Honestly, I do not really think most online commenters want to convince anybody of anything. For most of history, discussion of current events by normal people has just been venting to your likeminded friends in the pub. The problem I think is on the part of people who expect convincing rhetoric in online conversations.
Both are correct. If you indeed know your views are correct, dangerous ones _need_ to be challenged, onlookers need to see that bad ideas have opposition and there are other ways of approaching an issue.
At the same time, you also need to acknowledge if someone has a point and have honest discussion. If you always debate and never ever think... "Huh, this guy has a point" then you most likely are not intellectually honest.
I fundamentally don’t agree that ideas can be dangerous (Ironically, I guess this is an argument). However actions are dangerous and people should be held to account by their actions. If you disagree with someone’s ideas you should debate them, or articulate your point of view, not challenge them.
I think fascism and racism and a lot of other ideas are dangerous and corrosive for society. Some ideas have been guilty of millions of deaths. By the time you try punishing actions, it will have been too late.
Now, the countering I advocate does not imply lack of discussion, or denial of the existance of these ideas, but unchallenged discussion, where these dangerous ideas are the only thing "right" is, IMO, very dangerous. You need people to be able to tackle with them, not protectem them like they are a shriveling violet, but this need to happen in a good frame.
I used to believe in a sort of laissez-faire internet community environment, no censorship, but just immunization by exposure. But then I saw my dad get seduced over the internet by a group of deeply illogical individuals and I do not believe this is the right course anymore.
> articulate your point of view, not challenge them.
I see debating ideas as synonymous with challenging them. How is it different in your perception?
I do agree that ideas can be dangerous, most of those revolve around bigotry and hatred. I don’t know the best solution, but I understand how the ideas are dangerous to others in a very direct way.
I disagree, you can win debates regardless of whether or not your views are correct. A good debater with a wrong view will "win" against a bad debater with a correct view.
They're not, because they're framed as zero-sum games. Both parties are attempting to convince the other (more likely, onlookers), and have no incentive to concede.
Sure, but I don't think many people are really looking for debates. I think most people are more interested in getting something off their chest and indicating in-group status (we're social animals after all).
are we happier now that we can reach millions of minds? or were we happier with smaller circles of family and friends? is there a great injustice that needs each and every one of us to play the persuasion game?
Or acceptance of difference. The underlying notion many seem to believe is that they are inherently right and so all they need to do is express their "mind-space" to somebody else, and that other person will come to feel the same.
But the thing one forgets is that the other person also often feels exactly the same. And it's not even a matter of one person being right and another person being wrong.
In any sort of reasonably complex topic, people can see the same data and make informed conclusions that are mutually exclusive. Seeing successful persuasion or violence as the only ends largely simplifies down to violence being the only end. Or, "The History of Humanity."
That only works if both sides do it. The problem is that there are many political ideologies across the entire spectrum that are unwilling to accept the difference to the point of resorting to violence to remove it.
Except certain resources are exclusive. For example, global human effort. How much global effort should be expended towards fighting climate change? In cases like these, people can't just accept their differences, a choice has to be made.
Acceptance of difference only works in cases where both parties share the same reality. There can be no acceptance of different opinions about positions that don't agree in objectively measurable facts. You can accept different opinions on economic policies, you can't accept different opinions on whether smoking causes cancer.
> is there a great injustice that needs each and every one of us to play the persuasion game?
How about yes? Some might say there are a few universal issues that qualify. Others might say that the issues aren't universal but there are so many that everyone should take up some set. Either way, they might agree that peer to peer persuasion is ultimately more effective than top-down edicts. They persuade to avert harm, just as you are attempting to do right here and now in a more meta kind of way, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Identifying methods of persuasion that are more effective and/or less harmful themselves is something worthy of our curiosity.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of the points in this article, but I think, from personal experience, this is the strongest point:
> Empathetic listening, of course, is an act of generosity—a gift
It really works. I’ve had people come up to me, years later, to tell me how much they valued me listening to them, even though we are on opposite sides of the value spectrum.
I find it odd that people seek to change minds to be honest.
For some reason I'm a hard-core libertarian so I kind of hate my own core values. I'd even go so far as to acknowledge that my ideal world would be close to hell for most people. I don't want to be this way. I just seem to have a preference for it.
I realised several years ago that if I ever got my own way it would make the world objectively a worse place for the average person to live and therefore I have an ethical duty to vote against my own self interest and instead try to vote for what I believe is in the interest of the collective good.
I think a lot of political division we see today just stems of a lack of empathy and understanding. Instead of trying to find ways we can compromise and share this Earth together we seek to force our own values on to others. And this seems to be true at all levels of society, from Twitter debates about trans rights, to democracy vs autocracy debates at the level of nation states.
Plus I think most disagreements we have can generally be solved with more localism and secessionism. Here in the UK for example I don't know why I don't just let Muslim communities practise Sharia law if they wish and allow communities who dislike immigration set their own rules on who is and isn't allowed to live there. But like I say, I know people disagree with me on these things.
> I don't want to be this way. I just seem to have a preference for it.
Aren't you being a sort of "preference fatalist"? Do you think it's impossible to change preferences?
Maybe a good place to start would be to research people who have changed preferences. I think motivation is not the mythical black box that oms people ascribe to. We're motivated by cognitive processes and experiences. If we expose ourselves to different experiences and try to see value in different things, our brain can adapt and start saying "Okay, this thing I didn't find motivating is getting motivating!" -- motivation is built by yourself. I call this concept "freedom of utility" -- you're free to choose what to care about; although of course there are limits to the flexibility of some of our instincts for various reasons related to just being limited, finite beings overall.
(I'm speaking of the general issue of changing values and changing your mind -- hopefully not too personal)
In your case, I think at a level you've already adopted different values (which I think is admirable and necessary for humans to achieve a good existence), but you're finding it hard reconciling your various intuitions and various rational thoughts. I think it's a slow process, but we should let the truth and what we ultimately find genuinely best win -- discuss it with other people, think about it, test its consequences (in real life or thought), this is how you change your mind.
> Aren't you being a sort of "preference fatalist"? Do you think it's impossible to change preferences?
I've changed my mind on a lot of things. Big things too. I've always enjoyed debating subjects too because I think there is often value in changing minds and having your own mind changed. There are also things which are provably true and preferences. It's really the latter that I see no point in changing people's minds about.
I think you basically have two end states to civilisation, the first being a single world government which sets laws to maximise the happiness and wellbeing for the average individual in a society.
Or the second option is that you accept the diversity of human opinion and have lots of smaller states where those states can adopt their own unique laws that maximise the happiness and wellbeing of that unique community.
I'd argue neither is stable because you either have competing states with different laws or a single government with lots of unhappy subjects.
But just as an example here, you're not going to make the world a more peaceful or happy place by forcing the middle-east to be pro-LGBTQ even if it's the "right" thing. Here in the UK we see this all the time. We import people with different ideas form our own then create conflict by telling them they're wrong for thinking the way they do. And for what? Perhaps some times something can be so clearly wrong that it warrants intervention, but in this case if someone who's LGBTQ wants to leave that community for somewhere more LGBTQ friendly they can do that and everyone is happy. I'm not going to get into a fight with a Muslim about why their beliefs are wrong.
I guess my position is just that the majority of violence and unhappiness in this world comes from people either believing their view is the correct view and that others should share it, or that someone else view is wrong and that they need to be stopped. All the insults on Twitter. All the people the state locks in cages. All the bombs drop for not following democratic values. I don't want any part of it. For the most part so long as they do so peacefully I'm happy for people to live however like, believing whatever they like.
By “abortion”, I don’t mean the act itself, more the attitude and specifically voting preferences of others.
Regardless of your stance on this, how others think and vote will affect other people.
For example, I am pro-choice. I believe people should have a right to access abortion if necessary. I don’t need to change someone’s mind if they don’t personally want to support abortion, but I do need to change their mind if they want to vote for people who will restrict that right.
See also: climate change.
There are many areas where you can and should agree to disagree and there will always be middle ground compromises in the details, but some issues really are black and white. Either you believe other people should have access to abortion or you don’t.
Also, and I hope this is obvious, the point is not whether you think abortion is right or wrong, it’s that other people’s decisions can affect you or your family or the world in general.
abortion itself, being a personal decision/action, doesn't seek to affect the thoughts and behaviors of other people. perhaps you mean anti-abortion, since that attempts to be positively coercive of others?
Abortion can only seen as a personal decision if you don't consider it murder. From the view point that "life" starts at conception, it cannot be seen as a personal decision. Thus, pro-abortion seeks to change the minds of people such that "life" does not start at conception.
They mean the issue of abortion (whether pro or against). "Change the mind" they mean from its current position (whether pro- or anti- abortion).
Even if we assume that "it's a personal choice" is some kind of natural/god-given/obvious default (which historically it hasn't been), we'd still to work to change the minds of people who think otherwise...
I'm a pretty liberal person in a very liberal area, but nobody has ever tried to convince me to change my mind to be pro-abortion. I'm in favor of letting people make their own healthcare decisions of course but to be actively pro-abortion seems like some hyper niche position.
I think agitating publically on a pro-abortion position is rare and considered unseemly by most liberals. However I do believe there are many situations where people will find themselves under pro-abortion pressure.
For example, I know many Icelanders are quite proud of how they have 'solved' the problem of Down Syndrome in their country by good prenatal testing. I strongly suspect women in countries like this face tremendous pro-abortion pressure when they consider carrying these children to term and welcoming them into their families.
If anti-abortion advocates were just advocating for their right to try to convince people to not get abortion and apply their own social pressure (not backed by the force of the state) then I'd have no objections. I mean I find the idea of using that right objectionable but it is obviously their right.
abortion has been a personal choice for most of humanity. only relatively recently have social mores become coercive like this, on which foucault wrote a whole treatise.
I'll take the opportunity to insert some thoughts from metaphysics here. It says that the evolution of humanity begins with total unity, and just as total lack of reason: if one was to lose a finger, others would feel the pain, but wouldn't understand why. In order to develop reason, humanity descends into individualism. The extreme social division today is the sign of passing the midpoint of evolution when mind is fully developed, but the sense of unity is lost. After that the course of evolution will take us back, but we'll get to keep the skill of reasoning. Returning to the origin will be forced by shared hardships: the divisiveness will die off under their pressure.
> For some reason I'm a hard-core libertarian so I kind of hate my own core values. I'd even go so far as to acknowledge that my ideal world would be close to hell for most people. I don't want to be this way. I just seem to have a preference for it.
Honest question, have you ever considered this to be a legitimate data point that would act to falsify your hard-core libertarian values?
Offering your values as a gift still seems way too presumptuous.
I think you can express how you feel about things and why if someone's interested, or if they express their feelings first. Anything more than that is unwelcome to the vast majority of people.
The article is paywalls and I don’t have access. So I have to start by apologizing, since I’m commenting on something I haven’t actually read, but I think this is important. Many people wiser than I likely learned this sooner than I did, but they failed to tell me so I ended up learning it on my own, and I feel I would be remiss if I did not share.
The truth is, you cannot change the mind of another person. Only they can do that. All you can do is plant seeds, and be patient. If they were the right seeds, and planted in the right way, you may observe them growing but it takes time. Sometimes as little as hours or days, but often months or even years.
Every belief has a context it is built on. When you try to change a mind, it involves challenging that context, which is painful for most people. But contexts evolve as experiences are gained, so plant the seeds which will be watered best by those new experiences.
And as you do that, who knows? Maybe you will find seeds from someone else have taken root, and have grown into new beliefs you hold.
Try a less clear cut debate topic. One where intuition works against you.
Like the wave of anti-trans legislation and framing of our mere existence as grooming in red states. It's much harder to see the outright wrongness and evil.
It's easy with the Russians. We got propaganda pieces where the message to foreigners is always "we fight nazis in Ukraine" and the message inward is "we fight against having to go to pride parades and having our children turned gay by satanists". [1]
Now trans people? Hardly anyone bothers to read up on us, but we're the wedge anyhow. Even most democrats seem to have little interest in defending us beyond some surface level posturing. This debate solely exists to mobilize republican voters with a heavily framed appeal to their intuition and disgust reflex. We're just the next cataclysmic threat that can only be averted through national rebirth (hey, wanna make america great? again?). Because apparently CRT lost steam.
I think I earned the right to be cynical about both bloodsport-type debates and this "just be like, nice, dude" because the outcome of this debate has a really good chance at fucking up my life.
From the other side of this debate: we genuinely believe what we’re selling, just like you.
It’s not “intuition and disgust reflex”, but research, questions, and genuine reasoned thought that brought people like me to a very different point of view.
I’m not directly addressing the issues we disagree on in this comment - just making the case that I’ve thought through these things in great detail, believe that my thinking is as close to objectively correct and ethically correct as I can reasonably manage, and yet, have likely come to a completely different set of conclusions than you.
I’d probably question your motivations before your arguments. You really can’t deny it is in the spotlight because we have elections coming up and this is a polarizing topic to mobilize voters with. Many of which will not understand any of the nuance.
And then I’d be wondering if your point requires dismissal of wide consensus (or - I have experienced this - sociology as a legitimate field of study all together) in favor of few outliers.
Also, I’m genuinely not sure which conclusions we are talking about here. I purposefully avoided sports and early medical transition and mentioned the DeSantis groomer / libsoftiktok stochastic terror against trans healthcare thing first - because that’s as close to objectively bad as anything related to this topic gets.
seems like the article is a cope about how to deal with anti-vaxxers. listen to their point of view, but offer the vaccine as a gift. as others have said, if you genuinely listened your mind may itself be changed, then you are now influenced by the 'misinformation'.
> Stop wielding your values as a weapon and start offering them as a gift.
It's about time this was put forth.
I've been screaming from the bottom of my lungs for ages that woke virtue signalling only makes enemies.
If you tell your opponent you're better than them, you're engaging in high school football rivalry. You'll never come to a meeting of the minds. It only makes the disagreement more bitter.
The left and the right, at the end of the day, really aren't that much different at all. There are only a few concepts we disagree upon. Yet we're engaging in petty team squabbles and letting the lizard parts of our brains turn it into tribalistic "us vs them".
An analogy, probably incorrect, is the hygiene hypothesis. An under-exposed immune system in a clean room learns to attack its host instead. Similarly, since we're not regularly engaging in tribe vs tribe, fighting off assailants that would throttle us in the night, or staying by the fire to stay away lions and bears, we turn that defense mechanism against those with different ideals.
At the end of the day, we're all suffering and dying together.
You have a great point. I think you could agree your point would have been made better without the cheap shot to score points against woke bogeymen.
To your point though, we need to stick together as humans, from every country, because the common person from China has more in common with the common person in America than either common person has with those in power trying to split us up by race and ideology. Divide and conquer doesn’t work if you don’t buy in to the divisions!
>cheap shot to score points against woke bogeymen.
Why denouncing something that tries to bring division and aggravate difference is called a bogeymen? Have you considered that it may be a real phenomenon?
You would do well to note how many people called what you said a cheap shot. You’re bemoaning a lack of discourse by spiking the conversation. Does that not strike you as odd? Or at least counter productive?
"woke virtue signaling" is the same thing that "political correctness" was ten years ago, right?
I mean, when I hear people complaining about "woke virtue signaling" I don't know what that means other than "being respectful" and "modeling good behavior".
If you're limiting that description to actual hypocrisy, then that's one thing. But in the absence of modeling good behavior, the only alternative is behavior that gets worse and worse. Because as soon as someone tries to stand up for a higher bar, it's "woke virtue signaling".
The phrase almost sounds like an incantation at this point, like it has no meaning other than to express a grievance.
Alternatively, after climbing past that initial resistance, joining in trying to raise the bar can actually be kind of fun, if the intent is more in improving one's own behavior than in just (hypocritically) judging others.
>I mean, when I hear people complaining about "woke virtue signaling" I don't know what that means other than "being respectful" and "modeling good behavior".
Come on, it's not that. "Just being respectful" is very different from the coercive tactics of the zealous kind we have seen in the recent years.
The idea that one side of the political discourse is engaging in "virtual signaling" and "wielding their values as weapons" is not a new one. Surprisingly enough, it is always the side that the disagrees with the author, that is totally disingenuous in the expression values, go figure.
> I’ve been screaming from the bottom of my lungs for ages that woke virtue signaling only makes enemies
That sentence right there makes me seriously skeptical of how well your conversations turn out, as well as how open minded you are when talking with people you disagree with.
I'm not following. The very term "woke virtue signaling" is itself a loaded, aggressive frame that is designed to "make enemies".
You don't think, to pick an example, that vegans eat vegan because they want to and not to signal to you? What's your solution for them to change your mind except to... eat meat with you in solidarity I guess?
The point being that what you're picking up as "virtue signaling" is largely in your own interpretation. Most of the hippies are just living their lives. But yeah, sometimes that involves being trans or gay or whatever in a way that isn't invisible to you.
let's posit two historical events that every American knows about, which represented pretty fierce disagreement:
1. the Civil War and Slavery
2. the Holocaust
each event featured "sides" that disagreed pretty strongly. They were life-or-death conflicts involving millions of people. Do we try to apply these "lets find our shared morals" / "present our side with the joy (of a missionary)" practices in these situations? Probably not. They were wars. Kind of the ultimate "disagreement".
If you are open to the view that conflicts happening today are fast approaching the scale / seriousness of the above two events, things like, one political party trying to overthrow the US government by force, widespread corruption of the rule of law and police, draconian rules meant to terrorize or imprison whole populations of women and immigrants, destruction of democratic norms, kids living their lives in terror of school schootings, then it's hard to take this article seriously.
If the above paragraph OTOH sounds ridiculous and one is of the view that things are pretty normal except for a little messiness on this social media thing, then by all means, present your view to that reality as a gift given with joy.
As of yet in America, the people willing to actually engage in things like 1-6 are a very small minority, and the ones willing to offer defenses for it are mostly those who feel trapped, that there's no other way their values can be preserved. These people can still be reached. But giving up hope prematurely is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, I'm not sure what your counter-proposal is. I assume it's not "just get the civil war started already", but if you actually give up on convincing your political opponents, there's not much left. Oh, there's "go vote!", I guess, but we already knew that one.
I'm not saying to forego discourse altogether, im saying that approaching the problem like a missionary ringing your doorbell who will then happily "debate" spirituality is not advised. religious missionaries have literally eternity to get their message across. dire issues like the loss of democracy can't really wait and can't really be reduced to "let's debate and wait for someone to win". "debate" with the goal to "convince one's opponent" is not really what's going on with the discourse that we're seeing. it is a war of sorts, where the "sides" are looking to engage their "side" as much as possible and to demoralize and humiliate the other "side" as much as possible, thereby creating a public impression that it is hoped will sway major political events, primarily through the psychology of who's perceived as "winning" and "losing".
also, virtually the entire Republican party from top to bottom supports the 1/6 insurrection, their methods, and their goals, and the party is actively electing attorney generals and governors who will actually see the insurrection through at the state level on the next go-around. The situation is in fact very dire.
I dunno, I think that point of view presupposes that everyone on the non-Slavery (for example) side is pretty much in complete harmony and has no need to exchange views in a way to evolve their shared perspective.
I think the article makes this point too: the approach isn't for every circumstance and shouldn't necessarily be used for every person. The pro-slavery people are not really the target audience.
> If you are open to the view that conflicts happening today are fast approaching the scale / seriousness of the above two events...
I'm open to it, but would need to see evidence. I'm not even sure what you mean by conflicts in this case, but I cannot think of anything that is on a trend line that would get take it even close to the level of those examples you name. What do we have that's about to become another holocaust, for example?
In general most things I can name have gotten noticeably better compared to the eras when those examples took place.
Because I agree with the author that attacking an opponent only makes them more entrenched in their position, I disagree with what I take to be the suggestion that, the more important something is, the more you should be willing to attack your opponent over it. The reason is that, unlike war, we can't just kill each other, we have to have to live together at the end of this. So, we should use the least centrifugal tactics we can.
> What do we have that's about to become another holocaust, for example?
While large scale genocide seems unlikely to be in the near future, the history of the rise of Nazi Germany has many parallels with the current rise of authoritarian governments around the world as well as among the right wing of the US. If there were to be large scale genocide, the conditions that precede such an event are certainly taking place right now within the right wing of the US as well as in authoritarian movements around the world.
> Politically, the president has certainly taken actions which are in many ways parallel to those of the early Nazi movement. As Evans rightly notes, his propaganda machine would be immediately familiar to Joseph Goebbels’s Nazi office. The recent executive order making administrative law judges political appointees subject to executive power cannot be seen as anything less than an attempt to bring the courts in line with the administration’s political ideology. The Nazis called this “Gleichschaltung,” or coordination, as they sought to co-opt government and private organizations. Even his management style has similarities to Hitler. Like Trump, Hitler was reluctant to surrender too much authority to one subordinate, and so his Cabinet (which he never called) was a den of backbiting and maneuvering underlings seeking the support of Hitler, who was the only one who decided policy. ...
> Let’s again be clear: Trump is not Hitler; Hitler was arguably a far more astute politician with deeply held convictions and the means to turn a fledgling democracy into a totalitarian state, something that should be much more difficult here. Nonetheless, these historical comparisons are not hyperbolic and should at least give us pause.
however, since this article was written, Trump has paved the way for *much* more astute authoritarians like Ron DeSantis etc. to take his place. A takeover of the US by authoritarian fascists and the end of whatever "democracy" the US has, replaced by sham elections that mean nothing while the government is turned into basically an enemy of the people with the exception of a very privileged few, would be a very serious, world changing event, and they are going for it big time right now.
> Do we try to apply these "lets find our shared morals" / "present our side with the joy (of a missionary)" practices in these situations? Probably not. They were wars.
Relatedly: As Barack Obama said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, non-violence would not have stopped Hitler's armies.
After years of shouting at Trump voters, calling them names, racists, fascists, and Nazis, and that not working. Why not try some sanctimonious nose peeping?
At this point I simply don't dialogue with people on political subjects. I nod, smile, agree, then pull the farthest right lever in the voting booth I can.
The idea of even trying to force or 'encourage' others to change their minds is horrid. Let people make up their own minds. Do people ever think that maybe their ideas are the ones that are stupid? Only giving advice or recommendations when they are sought is the genuinely gentler approach.
When you meet people like this there are no 'tactics' ... it's just about presenting the truth in good faith as you see it and listening actively to understand their point of view.
The problem I encounter is that many people posture as 'open-minded', but in reality they want to hear your opinion for the same reason an opponent wants you to show your cards after they've folded to a successful poker bluff. In this case it simply tells them "what side you're on" or "which tribe you belong to".
As a heuristic, I've found it's very difficult to formulate thoughtful questions if you're not genuinely curious about a topic. Therefore, I tend to use the 'questioning level of thoughtfulness' (QLOT) of my discussion partner as the signal of whether or not I'm dealing with someone who desires a good faith discussion.