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?
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.