I'm personally convinced that a lot of arguments in modern life boil down to not going to a sufficient level of detail. Mostly I find that both parties in an disagreement have valid points and simply haven't defined their terms precisely enough or been clear that they are talking about a p95 vs a p5 situation.
Agreed. A lot of the past conflict in my life boils down to this as well.
Conversely, I'm now in the habit of asking big "obvious" or "dumb" questions; questions that will highlight assumptions being made by each party. I'll often go slow at first to establish that these large unspoken thoughts are aligned and then work my way down to lower levels of detail until we hit an actual disagreement, rather than a mere misunderstanding.
It drives me crazy to spend 30 minutes arguing with someone only to find that "Wait, you're talking about THAT? I thought we were talking about THIS."
It's too common for people to find themselves arguing in the direction of the same general concept, but differences in their understanding/interpretation will diverge more and more the farther you get into the discussion. It's so helpful to lay out terms at the start when possible.
Absolutely. I summarise it as "abstraction is the curse of the age".
My wife works in governance, and when a proposed new policy is being discussed, she is always the one to say "so, how would the policy work in this situation, with these people involved? [Outlines a situation.] Tell me the steps."
And, of course, the elegant, abstract policy is shown to be unworkable or lead to manifestly unfair or absurd outcomes.
Agreed - and this is why I find it _so_ frustrating when I try to take a step back (or down, or whichever direction seems most intuitive to you) and actually define terms, only to get met with a "you're just nitpicking about terminology, I'm trying to communicate ideas!"
If we aren't using the same terminology, we can't possibly communicate ideas.
I usually phrase it as arguing parties discussing a high-dimensional idea by projecting it down to a much lower dimensional space, and if they can't seem to agree, it means they're projecting to widely different bases - considering different aspects.
Visual analogy: take a cylinder floating in the middle of the room, and a single light source you move around. As you move the light around, it'll cast shadows of very different shapes. This is merely projecting a 3D object to 2D, but if all anyone in the argument has is a single snapshot of a shadow, you could see how a person seeing a circle might have trouble agreeing with a person seeing a rectangle - and yet they're still talking about the same thing.
(The biggest hurdle is to get people to realize their view on a topic is a low-dimensional projection of a high-dimensional thing, and not just the thing - and that to do something productive with it, one must be willing to "walk around" a bit, project to different bases.)
I agree, most of the time you need to refine and quantify the question.
People are resistant to that though. If I'm being generous I think they think it's just saving time, because they 'know' the right answer. But the melancholy cynic in me wonders if it is just ego.
I don't think it's cynicism to realize that people are imperfect creatures subject to the whims of insecurity and ego, not being well slept, yadda yada. To me that's just realism.
it can be hard for me to admit that my entrenched beliefs may be flawed but enhanced with an updated worldview…now me thinks this is my ego…actually i am now sure of it…a detail i had not previously flushed out…
