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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   34845 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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The better thing to do is ask what would make them change their mind? What would that look like? Even then, if you showed them the exact proof they said they’d need, they most likely wouldn’t change their mind.

I'm actually pretty interested in this line of questioning, and debating the merits of this in and of itself. I wonder, is this line of reasoning ("what would it take for you to change your mind") questionable in some way? On the surface, I like it a lot, because it tries to operationalize the conversation, make it productive.

But really, do people really know what it would take for them to change their mind? Should people honestly really be able to know what it'd take for them to change their mind, or is it something that no human can really access? In which case, this line of augmentation ends up looking more like some form of sophistry, like "arguments as soldiers" or something. It can just become an excuse to say that your opponent is irrational, even if they're acting the same as you would in a comparable situation. After all, I don't think it's usually hard to find individual studies that support anyone's foregone conclusions, and most people wouldn't change their mind after seeing one, or even several studies contradicting their closely held beliefs, and I'm not sure they should be expected to (See Beware the man of one study and Epistemic learned helplessness).

So as much as I dislike what I personally deem to be irrationality on the left and refusal to change their minds when presented with data, I do also feel like I dislike when this approach is taken towards me, and that this form of argumentation may be making isolated demands for rigor. What do others think?

As I often point out, getting the phrasing exactly right is like writing a computer program and having it work perfectly on all inputs without you ever editing it after you write it. It can happen, but I wouldn't count on it.

The answer to "what would change your mind on X" should always be "I can't tell you because I am no good at phrasing things without loopholes". (It's similar to why it's a bad idea to bet on X; you're no good at phrasing the bet without loopholes.)

If you're playing fair and won't treat it as a gotcha if they can explain why you've found a loophole, and you don't demand absolute submission, you can ask "what would get you to at least consider...."

I wonder, is this line of reasoning ("what would it take for you to change your mind") questionable in some way?

No, but most devoted ideologues will just give an impossible standard. Or if you meet their standard, will relentlessly nitpick to justify why it doesn't really meet their standard. It sounds like it should work, but it won't -- a lot of beliefs are just immune to reason because they were never formed from reason in the first place.

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