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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Try: "I find your phasing... problematic." (Followed by a dignified silence.)

Seriously, though, if your purpose is to improve your own communication skills--and that's a laudable purpose to have--I recommend seriously adapting Socratic method. Ask questions, and genuinely listen to their responses. If they talk about broad ideas, come up with realistic concrete scenarios, preferably based on your own life or someone you know. If the terminology gets in the way of communication, suggest "tabooing" a particular word and see if it improves communication of ideas.

By the way, I recommend reading Plato's dialogues. The character of Socrates is great at walking the narrow path between a devil's advocate and a troll, and it falls to other characters to voice "common-sense" ideas.

This is also the strategy to employ if your goal is to cynically defeat your opponent. It's significantly easier to poke holes and raise hypotheticals than it is to defend your position and extemporaneously respond to hypotheticals, which means that the person asking the questions a) gets to direct the flow of conversation toward favorable ground, b) doesn't have to bother defending the weaker points of their own side, c) doesn't have to worry about getting (or appearing to get) stumped or contradicting oneself, d) has to dedicate less mental energy to coming up with questions than the other side does coming up with answers, and therefore has more brain space free to think tactically about the debate rather than the merits under debate themselves, and e) gets to come across more aggressive and confident than their opponent. "If you're explaining, you're losing" is a saying for a reason.

It should be noted though that smart people tend to cotton onto this relatively quickly, and it's a really great way to get everyone to hate you and refuse to argue with you in the future. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to argue with someone who has decided to play Socrates.

Plato's dialogues work only because Plato gets to write both sides.