Many hold strong beliefs and opinions, however not many know the roots of their belief. If a person agrees to explore it, both of you will learn something new and fascinating. The problem is finding someone who wants to think and ask the questions. This goes for both. Many want to “convince” someone, but how much do you truly know about the thing you’re trying to prove?
This also comes back to the “why?” game so many kids play. Parents get annoyed by it, but are they really annoyed at the game or their lack of knowledge depth? Play the game, find out how deep you lake of knowledge goes
This process is generally referred to as The Socratic Method. As you said, the devil is in first convincing both parties within a debate that they should be searching for shared understanding through the process of attacking and defending ideas, not attacking and defending each other.
Be very careful @dominicHillson, you are close to realising that the dumbest 95% of people defaulted to their views and rationalise their surrounding beliefs. The important part is that at no point have they or will they verify their beliefs. They are literally copying others and aren’t aware of it. If you press them most of the time they will get progressively more “uncivil”. There is a reason fascists genocide their enemies and don’t care about honesty or correct language. Power is how you go against nature, and if you are wrong, the only way to “win”.
If you guys want to rebuild your beliefs so they are actually true, you have to start with figuring out what truth is. I know philosophy is a scary and worthless sounding thing, but its literally the attempts to understand things through reason(literally having reasons for believing) and refining those views.
Epistemology is the philosophy of truth and knowledge. Some examples of epistemological thinking are
- Are the people around me a reliable way to determine truth? ex. In a Hindu region, the average person will vouch for Hinduism, in an Arabic region, Islam etc etc. Can mutually exclusive things in different regions become simultaneously true just because people around them believe it?
- Are experts a reliable way to determine truth? ex. Blood letting was a common profession, as was astrology.
- Are family members a reliable way to determine truth? ex. one family believes one thing, another believes the opposite.
- Are the most popular people a reliable way to determine truth? ex. Hitler could be argued as a popular person in his area and time, so also could any random influencer.
- Are the most powerful people reliable sources of truth?
You can clearly see a path this takes, so let me give a silly story.
The most popular politician during a debate says “You all trust me and my skill! That’s why I’m popular. The answer to the great question is three!”. Then, the expert mathemagician takes the spotlight to answer the question of one plus one. “Clearly an expert knows the answer and not some silly politician! After great calculations, the answer, is four!”. The crowd thinks, clearly the answer must be either three or four, maybe the uncertain could compromise to three and a half. If only there was some way to reliably come to a true conclusion.
To me personally, truth is the most internally consistent configuration of information that I have, cleaned up using cognitive dissonance as my guide!
This also comes back to the “why?” game so many kids play. Parents get annoyed by it, but are they really annoyed at the game or their lack of knowledge depth?
I used to think this as well, until I had a three-year-old. One day she yelled under the bathroom door, “WHY ARE YOU POOPING??” I’ve realized that young kids may ask “why” more often to annoy and test social boundaries instead of actually trying to learn something. When she does ask “why” in order to learn, it’s fun explaining and teaching her. But it’s not as often as I thought it would be.
Well, why were you pooping?
💀
Ah, I see :D I guess it is important not to miss those actual sparks of curiousity though
Sounds like being grilled on reddit.
this doesn’t guarantee that the conclusion is correct, or is in scope of expertise of either of you
It doesn’t, but at least it makes both think and hopefully improve the quality of the arguments. And with internet at our finger tips, it doesn’t take much to double check a couple things :)
That’s a part of the enlightenment and purpose for open-minded people. One or both may learn they really don’t understand what they so firmly believed.
Why?
Why what? I wont answer unless you ask properly!
I think that style is the counter for kids asking “why?” just to piss you off or push boundaries. It’ll take too much effort to spam and will force real questions.
Not always. A lot of the time people will just lie about what they actually believe and why they believe it.
For example. People are going to say they support free speech because they believe in it as an important principle for a free society. No one is going to say they support free speech because actually they’re a full on Nazi and this is the only way to get their message out to the public until they get the reigns and then they can dispense will al the “free speech” stuff and lock down the opposition.
Actually this applies to a lot of politics related stuff. For example politicians always talk about how tax breaks are going to stimulate the economy, none of them say “well my mate paid me a few million under the table to push this, even though ‘trickle down’ has never worked in the 100+ years that it’s been around”.
Security patches, Everyone says “We need to insure that all new software has up to date security and patches.”, no one says “We want to collect every single bit of telemetry and integrate end to end DRM and the only way that can work is if the device is completely locked down so the users can’t bypass or root it.”.
You’re right. Going down through the levels of “okay, and why?” works on a theoretical level but requires both the person asking the right why-question and a level of intellectual honesty from both parties that is incredibly hard to find.
It’s not a bad approach for questioning your own beliefs though, if you can muster the strength to be honest with yourself.
That works only when people are ready to question their opinions. Many are not. The ‘why’ question does not seem to make sense to them – why ask for reasoning, when we know ‘the fact’?
The only meaningful ‘why’ in such situation may be: ‘why I am still talking to them?’
See also Double Cruxing
That was an interesting read - thanks for posting
eventually both of you will come to a conclusion
But not necessarily an agreement.
I remember asking my father in law why he doesn’t believe in climate change. It boiled down to him saying the democrats just want to control us. When I asked why he said just so they have more power for power’s sake. I told him I’m willing to accept that politicians can be like that (because many are) but why does he believe that the republicans are immune to this craving of power or if he thought republicans denying climate change could be just for the sake of controlling people to get more power (like he accused democrats of) and surprise surprise he couldn’t give me an answer other than democrats are corrupt and want more power but republicans don’t (which isn’t an answer because I’m asking why).
Turns out most everyone thinks based on reasoning developed by years of cumulative, biased experiences that ultimately amount to fundamentally distinct axioms of how the world works. Few people actually have opinions based on “logic”, least of all the people who fly the banner of “rational” or “emotion free” opinions. Answering why just provides post-hoc explanations rather than an actual cause (which humans are great at coming up with, just look at split brain cases). Which just turns most “big topic” disagreements into competitions over who can come up with a better sounding justification.
I had a commander who used to drive all the techs crazy by asking “Why?” His philosophy was to ask “Why?” six times whether he understood or not to make sure his sergeants had thought through any proposal.
Hmmm, but why?
Why do you ask?
Why wouldn’t they ?
Because if we did that all the time and everywhere, we would become smarter as a whole human race and maybe gain enough knowledge to stop slaughtering each other ❤️
Why do you think that is?
Because every human is continuously forced to check why they believe in what they believe and if it still makes sense. You build on pillars you once assume are stable. But with your latest knowledge and the question „Why?“, you may recognize some to be more brittle than you thought.
Why, necessarily, would they not follow human confirmation bias?
I personally think that they wouldn’t follow confirmation bias because in the discussion of “why?” we already have them questioning and looking deeper
Why that?
Why should I do that?
I think what you are looking for is kinda related to street epistemology.
Great responses in this post. Thank you for additional source
This reminds me of the 5 Why method from Toyota
We use this at work a lot when there’s been some kind of failure. The idea is to try and get to the real root cause of an issue, not just the immediate cause. Like maybe an engine failed because a valve didn’t open - you could correct that by replacing the valve, but why didn’t the valve open? Maybe it was stuck and the initial force to open it was more than the actuator could handle. Okay, so maybe we could lubricate it somehow, but why was it stuck. Maybe the supplier changed their cleaning method and switched to a new chemical. Why did they do that? Oh, because it was cheaper. That’s the real root cause: the supplier tried to cut costs by switching to an inferior cleaning chemical. Time to work with them to fix that. All of the other fixes would have only helped that one valve on that one engine - this one fixes all of them.
I don’t believe that’s true. People have different value hierarchies, so you won’t necessarily agree with them no matter how much you clarify knowledge.
For example, my value hierarchy changed when I got attacked on the street once. It made me realize how terrifying it was to see my life about to end, and that moved “staying alive” up the hierarchy.
Now I think taking away people’s weapons is a terrible thing. But I can’t convince anyone else of this by talking to them about it, unless they value the protection of life as powerfully as I do.
I thought I valued my safety, but I really didn’t. I took a lot more risks before that happened, because I valued fun, social status, money, exploration over safety.
So my values shifted, without any new knowledge of the world (at least not that I can convey in words), and as a result my decisions and worldview changed.
It sounds horrible, but I don’t know if I could alter another’s philosophy on this by talking. I’d have to disguise myself as a stranger and beat them half to death, then come back as myself again to really get on the same page.
