Today in the New York Times, Pamela Paul introduces us to Bo Seo, a two-time world debate champion. He thinks we have a problem:
“We disagree badly: Our arguments are painful and useless.” We spend more time vilifying, undermining and nullifying those we disagree with than opening or changing their minds. If more people took their cues from the world of competitive debate, he argues in a recent book, it would be easier to get people to reconsider their views or at least consider those of others.
You may think I have no standing to disagree with this. Au contraire! It so happens that both my parents were university debate champions back in the day, and I'm quite sure that both of them would disagree with Bo Seo in the strongest possible terms.
(What do you say about that, mom? Give me a call.)
Formal debate is all about introducing facts—as many as possible—and then refuting them. In real life, this is not called debate, it's called the most boring thing in the entire world. It persuades no one. I've been doing it for 20 years and, as far as I can tell, have persuaded virtually no one of anything.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, almost literally doesn't know any facts. Nor can he refute them in any rational way. But he is practically a cult leader.
Sadly, people are not persuaded by facts. They are persuaded by emotions. They are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview. They are persuaded by "arguments" that are beneficial to them—perhaps monetarily, perhaps in conferring status, perhaps in vilifying people they already didn't like. This is how you win in real life.
And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're the exception. Oh, you might be. The odds are a thousand to one against, but there are a few of you. The other 999, however, from PhDs down to ninth-grade dropouts, have no interest in dull facts and have no way of evaluating them anyway. They just want their biases confirmed and their status in the world elevated. Do that, and you too can win the presidency.
Yes, quite right.
We are essentially just suped up Chimpanzees.
although probably the profile of readers for this sort of blog probably can claim to be episodically and in bounded ways more facts oriented, there is no doubt that all of them (of which myself not excluded) are far far less rational, and far far more emotional-status driven behind the façade of rationality than they can bring themselves to admit.
Delong calls us "Jumped Up East African Plains Apes"
Nothing racist in those adjectival choices ("jumped up", "East African").
De Long is a glibertarian-qurious kkklown.
One of your better ones, Kevin. I have nothing to add.
There is also the psychological effect that the more a person's position or belief is challenged, the more that person become entrenched in that position or belief.
Amen. I've always said there's a "Fallacy fallacy." If you're pointing out fallacies in people's arguments, you aren't persuading.
Yes, MAGA's don't need no stinkin' facts - they know what they want. But what has to be realized is that the most powerful motivations are often those involving group loyalties. People will obviously give up their lives for their country or their side in a civil war or for some smaller group. People often think they are dedicated to some noble cause, but for most people what they are really fighting for is the group they identify with. When the group divisions get strong enough, nothing that the other side does is right while everything that your side does is right. This is not just cult behavior, it is universal human behavior. Cult leaders and many national political leaders are those who can tap into basic group identification factors such as race and religion, even if there are no real material conflicts.
And it is not inherently stupid people who join these tribal divisions, it is those who have been most thoroughly indoctrinated in cultural things like racism or religion.
You're trying to persuade me by offering facts, like people aren't persuaded by facts? Maybe Bob Somerby will take this on after he gets through with Wittgenstein.
"You're trying to persuade me by offering facts..."
This is the irony of this whole discussion. No one here is offering anything but facts.
They don't appear to have any impact in the moment but maybe later on, upon reflection, we may alter our opinion somewhat. Like on the comment about lead poisoning below.
>> I've been doing it for 20 years and, as far as I can tell, have persuaded virtually no one of anything.<<
As I indicated before, this is untrue. I, and I believe many others, were persuaded by your lead/crime hypothesis. I was a hard sell. I have my degree in Criminology. I worked in law enforcement. Many of the people I know also work(ed) in law enforcement. When I first read your postings on the subject I thought you were nuts and said so.
But you persuaded me with facts backed up by studies. I am persuaded. And for those who aren’t completely persuaded I’ll bet there are many who have a more open mind on the subject. And I don’t flatter myself to think I’m “one in a thousand”. There are very few other opinions I have that anyone could budge me on.
Me, too!!
How interesting! The lead/crime hypothesis has been something I have been interested in for a long time (since the 90s), and I started reading Drum because he was one of the few people who also talked about it. Then, all of a sudden, everyone was talking about it.
I'm still waiting for people to talk about cancer and benzene exposure. "Don't live next to a gas station" is one of my mom's rules, but no one else seems to care about it.
I think you've just driven the point home - who has more emotional pull than Mom?
Worse yet--A gas refinery.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7691047/
Paul's op-ed also ignores the very real differences between different types of debate practiced in HS and colleges. Yes, there's "Oxford" style, but AFAICT, a lot of competitive debating has, for years, not used this style at all. This American Life did a program many years ago on the weirdness of at least one of these other styles, with a focus on "facts-per-minute", and rules that allow just speaking over an opponent.
I do happen to like Oxford style debates a lot, but nowhere does Paul acknowledge that this is not necessarily the experience of "debate club" for many people.
Good point about types of debate. My understanding is that to be competitive in American intercollegate debate you have to learn to speak fast enough that a normal person won't be able to comprehend the argument you are making, much less be persuaded by it. The reason is that if your opponent rattles off ten arguments, and you've prepared counterarguments to all ten of them but speak more slowly than your opponent you may only get through eight of your ten counterarguments before you run out of time. Your opponent would then get points for presenting arguments that you didn't counter, and you likely lose the debate.
Click and Clack "The Tappet Brothers" used to talk about the Dopeler Effect, which they defined as the tendency of dumb ideas to sound smarter if they were coming at you at high speed.
Yep, a young Michael Sandel (Harvard philosopher) learned this the hard way when then-governor Ronald Reagan visited his high school.
>>“I had prepared a long list of what I thought were very tough questions,” recalls Sandel, now 67, via video-link from his study in Boston. “On Vietnam, on the right of 18-year-olds to vote – which Reagan opposed – on the United Nations, on social security. I thought I would make short work of him in front of that audience. He responded genially, amiably and respectfully. After an hour I realised I had not prevailed in this debate, I had lost. He had won us over without persuading us with his arguments. Nine years later he would get elected to the White House in the same way.”
Kevin writes;
> Sadly, people are not persuaded by facts. They are persuaded by emotions. They are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview.
what are we to make, if this is true, of the swings that occur between the start and end of an oxford-style debate? is it just an illusion?
That an Oxford-style debate in no way resembles the real world.
No doubt, no doubt. But then the claim is not "sadly, people are not persuaded by facts", but rather "in most real world situations, people not persuaded by facts". And there's an untested corollary that maybe if more people were exposed to Oxford-style debates, they might change their minds based on facts a little more often.
A quick summary: competitive debate ≠ argument ≠ persuasion
There are flaws to sticking to "facts". If you stick to "facts", there is no religious or spiritual rebuttal. Shutting down argument in this manner does not persuade anyone.
Most issues are not binary, but rather, have several intervening dependencies and circumstances that give us shades of grey, not black and white. If you want to persuade someone, you have to, at least mentally, account for as many of those intervening dependencies and circumstances, then address them (or be prepared to).
We have a word for all this: Thoughtfulness.
Are we entering epistemology? I think so.
Kevin,
You persuaded me of the lead-crime link in the latter-half of the 20th century.
But I already didn't like lead, so . . .
Presenting facts and arguments. Yeah, sure -- if there actually were "facts" that people could agree upon. Lefties recognize that the right wing just makes up their "facts" on the spot and fervently believe things that just ain't true. That are observably not true. But the reactionary right disbelieves anything reported by "reliable sources" ... because.
You can't "debate" under those circumstances. There literally is no common ground.
Oh, and the "vilifying" and "personal attacks"? Don't "both-sider" this issue. The demonization is coming almost entirely from one side.
Yes. Who was it that coined the term "alternative facts"? Was it "both sides"? I think not.
Without disagreeing with the importance of emotional appeals in persuasion, facts must also be important, else why would one side lie about them so much? Come to think about it, why does Kevin even bother to give us the facts about our economic situation? If they are unimportant, does this just amount to mental masturbation on his part?
So my group is…Center Left, and I obviously believe the far is nuts, the far right is insane. However, am I wrong? Give me some facts and I can be convinced. After all,
I read new republic and nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, i've memorized lerner and golden
I feel like i'm almost a jew
But when it comes to times like (whatever war)
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me….
*left
Me too. But now I've grown older and wiser.
Even if people were persuaded by facts, I don't think "debate" would get us very far.
The relevancy and accuracy of facts is situational and conditional, and it's really easy to misinterpret facts if you fail to understand the larger picture. Plus there are rarely just two opposing sides. There's a reason that academics engage in a scholarly conversation more than a debate, and every analysis has to deal with confounding variables. Without context, facts are often meaningless "gotcha" statements that don't actually get you to an optimal solution.
I disagree. People don't think solely in terms of facts, but facts can certainly persuade people at least some of the time. People naturally understand that it is a good idea to replicate strategies that have worked in the past, and avoid those that have failed in the past. That understanding can get overpowered by bias, but my own read of history is that facts usually win in the long term.
A fact that jumps up and bites you on the ass can change minds. Ref: Having a pregnant daughter carrying an unviable fetus.
Sometimes.
Glenn Thompson (Q - PA) has the mental discipline to sanction his son's sodomite nuptials while casting a vote in the House to deny those same rites to other homosexuals.
I dunno - I don't think I'd give up on reasoned debate that quickly. If facts never win out over emotion, how to explain Biden's win over Trump in 2020? Or Macron over LePen?
Both reason and emotion play into the formula, but it is not always a slam dunk for the emotional side.
It seems the emotional attachment needs to rupture for reason to prevail. I mean, under emotional response theory of elections, decorated war veteran Juan Mc Cain should have gotten close to Bush-Dukakis numbers in the electoral college against a callow African of questionable US provenance like Obummer, but after eight years riding the wave of post-Climpton moral restoration under compassionate conservative Dubya, the country decided our amygdala was getting us nowhere.
Conversely, after Obummer proved one of the good ones for eight years, our limbic system rebelled at further presidency by geek in the way of Hillary & went with our gut, going for the base impulses of El Jefe.
The question now: is joebiden a mentally enfeebled simpleton whose continuing appeal rests on emotion, thus setting him up to play smiling grandpa to De Santis's conniving demifascist & win reelection, or is the current president a cunning & canny despot himself who will lose to De Santis's affable Yalie baseball player self.
What happened in 2020 is that four years of Trump inspired a whole lot of emotion in Democrats and independents.
More like, four years of MAGA didn't bring Teh Revolution, as Susan Sarandon claimed.
At least she got her payoff from FOX with the casting on Monarch.
I think that's a little unfair to Bo Seo, who was tacitly acknowledging the truth of Kevin's argument but suggesting people change. It opens the interesting question of whether emotion-based opinion-making is inevitable, or whether people can choose to adopt a more rational approach. Hopefully it's the latter; for example, many people's consumer choices become more rational as they get older, learning not to be swayed by emotion but to consider objective facts about potential purchases in deciding where to spend their money.
Debate with this guy: https://twitter.com/WUTangKids/status/1569040845642375168?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1569040845642375168%7Ctwgr%5Ecfb7a72b768371e8b78c09cae3bf80e0b84d3f30%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Deschatont_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.eschatonblog.com2F20222F092Fsunday-afternoon.htmlt_d%3DEschaton3A20Sunday20Afternoont_t%3DEschaton3A20Sunday20Afternoons_o%3Ddescversion%3D0837a7fb2afa86b68e4ee5098ec9905b&fbclid=IwAR3-Kp8-Z4NXDlX-7Ly6uu2ZWv0_uuc5J0MnTqdHbZUuASUjVFwDMpyBxFU
Oh, good grief! How many of those MAGA caps are covering up the spot where they were dropped on their heads as children?
Says you.
My own experience with formal debate is that it's all about winning. And everyone involved in it will contort themselves, their facts, and the truth around doing this.
It's also a crabbed and stunted thing. This is, of course, my own personal experience, but I remember throwing up my hands multiple times in HS and undergrad after being told "you're making moral and ethical arguments backed up solely by inductive reasoning based on your own priors. Stick to facts." And it's like... no? Screw you? Morals and ethics often don't have a strong basis in pure facts? I can't PROVE "racism is awful" using facts.
Argumentation, disputation, that's important. But formal debate is a plague upon the land.
"My own experience with formal debate is that it's all about winning."
Winning and losing. Somebody must win, somebody must lose. That binary outcome is a big part of our problem. Almost all our political discourse is based on that assumption -- who's right and who's wrong. Elections are binary events, so that's understandable. But governing is something different. Usually, it requires negotiation -- a win-win where both sides get something in order to reach agreement. (Therefore, we have a governing problem when one party refuses to negotiate at all.)
I find discussions about most things, even politics sometimes, are worthwhile even with people I disagree with as long as both sides are open and curious to learn more and raising points in good faith. But if someone is trying to convince me of something I don't believe, forget it. A lot of our trouble is that people are trained to think they must "win" every discussion. But "winning" means the discussion is over, and in life (unlike debate matches) we ought to aim to keep the discussion going, if possible.
The world isn't a debating club because the right wing isn't interested, in the slightest, in any fact which does not already support what they believe.
The last time anyone on the right was convinced of anything was when they were convinced they could not just lynch black people.
They are about to be convinced, maybe, that global warming is not a joke.
Otherwise:
The anti tax crowd is no nearer to being convinced of the need for taxation then they ever were. Its as if there is some part of this which is up for debate. With nothing up for debate, well, who cares what the rules of the debate would be?
The religious crew is also not interested in any facts. See above.
The anti regulation crew can be picked off if the need for a regulation becomes so ridiculously obvious that you have to accept it. Note that a non-insubstantial set of this crew wasn't even won over on the need for mandatory vaccination in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, let that one sink in.
The anti brown person crew is not interested in debating whether its in their -enlightened self interest to be accepting of refugees, or facts which show that the Washington Redskins name is crazy offensive. So don't waste too much time on facts for them, either. You could show them a census form in which 100% of all native americans said they were offended and it would get you absolutely nowhere.
The only reason Kevins's lead paint thing got any traction at all was that some people are actually interested in what causes crime. I mean, some are only interested in punishment of crime, which is clearly not the same.
We on the left are drowning in facts, and exist in an endless debate, internally and externally, over what those facts mean in terms of causation. But don't think the right wing is even remotely interested.
I would suggest that MIT students and MIT graduates are capable of developing rational opinions based on facts. The institute's position on global warming is an example.
You have persuaded me that I am mostly unpersuadable ... (!)
Per Kellyanne:
"Alternative facts" was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States ...
The more refined version of Fruity G's "truth isn't truth" from 2016 qampaign season Meet the Press.
Malarkey. Just the other day someone changed me from being a Ranked Choice Voting supporter to being an Approval Voting supporter.
Rhetoric, not debate per se. Logos, pathos and ethos.
You need to connect to your audience in order to reach them, and only then can you try to lead them.
If you can construct a story that blames the "other" for someone's problems in life, your both seeing them, validating their concerns, and giving them a scapegoat. Dictator's playbook?
"Donald Trump, on the other hand, almost literally doesn't know any facts. Nor can he refute them in any rational way. But he is practically a cult leader."
Not just practically a cult leader, but the most successful in nearly a century. And yet the arc of history bends toward sanity. The key is not to be obsessed by our little span in time but look far enough into the past and imagine far enough into the future.
I suspect that getting people to listen to discussion (and sometimes debate) is the first step towards moving their opinions. That's why college graduates are slightly more liberal than others -- they were required to take some courses in liberal arts, and that in and of itself exposed them to alternative points of view. They were at least challenged by the fact that there are numerous conflicting points of view on everything from American history to economics, and they are put in a position where they are confronted by an opinion leader who is their teacher.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that modern debate clubs bear zero resemblance to what your parents remember, nor what you think, nor what you do. They are actually, if anything, less useful or convincing. Here, for example, is a debate between Michigan State and UC Berkeley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui8XXE1friM
It's NEEEEEEERDS! all the way down, regardless.
https://youtu.be/Z7_QQn_2McM
Comment 1: Conversation, not debate, is how you change a person's mind. A debate is just a performance, and the performer better know their audience lest they make the common mistake of being unaware of the fact that they're its only member.
Comment 2: Kevin ... you change my mind often. I'd otherwise have no interest in your posts.
Comment 3: "Facts" are not reality. They are approximations of reality that are more or less useful and, depending on the interest being served, more or less accurate. What Donald has cottoned on to is that accuracy is irrelevant if the interest being served is me, myself and I. What his behavior should be teaching all of us is that accuracy is a given if the interest being served is not just me, or not just the people that think like me, but the greater good first and foremost.
Comment 4: I agree that people are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview and only by arguments that are beneficial to them. But what if that shared worldview is that serving the greater good is the way to maximize benefit? I think you'd get something like what's happening in Ukraine. Wouldn't it be nice if didn't require a war?
Comment 5: My guesstimate was 95% as opposed to 99.9%.
Comment 6: I'm open to having my mind changed on any of the above comments by fact-based arguments.