If you did not know whom a given argument came from, or who will see your counter argument, what is the best strategy for your expressing your position?

This constraint alone would mitigate the felt urge to engage in ad hominems, polite evasions, and most redundant information-reducing mechanisms so common in arguments over Big Questions.

I think consistent adherency would lead us all to act like Feynman: clear, concise, and without any qualms at all about refuting an idiotic statement no matter where it comes from.

One possible solution is to do your disagreeing with people you are not in social competition with. That includes people who are dead but whose arguments survive in their books, people whose social status is much higher than yours already, people you are interacting with only via arguments, whom you will never meet and be in competition with, … . One could even set up an internet forum where all posters were anonymous, with some mechanism for matching up those with differing beliefs on a variety of subjects.

BTW great post Hal.

Really? How do you know this? Isn’t this begging the question?

1) People assume you are insincere. They don’t believe you think they are right, and get upset when you tell them you concede. They insist on continuing to try to ‘convince’ you until they see signals that they believe in.

2) When you tell someone that they’ve just made a telling point and that you’re going to have to sit back and rethink your entire argument, they won’t let you. In fact, they most often keep reiterating bits of information that you’ve already covered and had no effect on your position (either because you agreed to them, or because you could provide cogent counterarguments.) I’ve had to actually RUN AWAY from people who would win the argument by simply shutting up, but who seemed constitutionally incapable of doing so, to the extent that leaving was the only way to end the ‘debate’.

The majority of disagreements I have which result in the mutual disrespect of agreeing to disagree seem to be on topics where additional evidence is hard to come by, and suspicion of bias (likely true!) in both participants degrades communication.

What disagreements have you successfully practiced on?

Perhaps you are a candidate for the Nice party, which seeks to win power in order to enslave the whole population apart from a small clique. Then you seek to convince people to vote for you, out of personal interest.

Perhaps you are part of a small tribe, just managing to support itself, with a strong moral sense that no-one should be allowed to starve. You try to persuade someone that his farming method could be improved, for your own good.

However, it is in my interest to be as close to right about things as I can possibly be. This involves assessing other’s views, and changing my own when appropriate. If X thinks he will gain kudos by overcoming in argument someone who actually knows better than him, I believe that his loss when he finally comes up against reality will be greater than any loss of kudos from admitting earlier that he was wrong.

Why should Dawkins care if someone believes that the world was created in six days six thousand years ago, if that belief makes the believer happy?

I do agree to disagree about lots of things, especially where my potential loss from being wrong is low. It may be better to live with a false but unimportant belief about X, than to spend the energy necessary to find what belief about X is perfectly right.

It’s so true. *Sob*

Alan, there’s a huge amount of maths here that defines terms like ‘disagreement’ and ‘evidence’ in a very fixed way, which addresses your first few points.

a samurai empties his mind, all the better to respond automatically.

Not sure how this is being framed as a bad thing. Those automatic responses are probably as close to a bias-free answer as you can get from a human. Remember that precious half-second before your mind is made up.

For point 5, it may well be true that alpha-arrogance is an evolutionarily useful response. But you don’t come to this site for that, you come to find out how to get closer to rationality. If it’s the pursuit of truth you’re after, then yes, it is worth it. Point 6 is a very good one.

Point 8,: put aside that immediate moral repugnance and ask ‘are they right?’ If so, update. If not, convince them that they’re wrong.