Last week I wrote:
- [For] lawyers supporting clients, engineers presenting designs, accountants presenting financial accounts, or academics presenting analyses, styles are more "no-nonsense." They avoid colorful flashy emotional visual aids and music, use precise concise technical and unemotional language, make structured and standardized arguments, explicitly summarize and address opposing views, make methods and premises explicit, and warn early of conclusions and structures. … Authors who want to be seen as minimizing the propaganda element of their communications avoid using flashy styles. … [In contrast,] in such propaganda contexts, impressive charismatic leaders tend to speak in simple repetitive eloquent poetic vague emotional language, often with rambling structures, engaging stories, vivid colorful flashy emotional music and visual aids.
Communities of conversation "serious" about working together to make progress in understanding things tend not only to follow the above style conventions, they also tend to follow a key content rule: avoid arguing basic values.
Communities that mostly agree on how to evaluate claims can make a lot of progress, and such agreement comes naturally enough when discussion is restricted to "facts" connected to frequent observations and actions. Such communities can also discuss how to achieve a few commonly accepted values.
For example, athletes can talk about how to win games, lawyers about winning cases, salesmen about increasing sales, business managers about increasing profits, scientists about accelerating scientific progress, engineers about improving design efficiencies, medical experts about increasing health while decreasing costs, and economists about increasing policy "economic-efficiency."
In all of these cases, explicit agreement on simply-expressed values allows group conversations to progress effectively toward achieving such values. Members can specialize, develop and use specialized language and techniques, and evaluate others' contributions to the common cause. In contrast, groups that freely argue about basic values tend to fragment into like-thinking-cliques focused more on clique loyalty than on fairly crediting informative contributions.
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