The most prestigious articles in popular media tend to argue for a (value-adjacent) claim. And such articles tend to be long. Even so, most can’t be bothered to define their terms carefully, or to identify and respond to the main plausible counter-arguments to their argument. Such articles are instead filled with anecdotes, literary allusions, and the author’s history of thoughts on the subject. A similar thing happens even in many academic philosophy papers; they leave little space for their main positive argument, which is then short and weakly defended.
You can presume, but I don't think it's the case, or perhaps by reasonable you mean agreeable. But even so, I often find interesting statements much more from people I disagree with about other things. In fact I disagree with almost everyone about something.
I'm currently trying to plow through some post-modern work, and it works like this to a shocking degree. It's like 99.99% of the whole work is just going through the post-modern motions, which basically just means the author speaking to you in a post-modern way. There simply doesn't seem to be any meat of the matter. I don't even understand what they're trying to do.
a rule-of-thumb for presentations to adults is that they won't pay attention unless the medium or topic changes every 10 minutes. In regard to liturgy, while the 10-min rule may apply, some get their full-fillment from the music or even pictures and architecture, so those are not preliminary to the message - massage is the message.
"Regarding media articles and sermons, a direct if perhaps surprising implication of all this is that most of us are often not very open to hearing and being persuaded by arguments until speakers show us that they sufficiently share our values, and are sufficiently impressive in this performance."
That doesn't sound surprising at all to me. There's even some defense for it. If a person has reasonable views (or at least what we think are reasonable views) in one area, they are presumably more likely to be reasonable in other areas too.
Those seem more like reasons to know something about the author and have some period experience with them than to have a preamble before each new argument.
Obligatory foreplay: I'm mostly being devil's advocate here.
re "But the main goal is to share beliefs with impressive value allies.": even if my goal really is to have the most accurate beliefs, there may be good reasons to see this kind of 'foreplay' first. If you are trying to prove some fact to me, there are several things that I want to know in addition to the actual meat of your claim and its proof, including:
- you are not making too many mistakes- you are not arguing in bad faith, lying, etc- I agree with the things you take as unstated axioms
Now I *can* work with just a bare proof - I can comb it carefully for mistakes, I can fact check your assertions, I can notice the places you don't justify an axiom and decide whether I agree with it. But it might be more efficient for you to establish a lot of this separately: if you manage to establish in general that you're careful, intelligent, honest, etc, then I can get a similar level of confidence in the correctness of your proof while spending less time analyzing it. This efficiency gain can be more pronounced if we have an iterated prover-verifier relationship - you only need to establish all these proof-independent things once and then I can more easily accept a large number of proofs.
And if I *do* manage to establish that you are a rational agent who shares my priors, then by Aumann's Agreement Theorem I will come to the same conclusions as you once I've seen your evidence, so why shouldn't I just skip your proof and accept your conclusion?
Now of course none of this will ever work 100% in reality - e.g. no one actually shares *all* my priors, no one *never* makes mistakes, etc. But it does mean that the strategy of spending less time reading (and hence, by the prover, writing) the proof and more time reading (and thus writing) some foreplay is not as crazy a truth-finding strategy as it might appear.
The points Sophists demand you make before your argument is considered valid include proving your values, proving the truth of your claim, and proving that your claim is also useful. (Though if they immediately perceive the claim as useful, then the requirements of accuracy and correct values are waived.) It is all but impossible to meet all of these requirements in front of a hostile audience, and literally impossible if space is limited.
Nor can these points be addressed preemptively, because then the actual point will be buried in theoretically unnecessary verbiage and you will be accused of being defensive against attacks that have not been made; but if you only reply once those arguments are made, the reply is liable to be buried and overlooked.
The traps of having to prove your values and the necessity of the claim you are making, and not just its accuracy, work too well. The only solution if you want fair analysis is to ban those traps. This is why, ideally, science and hard news reporting only require that claims meet the thresholds of newsworthiness and accuracy.
In hard science not too closely aligned with commercial or political interests, this ideal may even be close to achieved, and occasionally, responsible news media will engage in reporting for newsworthiness' sake despite their editorial agenda. Elsewhere, particularly in politics, the assumptions that accurate newsworthy statements are self-justifying, and popular inaccurate claims inherently deserve rebuttal, are so widely rejected that they are associated with the "rationalist" niche viewpoint.
I remember getting better reactions to my arguments when I preceded them by quaint premises such as, "To be clear, my end goal is maximizing the average wealth of the world rather than for the rich."
Initially, I was offended that people might consider that I could have an alternative premise. Gradually, I realized that it's very important for most people to establish a common foundation, even if it's -- to people like us -- obvious.
Wow, this is describing a pattern in my life to an astonishing degree.
In tricky discussions with my partner and with co-workers, I have learned (well, OK, I'm still learning) to provide what I call "preambles": introductory speeches where I emphasize our common values and shared intentions, and help them anticipate that what I say next might feel off-putting or abrupt or alarming, but that the last thing I want is for them to feel unappreciated, and all I am hoping for is that they think about what I'm saying, if not right now than later. If I provide a preamble like that, I find the other people seem to feel much, much better when I make a provocative or contradictory point to what they, or the group, had previously been saying. It also seems to make them more likely to agree with me, or at least to acknowledge some validity in what I'm saying.
I used to assume that this sort of argument cushioning was mostly necessary if what I was going to say was unusually unexpected or speculative; I figured that if I was pointing out something that was squarely within our established intentions or agreements, something that was very clearly sensible, that this ramp-up wouldn't be necessary. But it's turned out that the opposite is true: the more my point seems squarely justified and valuable on its merits, the more risky it is for me to omit this pre-conciliatory introduction.
One theory I have is that when I'm saying something that nobody thinks they should have though of already, it doesn't elicit shame or defensiveness; whereas when it's something someone might feel embarrassed for missing, or which points out departures in practice from the stated process, it elicits feelings of shame, and people need to find a way to balance out the intensity of that feeling. I of course feel the same thing on the other end, and sometimes I succeed in realizing that's happening and coping with the shame with excitement that I'm learning something new and becoming more sophisticated than I was before; but sometimes I fail to catch it, and I cope with my shame with aggressiveness.
Relevant article:Persuasion and the Prestige Paradox: Are High Status People More Likely to Liehttps://quillette.com/2021/...
You can presume, but I don't think it's the case, or perhaps by reasonable you mean agreeable. But even so, I often find interesting statements much more from people I disagree with about other things. In fact I disagree with almost everyone about something.
I'm currently trying to plow through some post-modern work, and it works like this to a shocking degree. It's like 99.99% of the whole work is just going through the post-modern motions, which basically just means the author speaking to you in a post-modern way. There simply doesn't seem to be any meat of the matter. I don't even understand what they're trying to do.
a rule-of-thumb for presentations to adults is that they won't pay attention unless the medium or topic changes every 10 minutes. In regard to liturgy, while the 10-min rule may apply, some get their full-fillment from the music or even pictures and architecture, so those are not preliminary to the message - massage is the message.
most of us are often not very open to hearing and being persuaded by arguments until speakers show us that they sufficiently share our values
You don't win hearts and minds. You win hearts then minds.
"Regarding media articles and sermons, a direct if perhaps surprising implication of all this is that most of us are often not very open to hearing and being persuaded by arguments until speakers show us that they sufficiently share our values, and are sufficiently impressive in this performance."
That doesn't sound surprising at all to me. There's even some defense for it. If a person has reasonable views (or at least what we think are reasonable views) in one area, they are presumably more likely to be reasonable in other areas too.
It seems like our discussions of race are so full of this as to make them mostly useless.
To the extent that each audience includes people without that knowledge or previous experience, a preamble can help fill the gap.
Those seem more like reasons to know something about the author and have some period experience with them than to have a preamble before each new argument.
Obligatory foreplay: I'm mostly being devil's advocate here.
re "But the main goal is to share beliefs with impressive value allies.": even if my goal really is to have the most accurate beliefs, there may be good reasons to see this kind of 'foreplay' first. If you are trying to prove some fact to me, there are several things that I want to know in addition to the actual meat of your claim and its proof, including:
- you are not making too many mistakes- you are not arguing in bad faith, lying, etc- I agree with the things you take as unstated axioms
Now I *can* work with just a bare proof - I can comb it carefully for mistakes, I can fact check your assertions, I can notice the places you don't justify an axiom and decide whether I agree with it. But it might be more efficient for you to establish a lot of this separately: if you manage to establish in general that you're careful, intelligent, honest, etc, then I can get a similar level of confidence in the correctness of your proof while spending less time analyzing it. This efficiency gain can be more pronounced if we have an iterated prover-verifier relationship - you only need to establish all these proof-independent things once and then I can more easily accept a large number of proofs.
And if I *do* manage to establish that you are a rational agent who shares my priors, then by Aumann's Agreement Theorem I will come to the same conclusions as you once I've seen your evidence, so why shouldn't I just skip your proof and accept your conclusion?
Now of course none of this will ever work 100% in reality - e.g. no one actually shares *all* my priors, no one *never* makes mistakes, etc. But it does mean that the strategy of spending less time reading (and hence, by the prover, writing) the proof and more time reading (and thus writing) some foreplay is not as crazy a truth-finding strategy as it might appear.
Ye, the preambles---and also why sometimes you will hear one party dismissively and impatiently say, "Will you get to the point?"
The points Sophists demand you make before your argument is considered valid include proving your values, proving the truth of your claim, and proving that your claim is also useful. (Though if they immediately perceive the claim as useful, then the requirements of accuracy and correct values are waived.) It is all but impossible to meet all of these requirements in front of a hostile audience, and literally impossible if space is limited.
Nor can these points be addressed preemptively, because then the actual point will be buried in theoretically unnecessary verbiage and you will be accused of being defensive against attacks that have not been made; but if you only reply once those arguments are made, the reply is liable to be buried and overlooked.
The traps of having to prove your values and the necessity of the claim you are making, and not just its accuracy, work too well. The only solution if you want fair analysis is to ban those traps. This is why, ideally, science and hard news reporting only require that claims meet the thresholds of newsworthiness and accuracy.
In hard science not too closely aligned with commercial or political interests, this ideal may even be close to achieved, and occasionally, responsible news media will engage in reporting for newsworthiness' sake despite their editorial agenda. Elsewhere, particularly in politics, the assumptions that accurate newsworthy statements are self-justifying, and popular inaccurate claims inherently deserve rebuttal, are so widely rejected that they are associated with the "rationalist" niche viewpoint.
I remember getting better reactions to my arguments when I preceded them by quaint premises such as, "To be clear, my end goal is maximizing the average wealth of the world rather than for the rich."
Initially, I was offended that people might consider that I could have an alternative premise. Gradually, I realized that it's very important for most people to establish a common foundation, even if it's -- to people like us -- obvious.
Wow, this is describing a pattern in my life to an astonishing degree.
In tricky discussions with my partner and with co-workers, I have learned (well, OK, I'm still learning) to provide what I call "preambles": introductory speeches where I emphasize our common values and shared intentions, and help them anticipate that what I say next might feel off-putting or abrupt or alarming, but that the last thing I want is for them to feel unappreciated, and all I am hoping for is that they think about what I'm saying, if not right now than later. If I provide a preamble like that, I find the other people seem to feel much, much better when I make a provocative or contradictory point to what they, or the group, had previously been saying. It also seems to make them more likely to agree with me, or at least to acknowledge some validity in what I'm saying.
I used to assume that this sort of argument cushioning was mostly necessary if what I was going to say was unusually unexpected or speculative; I figured that if I was pointing out something that was squarely within our established intentions or agreements, something that was very clearly sensible, that this ramp-up wouldn't be necessary. But it's turned out that the opposite is true: the more my point seems squarely justified and valuable on its merits, the more risky it is for me to omit this pre-conciliatory introduction.
One theory I have is that when I'm saying something that nobody thinks they should have though of already, it doesn't elicit shame or defensiveness; whereas when it's something someone might feel embarrassed for missing, or which points out departures in practice from the stated process, it elicits feelings of shame, and people need to find a way to balance out the intensity of that feeling. I of course feel the same thing on the other end, and sometimes I succeed in realizing that's happening and coping with the shame with excitement that I'm learning something new and becoming more sophisticated than I was before; but sometimes I fail to catch it, and I cope with my shame with aggressiveness.
So I too sometimes need some foreplay!