Agonistic VS Friendly Dialectic

Last week, when he and I were emailing about How Minds Change, Franco recommended Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don't Know (Adam Grant). I had a chance to read it and it's so compatible with both How Minds Change and The Phaedrus that I wanted to excerpt and "talk" about it a bit here. Alcidamas was right.

Last week we observed that the Socrates of The Gorgias is irritating, almost toxic. He says he wants to help his friends by correcting their false opinions because false opinions are the psychological equivalent of physical sickness, but his "friends" in the end are only alienated by the encounter and everyone watching is tired and bored.

In The Phaedrus Socrates seems a changed man, inspired, a pastoral version of his urban self, playful, even a bit flirty. He still wants to correct his friend, Phaedrus', opinions about what is the best kind of education, but his approach is vastly different and that difference is both important to the history of rhetoric and echoed in How Minds Change and Think Again. If someone disagrees with us, we get defensive; the more they contradict us, the more we dig in. If the spiral of disagreement goes on long enough we begin to suspect the morality or even the sanity of the person who disagrees with us. If we are non-confrontational, we might shut down. If we are confrontational, we may shout them down. Either way, no minds are changed.

To change someone's mind you need to start with common ground, establish rapport by identifying with the person's identity, values, and goals, and then, rather than making assertions and counter-statements, ask questions that lead him or her to open their mind to the possibility that perhaps they are not quite so committed to the belief in question as they first thought. All persuasion is self-persuasion. "When we ask genuine questions, we leave them intrigued to learn more. We don't have to convince them that we're right -- we just need to open their minds to the possibility that they might be wrong. Their natural curiosity might do the rest." (Grant, 113)

In The Phaedrus, Socrates establishes common ground by playfully demonstrating that both he and Phaedrus love the same things (speeches) and enjoy the same activities (composing and critiquing). He then encourages Phaedrus to read Lysias's speech. Phaedrus would rather have recited it but by getting him to read it, Socrates distances Phaedrus from the speech so when the speech is critiqued he doesn't feel like he is being critiqued, correction is less personal and therefore less alienating. In a sense he is indulging Phaedrus, making him feel good, which will make him more receptive to correction later on.

When Phaedrus finishes the speech, Socrates critiques it and then provides what both agree is a better one, not drastically different, just better organized. So he's not opposing but nudging Phaedrus in a different direction. Then Socrates gives the third speech, this one is far better than either of the other two, and thus he shows Phaedrus that just like him he loves a great speech but also that he can compose even greater ones than Lysias can. Then he and Phaedrus point out all the ways the best speech is better and all the ways the worst speech is worse and then, and only then, does Socrates help Phaedrus build a new perspective on what the best kind of learning is. It's dialectical philosophy, not sophistic rhetoric as Phaedrus thought when the conversation started.

As all three of these books tell us, the best way to change someone's mind is to be friendly in the best sense of the word, not a flattering agreeable person who goes along to get along, but someone who disagrees both vigorously and respectfully, leading the other person bit by bit to see a new way of seeing. Really horrible rhetors establish rapport by burning a scapegoat, the more imaginary the better since a bogeyman can't defend itself. A good friend, on this view, is one who helps the other be the best version of themselves possible and a good friendship is balanced in this way. Each makes the other better and together they become better than either can be alone.

Thus while dialectic can be adversarial, it ought not be. People who want to pick an intellectual fight in order to make themselves feel superior may "win" but they will never persuade. Rhetoric, on the other hand, need not be all flattery that leads to lazy thinking and stupefied people. It can use mutual pleasure and curiosity to lead someone to a better perspective, to see themselves as their best self, one who has a better opinion than the one they held previously and who is now open to the possibility that further evidence or experience or interaction with others might further improve their opinions. The best rhetoric makes a person better by showing them how to ask questions that make them want to learn more. The worst rhetoric just makes a person want to shout louder and louder: "I'm right damnit, and you're a ****ing @#$%#$%!!"

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Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know Grant, Adam.

• Page 2 Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
• Page 3 The first-instinct fallacy. [Your first answer is your best guess, not the best answer]
• Page 4 Part of the problem is cognitive laziness. Some psychologists point out that we're mental misers: we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones. Yet there are also deeper forces behind our resistance to rethinking. Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong. Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we're losing a part of ourselves. ... We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995. We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.
• Page 12 This book is an invitation to let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well, and to anchor your sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency. ... hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it's time to abandon some of your most treasured tools -- and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.
• Page 18 We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter prosecutor mode when we recognize flaws in other people's reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when we're seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our constituents. The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we're right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don't bother to rethink our own views.
• Page 24 Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you're faster at recognizing patterns.... The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views.
• Page 25 My favorite bias is the "I'm not biased" bias, in which people believe they're more objective than others.... Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong -- not for reasons why we must be right -- and revising our views based on what we learn.
• Page 28 Pride breeds conviction rather than doubt,
• Page 31 Research shows that when people are resistant to change, it helps to reinforce what will stay the same. Visions for change are more compelling when they include visions of continuity. Although our strategy might evolve, our identity will endure. ... Good judgment depends on having the skill -- and the will -- to open our minds.
• Page 35 Anton's syndrome -- a deficit of self-awareness in which a person is oblivious to a physical disability but otherwise doing fairly well cognitively.
• Page 37 In theory, confidence and competence go hand in hand. In practice, they often diverge
• Page 46 humility means "from the earth." It's about being grounded -- recognizing that we're flawed and fallible.
• Page 53 Plenty of evidence suggests that confidence is just as often the result of progress as the cause of it.
• Page 57 The goal is not to be wrong more often. It's to recognize that we're all wrong more often than we'd like to admit, and the more we deny it, the deeper the hole we dig for ourselves.
• Page 60 we weren't born with our opinions. We choose our views, and we can choose to rethink them any time we want.
• Page 62 He said he refuses to let his beliefs become part of his identity. ... "My attachment to my ideas is provisional. There's no unconditional love for them." ... Detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity.
• Page 63 Rethinking who you are appears to become mentally healthy -- as long as you can tell a coherent story about how you got from past to present you.
• Page 64 Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe.
• Page 67 The single most important driver of forecasters' success was how often they updated their beliefs. The best forecasters went through more rethinking cycles. They had the confident humility to doubt their judgments and the curiosity to discover new information that led them to revise their predictions.
• Page 68 That's where the best forecasters excelled: they were eager to think again. They saw their opinions more as hunches than as truths -- as possibilities to entertain rather than facts to embrace. They questioned ideas before accepting them, and they were willing to keep questioning them even after accepting them.
• Page 72 If we're insecure, we make fun of others. If we're comfortable being wrong, we're not afraid to poke fun at ourselves.
• Page 73 When you form an opinion, ask yourself what would have to happen to prove it false. ... Psychologists find that admitting we were wrong doesn't make us look less competent. It's a display of honesty and a willingness to learn. Although scientists believe it will damage their reputation to admit that their studies failed to replicate, the reverse is true: they're judged more favorably if they acknowledge the new data rather than deny them.
• Page 81 The clearest sign of intellectual chemistry isn't agreeing with someone.
• Page 83 The ideal members of a challenge network are disagreeable, because they're fearless about questioning the way things have always been done and holding us accountable for thinking again.
• Page 86 We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. ... I'm looking for disagreeable people who are givers, not takers. ... Disagreeable givers often make the best critics: their intent is to elevate the work, not feed their own egos. They don't criticize because they're insecure; they challenge because they care. They dish out tough love.[*]
• Page 88 Hashing out competing views has potential downsides -- risks that need to be managed ... the tension is intellectual, not emotional.
• Page 89 They don't disagree just for the sake of it; they disagree because they care. ... Agreeable people don't always steer clear of conflict. They're highly attuned to the people around them and often adapt to the norms in the room. ... Agreeable people were significantly more accommodating than disagreeable ones -- as long as they were in a cooperative team. When they were assigned to a competitive team, they acted just as disagreeably as their disagreeable teammates.
• Page 90 Disagreeable people don't just challenge us to think again. They also make agreeable people comfortable arguing, too. Instead of fleeing from friction, our grumpy colleagues engage it directly. By making it clear that they can handle a tussle, they create a norm for the rest of us to follow.
• Page 91 A major problem with task conflict is that it often spills over into relationship conflict.
• Page 92 disagreements were seen as productive and enjoyable.
• Page 102 If you're like me, you reconsidered your views multiple times. Changing your mind doesn't make you a flip-flopper or a hypocrite. It means you were open to learning. ... When we're trying to persuade people, we frequently take an adversarial approach. Instead of opening their minds, we effectively shut them down or rile them up. They play defense by putting up a shield, play offense by preaching their perspectives and prosecuting ours, or play politics by telling us what we want to hear without changing what they actually think. I want to explore a more collaborative approach -- one in which we show more humility and curiosity, and invite others to think more like scientists.
• Page 104 For centuries, debating has been prized as an art form, but there's now a growing science of how to do it well. In a formal debate your goal is to change the mind of your audience. In an informal debate, you're trying to change the mind of your conversation partner. That's a kind of negotiation, where you're trying to reach an agreement about the truth.... A good debate is not a war. It's not even a tug-of-war, ... It's more like a dance that hasn't been choreographed, negotiated with a partner who has a different set of steps in mind.
• Page 105 "A weak argument generally dilutes a strong one." ... The skilled negotiators rarely went on offense or defense. Instead, they expressed curiosity with questions like "So you don't see any merit in this proposal at all?"
• Page 106 They appeared less assertive, but much like in a dance, they led by letting their partners step forward. ... Recent experiments show that having even one negotiator who brings a scientist's level of humility and curiosity improves outcomes for both parties, because she will search for more information and discover ways to make both sides better off.
• Page 107 he immediately drew attention to his and Debra's areas of agreement. ... "I think we disagree on far less than it may seem." He called out their alignment on the problem of poverty -- and on the validity of some of the studies -- before objecting to subsidies as a solution. .... We won't have much luck changing other people's minds if we refuse to change ours. ... "You should be willing to listen to what someone else is saying and give them a lot of credit for it. It makes you sound like a reasonable person who is taking everything into account."
• Project Debater [an early form of artificial intelligence], developed by IBM to do for debate what Watson did for chess. ... Her knowledge corpus consists of 400 million articles, largely from credible newspapers and magazines, and her claim detection engine is designed to locate key arguments, identify their boundaries, and weigh the evidence.
• Page 108 For any debate topic, she can instantaneously search her knowledge graph for relevant data points, mold them into a logical case, and deliver it clearly -- even entertainingly -- in a female voice within the time constraints. ... After studying 10 billion sentences, a computer was able to say something funny -- a skill that's normally thought to be confined to sentient beings with high levels of social and emotional intelligence. The computer had learned to make a logical argument and even anticipate the other side's counterargument. Yet it hadn't learned to agree with elements of the other side's argument, apparently because that behavior was all too rarely deployed across 400 million articles by humans. They were usually too busy preaching their arguments, prosecuting their enemies, or politicking for audience support to grant a valid point from the other side. ... Most people immediately start with a straw man, poking holes in the weakest version of the other side's case. He does the reverse: he considers the strongest version of their case, which is known as the steel man. ... A politician might occasionally adopt that tactic to pander or persuade, but like a good scientist, Harish does it to learn.
• Page 110 The computer piled on study after study to support a long list of reasons in favor of preschool subsidies. Like a skilled negotiator, Harish focused on just two reasons against them.... He knew that making too many points could come at the cost of developing, elaborating, and reinforcing his best ones. "If you have too many arguments, you'll dilute the power of each and every one," he told me. "They are going to be less well explained, and I don't know if any of them will land enough -- I don't think the audience will believe them to be important enough. Most top debaters aren't citing a lot of information."
• Page 111 A single line of argument feels like a conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught. As important as the quantity and quality of reasons might be, the source matters, too. And the most convincing source is often the one closest to your audience. Psychologists have long found that the person most likely to persuade you to change your mind is you. You get to pick the reasons you find most compelling, and you come away with a real sense of ownership over them. ... In every round he posed more questions to contemplate. The computer spoke in declarative sentences, asking just a single question in the opening statement -- and directing it at Harish, rather than at the audience. ... These techniques increase the odds that during a disagreement, other people will abandon an overconfidence cycle and engage in a rethinking cycle. ... When we support our argument with a small number of cohesive, compelling reasons, we encourage them to start doubting their own opinion.
• Page 113 And when we ask genuine questions, we leave them intrigued to learn more. We don't have to convince them that we're right -- we just need to open their minds to the possibility that they might be wrong. Their natural curiosity might do the rest.
• Page 114 In the hierarchy of disagreement created by computer scientist Paul Graham, the highest form of argument is refuting the central point, and the lowest is name-calling.