I’ve spent over 30 years arguing about ideas. During those decades, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve changed my mind. I’ve changed minds.
Normally, however, arguing about ideas is fruitless. Tempers fray. Discussion goes in circles. Each and every mental corruption that Philip Tetlock has explored rears its ugly epistemic head. You even lose friends.
When a conversation goes off the rails, I’m sorely tempted to bluntly assess the other party’s deep intellectual flaws. (As I repeatedly barked at my mom when I was a teenager, “When will you get it through your thick skull that…?”) You don’t have to master Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to predict the results. The other party typically has the temerity to bluntly assess my deep intellectual flaws, which in turn sparks an even more unpleasant, fruitless, and potentially friendship-ending exchange.
The wise approach to fruitless argument, rather, is to politely disengage. Yet how can you do this without counter-productively moving the conversation from bad to worse?
The classic move is to make “one last point,” then terminate the conversation. Again, you don’t have to master Carnegie to predict the results. The other side rushes to get in their “one last point” and the cycle of suffering resumes.
A better approach is to meekly announce, “I can’t think of anything else productive to say.” Alas, this is still red meat in the eyes of many disputants. “Aha, so you can’t even answer my brilliant arguments. Typical!”
The best ejector button I’ve discovered so far is a single word: “Impasse.” You can stretch it out to, “I fear we’ve reached an impasse,” but even that provides a hand-hold for the other party to say, “Oh, we’ve reached an impasse, eh? Speak for yourself.” When you say, “Impasse” and stop talking, the conversation swiftly ends. The other side won’t like it, but at this point you should meet further taunts with a silent shrug. While this might spawn a grudge, it’s less likely to do so than further wasted words.
Admittedly, if your real goal is to manipulate the other party into purging you, your best bet is probably Agree and Amplify. But if that’s your goal, you have no need of my help.
READER COMMENTS
Rick
Nov 9 2020 at 11:22am
How about “I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree.” Usually works for me.
Doug
Nov 9 2020 at 5:37pm
Rick, I thought I had posted a comment on this post, but don’t see it. However, your comment provides for a good place to start again. I had imagined what I had thought was a good final retort to Bryan’s, “I think we have reached an impasse”. It goes like this: “Ya, well, do you know that the work of Robert Aumann and Robin Hanson shows (and nicely exposited upon by S. Landsburg in his “The Big Questions”) that honest reasoners cannot ‘agree to disagree’ ?”
The reason I thought this reply clever is that Bryan (and a lot of the readership here) is among the small percentage of educated people who would be aware of and accept the premise of the riposte.
robc
Nov 10 2020 at 8:50am
I hate that phrase.
Mostly because I havent agreed to disagree. Impasse is more accurate.
Steve Bacharach
Nov 10 2020 at 11:58am
I’m a big fan of “Agree to disagree.” It’s my wife who hates it.
JdL
Nov 11 2020 at 8:15am
“I haven’t agreed to disagree.”
What’s not to agree with? The two of you do in fact disagree, or this situation does not arise.
robc
Nov 12 2020 at 1:50pm
I am not agreeing to leave it that way.
“Impasse” acknowledges that while I would prefer to continue on in order to change your mind, that is unlikely to happen.
Oldman
Nov 9 2020 at 12:38pm
“It is a privilege to not engage in these debates” is something I hear often. Clearly this doesn’t sound like starting point of a productive discussion, so maybe it is best to decline the debate.
My concern is that “it is a privilege not to engage in these debates” is very persuasive to bystanders. Such that by saying “impasse”, not only do you abandon a productive discussion with the speaker, but also move bystanders to the other person’s side.
Thomas Hutcheson
Nov 9 2020 at 1:07pm
My objective is not to persuade the person I am arguing with (though I’d like to do so) but to discover why we disagree. If we see different optimum points, is it because we have different objective functions different models, or different initial conditions. [I have a very strong prior against differences in objective functions an slightly negative toward initial conditions and hence toward differences in the model.]
Take “gun control” I assume that most people agree that reducing gun suicides, gun acidentes, mass shootings, fatal family arguments that end in gun manslaughter, and thwarting criminal violence by using as gun are all very good things. I think disagreements arise in, for example, estimates of the likelihood of encountering criminal violence (initial conditions) and the ability of an untrained person to effectively thwart violence (model parameter).
Mark Z
Nov 9 2020 at 3:25pm
That’s a good point, though many political disagreements trace back to fundamental value differences, such ash how much to weight the right to own a gun; ‘how many deaths does X have to cause for restriction of X to be worth it’ is a question not likely to be resolved by further argument. It’s probably also a source of considerable disharmony; people may be somewhat tolerant of those they believe share their moral goals but disagree on the best way to achieve them, but they’re much less so of differences in core values.
Shane L
Nov 9 2020 at 2:54pm
On an old international politics discussion forum I was on, I found it helpful to start or revive more neutral threads when discussion had collapsed into name-calling.
For example, we had a thread where people were invited to share music that they liked, another for poetry. Other threads playfully invited people to admit what things they disliked about their own countries.
In many cases this allowed us to stop fighting long enough to see the humanity in one another. People found they had common tastes across bitter political divides. It didn’t change minds on the politics but I think it improved the emotional state of the group.
I tended to find that nobody – myself included – changed their minds on serious political questions in one discussion. By preserving a sense of common humanity, these neutral threads gave people the opportunity to expose themselves to new ideas over a longer period of time. Consequently, people did change their minds, but relatively slowly. I suppose this is also true offline. If one’s discussion is going nowhere and becoming heated, it might be helpful to change topic to something more enjoyable. By seeing the humanity in you, the other person might be inclined to tolerate your company, creating the opportunity to change their minds slowly over months or years.
A Country Farmer
Nov 9 2020 at 10:13pm
The best move is to make a unrelated or semi-related joke that both sides will like and end on that. It’s often tricky to do well, but anything else leaves a bad taste.
Ron Browning
Nov 10 2020 at 7:46am
1) Work to foresee the potential downside of any conversation, before engaging in conversation. What are the potential costs of disagreement?
2) Work harder at understanding the other person than they are working to understand you.
3) Realize that your effort to “educate” the other person is nearly totally constrained by their willingness to work to understand you.
4) Many people will change their mind, over time, as long as you don’t force them to admit it.
John P Palmer
Nov 10 2020 at 11:34am
What about the weather we’re having?
How ’bout them Blue Jays?
Taco-Man
Nov 10 2020 at 3:08pm
“Adjourn.” (Queen’s Gambit reference)
Richard Gaylord
Nov 11 2020 at 4:39am
“As I repeatedly barked at my mom when I was a teenager, “When will you get it through your thick skull that…?”. you spoke like that to your mother? had i done that, i wouldn’t have survived to adulthood.
Ben
Nov 11 2020 at 6:36am
I think “impasse” addresses a different point than changing the topic.
Impasse says we are not agreeing to disagree, but that there will be no movement here. Changing the topic still feels like a retreat where the counter party gets satisfaction of winning.
JdL
Nov 11 2020 at 8:06am
Another trick I like to employ to disengage is to find something the other person has said that I agree with (it could be as general as “X is a problem”), state my agreement with that point, then shut up. This gives the other person a chance to follow suit and end the conversation with a “victory”. If that fails, I’ll resort to the equivalent of “Impasse”.
Comments are closed.