Bits

Discourse

How to argue with reasonable people, drawing on Carl Rogers, Karl Popper, Anatol Rapoport, and Daniel Dennett. Not everyone is reasonable. Someone committed to pseudoscience may not be open to discussion at all; for those cases skip to the second section.

Do not proceed until all sides agree on three things:
1. An appropriate time and place for the exchange.
2. Readiness to tolerate criticism.
3. The freedom to pause or end the debate at any time.
Follow these guidelines:
1. Listen attentively and make the other side feel understood.
2. Restate their position so clearly that they might say, “Thanks, I wish I had said it like that.” That is Dennett’s test.
3. Be humble and ask honest questions to seek understanding.
4. Talk things over rationally, preferably using science.
5. Take seriously the idea that you could be wrong and they could be right.
6. Remember that agreement is comparatively unimportant, since both sides could easily be mistaken, as Popper held.
Repeat until any party pauses or ends the exchange under step 1.

Peter Boghossian and James A. Lindsay wrote How to Have Impossible Conversations in 2019, the source of most of these techniques. They rest on older and better documented practice: motivational interviewing, the Socratic method, street epistemology, and Rapoport’s rules. A brief and incomplete mnemonic:

Model it. Be and do what you want them to do. Admit ignorance.
Watch words. Be careful, and understand their definitions.
Ask questions. Calibrated, open-ended how and what questions that do not lead to a simple yes or no.
Acknowledge extremists on your own side to build a bridge across the moral divide. Concessions help, such as “some on my side are fanatics who should be arrested” or Democrats condemning César Chávez. Do not expect reciprocation; build trust. Treat their side charitably.
Do not blame. Focus on contribution.
Focus on epistemology. How do they know what they claim to know?
Learn what makes someone closed-minded.

Michael Shermer gives a longer list in his 2022 book Conspiracy. It adds:

Channel Socrates. Use Socratic questions:
- Clarity: “How do you know that’s true?”
- Sources: “What’s your source for that?”
- Evidence: “Is that all the evidence, or a selection?”
- Other views: “What is another way to look at it?”
Ask for a number. How certain are they, as a percentage?
Avoid the dishonest moves yourself. They are questioning motives or authority, claiming a group’s authority, changing the subject, and sealioning. Sealioning buries a person in requests for evidence. Say “that idea”, not “your idea”.
Separate facts from worldviews. A changed fact need not mean a changed identity.
Let people be wrong. Friendship rests on respect, not agreement. Jefferson wrote this in 1800. “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”