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How to want to change your mind
So! Via my network I came across ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
the_school_of_philosophy, which is maintained by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_future_modernes and thus not your usual run of the mill philosophy. And that linked to "How to want to change your mind" at Measure of Doubt, one of the very few "rationalist" videos/essays etc I've seen which captures the sort of rationalism I aim for (eg actually trying to figure out the truth, not prove how much smarter I am than other people or dogmatically defend the scientific establishment from all who question it)
Below the cut is a transcript. I used the Youtube automatic transcript as a starting point, it was right often enough to be helpful and hilariously wrong often enough to make the task amusing :)
Transcript:
Hey everyone. When you learn rationality or critical thinking usually what you learn is a set of cognitive biases, logical fallacies, sometimes structure of argument...learning about the anchoring effect, focussing illusions, the subcost fallacy, you're learning how to recognize... ad hominem attacks or non sequitur... and that's great but it's not useful at all in terms of making you a more rational person unless you accompany that with a genuine desire to know the truth about the world, to have an accurate model of how things really work.
Unless you want that more than you want to cling to a particular belief that you happen to like or be emotionally invested in. Unless you want that more than you want to win a particular argument with a particular person.
It's always kind of disappointed me that this fundamental skill of rationality which is the disposition to be rational, the desire to have the truth, isn't discussed more when people are talking about and teaching rationality. That said it is difficult. It's especially difficult when you're in a debate was someone so not only do you have like an attachment to your particular point of view but you're in the situation that feels like a battle so your defenses are up...
Over the years I have developed a few techniques that i have personally found useful in helping get myself in the mindset, of reminding myself of what's actually true that which is that I want to have true beliefs overall much more than i want to win this particular argument with this particular person. So I'm going to share a few of these techniques with you in hopes that you will also find them useful.
The first is called divorce your belief from yourself. It's a visualization where essentially I picture the belief that I'm defending in that particular debate as existing a few feet away from my body so when the person I'm talking to attacks it I can picture the attack being directed at this thing that's not me, so it doesn't feel like a personal attack and i can evaluate more objectively how the belief stands up to that particular attack.
Second: just reframe the argument, think of a disagreement as being collaboration in which you were working together to try to figure out the truth about X, as opposed to an adversarial situation or debate where one of you has to win.
Thirdly a tip from Eliezer Yudkowsky of less wrong dot com: Visualise being wrong. So before you try to examine the evidence against a particularly fraught belief just visualise...what would it look like, how would the world be if this belief were false? Rather: how would I cope? What would it be like? And one you've thought about how you would react, how you would respond if this belief of yours happened not to be true and gotten a little bit more used to the idea then you're in a better position to more objectively consider the possibility that it might not be true, or the evidence for that possibility.
Fourthly, take the long view. Think about conceding a points, if it's warranted, as putting credit in the bank in terms of your of your ability to convince other people of things in the future. If people know that you're the sort of person who says "Ok, that makes sense. I accept your argument, I'm convinced." Then they know that in the future if you don't do that it's not necessarily because you're just stubborn it's because you haven't been convinced yet.
Next: congratulate yourself on being objective, not on being right. This is a technique to redirects the very common and very human impulse to need ego validation, which is something we typically get from winning arguments or from turning out to have been right along, and taking that need for validation and just redirecting it into the goal of being objective and rational. So you can pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself on having evaluated arguments as dispassionately and fairly as possible instead of congratulating yourself on "Yes I was right all along."
Along similar lines in terms of a stepping stone from less productive human impulses to a more productive human impulses is redirecting your competitive instincts. As I said earlier it's really much better in the long run to think of arguments as as collaborations instead of as combat. But if you are inclined to think of arguments as combat one way that you can redirect that impulse in a more productive way is to think of the duel, so to speak, as one in which you have one weapon, your opponent has another
weapon and maybe their weapon turns out to have been more powerful than yours, but here's the nice part: you get to have their weapon at the end of the duel. You got a copy of that more powerful weapon, and now you can use it in future duels to beat other people with less powerful weapons. So, as I said, stepping stone on the way to a more enlightened approach to argument, but useful.
Finally, another technique that I've found useful is: when you're feeling negative affect towards a person you're arguing with, when you're feeling frustrated or irritated, or defensive, hostile...Take the words that you're hearing them say and just put those words mentally in the mouth of of someone you like and feel comfortable with, and feel friendly towards. And then try to evaluate the arguments as if they were coming from someone you like more and I think if you'd like me you'll find it much easier to consider them fairly than you otherwise would.
the_school_of_philosophy, which is maintained by the_future_modernes and thus not your usual run of the mill philosophy. And that linked to "How to want to change your mind" at Measure of Doubt, one of the very few "rationalist" videos/essays etc I've seen which captures the sort of rationalism I aim for (eg actually trying to figure out the truth, not prove how much smarter I am than other people or dogmatically defend the scientific establishment from all who question it) Below the cut is a transcript. I used the Youtube automatic transcript as a starting point, it was right often enough to be helpful and hilariously wrong often enough to make the task amusing :)
Transcript:
Hey everyone. When you learn rationality or critical thinking usually what you learn is a set of cognitive biases, logical fallacies, sometimes structure of argument...learning about the anchoring effect, focussing illusions, the subcost fallacy, you're learning how to recognize... ad hominem attacks or non sequitur... and that's great but it's not useful at all in terms of making you a more rational person unless you accompany that with a genuine desire to know the truth about the world, to have an accurate model of how things really work.
Unless you want that more than you want to cling to a particular belief that you happen to like or be emotionally invested in. Unless you want that more than you want to win a particular argument with a particular person.
It's always kind of disappointed me that this fundamental skill of rationality which is the disposition to be rational, the desire to have the truth, isn't discussed more when people are talking about and teaching rationality. That said it is difficult. It's especially difficult when you're in a debate was someone so not only do you have like an attachment to your particular point of view but you're in the situation that feels like a battle so your defenses are up...
Over the years I have developed a few techniques that i have personally found useful in helping get myself in the mindset, of reminding myself of what's actually true that which is that I want to have true beliefs overall much more than i want to win this particular argument with this particular person. So I'm going to share a few of these techniques with you in hopes that you will also find them useful.
The first is called divorce your belief from yourself. It's a visualization where essentially I picture the belief that I'm defending in that particular debate as existing a few feet away from my body so when the person I'm talking to attacks it I can picture the attack being directed at this thing that's not me, so it doesn't feel like a personal attack and i can evaluate more objectively how the belief stands up to that particular attack.
Second: just reframe the argument, think of a disagreement as being collaboration in which you were working together to try to figure out the truth about X, as opposed to an adversarial situation or debate where one of you has to win.
Thirdly a tip from Eliezer Yudkowsky of less wrong dot com: Visualise being wrong. So before you try to examine the evidence against a particularly fraught belief just visualise...what would it look like, how would the world be if this belief were false? Rather: how would I cope? What would it be like? And one you've thought about how you would react, how you would respond if this belief of yours happened not to be true and gotten a little bit more used to the idea then you're in a better position to more objectively consider the possibility that it might not be true, or the evidence for that possibility.
Fourthly, take the long view. Think about conceding a points, if it's warranted, as putting credit in the bank in terms of your of your ability to convince other people of things in the future. If people know that you're the sort of person who says "Ok, that makes sense. I accept your argument, I'm convinced." Then they know that in the future if you don't do that it's not necessarily because you're just stubborn it's because you haven't been convinced yet.
Next: congratulate yourself on being objective, not on being right. This is a technique to redirects the very common and very human impulse to need ego validation, which is something we typically get from winning arguments or from turning out to have been right along, and taking that need for validation and just redirecting it into the goal of being objective and rational. So you can pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself on having evaluated arguments as dispassionately and fairly as possible instead of congratulating yourself on "Yes I was right all along."
Along similar lines in terms of a stepping stone from less productive human impulses to a more productive human impulses is redirecting your competitive instincts. As I said earlier it's really much better in the long run to think of arguments as as collaborations instead of as combat. But if you are inclined to think of arguments as combat one way that you can redirect that impulse in a more productive way is to think of the duel, so to speak, as one in which you have one weapon, your opponent has another
weapon and maybe their weapon turns out to have been more powerful than yours, but here's the nice part: you get to have their weapon at the end of the duel. You got a copy of that more powerful weapon, and now you can use it in future duels to beat other people with less powerful weapons. So, as I said, stepping stone on the way to a more enlightened approach to argument, but useful.
Finally, another technique that I've found useful is: when you're feeling negative affect towards a person you're arguing with, when you're feeling frustrated or irritated, or defensive, hostile...Take the words that you're hearing them say and just put those words mentally in the mouth of of someone you like and feel comfortable with, and feel friendly towards. And then try to evaluate the arguments as if they were coming from someone you like more and I think if you'd like me you'll find it much easier to consider them fairly than you otherwise would.