Category: Becoming Who We Need to Be – Colin Wright

A Better Way to Debate and Argue

Posted on by jabittan
One thing I am not that great at is having meaningful discussions where I explain my thinking within a given area without bombarding my interlocutor with reasons why my point of view or conclusion is the best. I would like to be better at explaining the values that I consider important in a given area and what decisions I have made that lead me to adopt the world view that I have. What I usually end up doing, is arguing about a set of “facts” and debating at a high level something that can only be understood by examining the small details that build up to the final decision.

 

What I would like to develop is a skill that seems to be missing more and more in today’s discourse, especially around politics. While I don’t think it is anything new for people to respond to their counterparts in a debate with witty and sharp criticisms, there is a big difference between saying something snide in a face to face debate or critiquing an idea or person in a news paper and sending out tweets and posts that straw-man another person’s argument for your own audience while receiving instant feedback and applause for comments made in bad faith. This puts us in a place where we really don’t so much debate ideas, people, or politics, but we try to win arguments by putting down other people. We really don’t make any deep considerations about our thoughts, feelings, or ideas but instead grab onto what intuitively feels right (or what is counter the point of our adversary) and develop a narrative and set of facts around the thing that is convenient for us to believe.

 

Author Colin Wright is someone who also thinks this is a problem. In his book Becoming Who We Need To Be he writes, “We need to be capable of comparing the information and perspective that we have with that of other people. In order to combine the information we’ve collected in this way, we need to be capable of having valuable, productive discussions, rather than simply propagandizing at each other all the time.” It is valuable to work to cultivate a space where you can start at the bottom with your core values and beliefs and work your way up to the larger decisions that you have made. By better examining your values, you can better explain the way you think, and it is OK to express doubt or uncertainty about the exact nature of what is happening and the facts surrounding the situation while you are building your argument in this way. Being able to better share information and explain our ideas will help discourse be more meaningful and it will reduce the threat levels in our arguments and debates. There may be times for propagandizing each other, but in most of our conversations we would probably be better off if we could be more explanatory than inflammatory. A recommendation I would have when starting this process is to focus on what is in your own self-interest, and be aware of the times when the thing you believe just happens to align with what is in your own self-interest. If you find that your beliefs all match exactly with your self-interest, it may be worth being more critical of your views and asking if you are just developing beliefs to defend your self-interest, or if you truly do believe those things on merits beyond your own personal gain.

Remember Your Bubble

Posted on by jabittan
A huge challenge for our world today is the way we get stuck in our own echo-chambers and fact bubbles. The world is a large and incredibly complex place. We never truly know that much about any one thing. We might be an expert in our field of study, we might be an expert in the area we work in, and we might have a hobby that has made us an unofficial expert in a random thing, but we can never truly know everything there is about a subject or topic. As a result, we rely on a body of knowledge that is incomplete to make assumptions to form a belief about the world.

 

Colin Wright writes about these fact bubbles in his book Becoming Who We Need To Be, “We also find ourselves stuck inside fact bubbles which reinforce our existing ideologies, and which fail to provide us with full context, with complete, accurate information, and which leave us, as a result, holding worldviews that are not based on accurate representations of what’s happening.” This is not a new problem in human history, but it feels like it is a more acute problem today than it has been in the past. We have more access to information today than any humans before us, but the overwhelming tidal wave of information that we can focus on puts us in a position where we have to make choices about the information we take in. We can build a world for ourselves in which our worldview is always reinforced, and never seriously challenged. We can create a world in which all of our problems are blamed on some “other” who we must vilify in order to improve things. We advocate for specific ways that we think the world should organize itself because it is what we see, what we know, and what is familiar for us.

 

These bubbles however, are incredibly limited and our singular perspective does not accurately represent the complete range of experiences and possibilities for the human condition. As a response to these bubbles, many people advocate for stepping outside our groups and tribes to understand the worldviews and ideas of others. I do not think this is realistic advice.

 

The world is busy and we only have a limited amount of time and attention to direct toward any given thing. Trying to take in information that we can understand and identify is in many ways a by product of long work hours, long commutes, too much information to know where to focus, and a world that seems to place unlimited demands on our thoughts and actions. Rather than trying to jam in more time reading things that challenge us or listening to news that might spike our blood pressure, I instead advocate for more self-awareness. Recognize how frequently we act and are inspired by a story that makes us look like the hero. Acknowledge the times when you select something to read because it looks like it will already fit in with what you want to believe. Be aware that your perspective on the world is incomplete and that the information you absorb is limited and filtered to present the world a certain way. We likely won’t be eliminating bubbles from our lives any time soon, but we can at least acknowledge their existence and recognize that we don’t have the certainty we would like about the information that helps us know what is really happening in the world.
Conversations

Paying Attention to our Conversations

Posted on by jabittan
In our general lives, conversation is interesting. What is interesting, however, is often how uninteresting our conversation actually is. When we talk to each other we never really have a full conversation with lots of data, with great background context, or with a lot of acknowledgement of other people’s thoughts or experiences. A lot of time in our conversations we more or less just ramble on about something or other about which we have vaguely formed ideas.

 

When I think about the general conversations I have at work, most seem to fit the model I described above. I started a new job recently and I have not had that many opportunities to really engage with my colleagues to understand their histories, thoughts, and opinions. Most of our interactions are relatively surface level, which means we are never really getting into the weeds of life or anything important. Colin Wright described this in his book Becoming Who We Need to Be. He writes, “Without access or context, we can only deliver empty words or lackluster, heartfelt but misguided opinions. And unfortunately, that could accurately describe many of our conversations.” For me, I feel that many of my conversations truly are like this. I either end up not fully knowing much about my conversation partner or the subject at hand and that leads to me feeling out of the loop in the conversation and unable to provide any useful or interesting input to the conversation.

 

I don’t think we need to include footnotes in every conversation referencing where our thoughts and ideas come from, and I don’t think we necessarily need to provide everyone with or request from everyone a perfect biographical story for them before we ever have a conversation. I do think, however, that we need to build new spaces and opportunities to have deeper conversations with people. We can spend more time talking with someone about the forces that have driven their life and who they are, rather than talking about whether a sports team won a game, whether its really hot or cold outside, or about what happened on a TV show. We can spend some time thinking about the kinds of questions which would elicit interesting answers or conversation from ourselves and then try to turn those questions back on the people we would otherwise have surface level, context-free conversations with. By being interested in others, we can start to work toward more intentional and meaningful conversations.

 

Wright continues, “We don’t always hold ourselves to the highest of standards when it comes to conversations, and considering that a good deal of what we believe is derived from these interactions, it’s unfortunate that we don’t have a better mechanism for ensuring we’re not reinforcing unbacked opinions or false facts, causally and probably unintentionally.”

How We Argue – Talking Past Each Other

Posted on by jabittan
Senator Cory Booker discusses the state of national debate in politics in his book United and I think accurately describes an unfortunate reality of today’s political discourse. The arguments that we make today often don’t seem to be in alignment. Each side is arguing in a way that does not seem to actually address the point being made by the other side, and does not seem to be operating with the same set of facts, values, or baseline understandings. Booker writes,

“We often end up in national conversations that are akin to arguing about what  the temperature is in a room without looking at the thermostat. What we need is a collective call to the common good based upon indisputable facts and the broader aspirational ideals to which we all ascribe.”

Booker’s point is well intentioned and falls in a recent theme among books that I am currently reading and podcasts that I listen to regarding language, reason, argument, and understanding. Booker is absolutely correct that we are arguing without a baseline and without a common set of facts, but the challenge is that his final point rests on political decision making, and even for an individual, deciding what aspirational ideals should be ascribed to is a struggle.

Author Colin Wright’s new book, Becoming Who We Need to Be, looks at one of the problems with arguments today and how we end up talking past each other. We fail to develop a shared understanding of the world and issue at hand because we use language differently depending on our viewpoints. We apply labels (acronyms, descriptions, names) to elements of an issue or argument, and if those labels are not well defined or shared, we end up at a point where our argument is in some way unintelligible to someone who sees things differently.

I have also recently listened to a couple of podcasts on Julia Galef’s show, Rationally Speaking, where the ideas of self-interest, rationality, and decision making have been challenged and examined from very nuanced perspectives. It turns out that we are not so good at determining what is in our own best interest, and much worse at understanding how other people determine what is in their best interest.

Julia Galef was also interviewed herself on a recent episode of the Ezra Klein show, and in the podcast Ezra and Julia discuss the problems that arise in our arguments. We are not open to the other side, and often shut out ideas that seem to be oppositional to ourselves or come from people we find disagreeable. This means that before we even begin an argument or debate, we are judging how aligned we are with the other person, and determining how much we should agree with them on any issue before we have even begun talking or listening.

I think Booker is correct that we are arguing without understanding what we are arguing about or what the baseline is, but trouble with how we use language, how we determine what is politically best for us or others, and how we rationalize what we and others believe make it politically challenging to ever decide what we should all ascribe to and how we could reach that goal. One solution would be an increased validity in political and knowledge institutions. A greater sense of support and acceptance of reports from academic institutions and politically neutral government agencies can help us be more aligned in our debates and discussions. This would require serious effort and commitment on the part of the agency or academic report to be seen as non-partisan, and it would also require the public to accept reports and findings that did not align with political ideals.