[rickdicker]

I find it strange that this article presumes that you have all the right answers and that there isn't the possibility that you are the one who needs their mind changed. It points out that listening is valuable, but not because there's a possibility that the person you're talking to is in the right, no, you should listen to other people because studies show that listening to other people will manipulate them into seeing things your way. I feel like if you really wanted to live in a world of open-minded people, you should probably start by being open-minded yourself.

Here's a good trick I picked up for discussing contentious things - if you're ever tempted to dish out a sick burn, try to rephrase the point into a genuine question. Then the other person will have to walk through the logic of it, and if it turns out there is a real logic to their side of things, you don't get your ego bruised, cause you just asked a genuine question.

[kyleyeats]

It helps if you understand whether the person is defending their own values, or their group's values.

If you talk someone out of their group's values, you might destroy their entire life. Talking someone out of their religion is a "win" until they get shunned and lose everything they have. Are you still in the right then? What does the "objective truth" matter if you're just ruining peoples lives?

Change someone's mind on guns or abortion and you hurt them! It doesn't matter which side they start on or which side you convince them to. You're ripping and tearing at the very fabric of their social life.

Some people are unable to change their minds, but some people can't change their minds due to circumstance. It's really important to understand this before convincing anyone of anything.

[pempem]

Certainly you jest...

If we apply this kind of belief to corporations/government/etc. we get the things that most folks at HN spend their non-tech comments complaining about. Entrenched power, inability to pursue effectiveness because "this is how its always been done" and a lot of fluff.

You are not ruining people's lives by sharing reasoning to change someone's values. You are not destroying their lives because simply talking to someone is not forcing them to accept and implement something.

Their community is not flexible enough to incorporate differing beliefs and thus not long destined for this world. Take for example, Christianity. It comes in more flavors than ice cream, and infighting occurs but is rare in the face of conversations that pit Muslims or 'heathen religions' against Christianity. flexibility

Or take Hindu social society which is literally the oldest surviving widespread religion + social group that continuously assimilates different beliefs from different pagan religions bending so far that Hindus now celebrate Valentines and Xmas Day without invalidating a single belief.

The party "destroying lives" is not the party that posits a new way of thinking.

[RobertoG]

Great comment. I suspect that we all are vulnerable to Stockholm syndrome and doing the calculation of what price we will pay for changing our mind. After all, surviving is more important than being right.

[anyonecancode]

I don't know about being "in the right" or not, but I do think this comment is correct in showing why it can be difficult, if not impossible, for some people to change their minds. I experienced this in my own family in regards to covid, which made for some very stressful discussions around masking and behavior when we gathered for the holidays during the pandemic. I live in one part of the country, where certain behaviors and beliefs around that were baseline assumptions, some of my siblings in a different part of the country, with the opposite baselines. To change minds would mean going against what all your friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc believed. It would mean pretty significant social distancing, unrelated to the pandemic.

We all were able to work out some measure of compromise for the duration of the visit, but, well, there's reasons we live where we live and not in the same place.

[coffeeblack]

Or they may even lose their job at WaPo or the Atlantic! ;)

[adrianN]

It's all fine an dandy until objectively false group beliefs start affecting, e.g., political policy that has an effect on everybody, not just believers.

[nuancebydefault]

Even if you persuaded them into changing their mind on a topic intertwined with their identity or the group they are part of, can it not be that it is for the better and, ultimately for their own benifit?

[danhak]

On the contrary, the article concludes on this note:

> But if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world.

[andrewflnr]

That means a lot less as a postscript than as the starting point. Whereas the framing of your values as a "gift" doesn't absolutely imply they're correct, but does imply they're somehow a good thing.

There's a phrase we use for saying the right words about an important idea but not actually incorporating it into your methods: "lip service".

[dr_dshiv]

> if you're ever tempted to dish out a sick burn, try to rephrase the point into a genuine question

Can you give an example?

[Nition]

"The government's using COVID as a means of population control."

"Why does the government want a lower population - don't they usually want more people to grow the economy?"

[phailhaus]

Great example!

[spangry]

> I find it strange that this article presumes that you have all the right answers and that there isn't the possibility that you are the one who needs their mind changed. It points out that listening is valuable, but not because there's a possibility that the person you're talking to is in the right, no, you should listen to other people because studies show that listening to other people will manipulate them into seeing things your way.

Perhaps the article is being devious here. It's not easy for people to separate intentions and actions - sometimes an intention can form to rationalise a preceding action (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect). Even though your initial intention may be to manipulate by appearing to genuinely listen, you may end up just genuinely listening and rationalising that this was your intent all along. This line of reasoning could trick the most ardent zealots into accidentally genuinely listening to their enemies' point of view.

Relatedly, I think another effective persuasive technique is 'seeding'. If you can engineer a 'non-defensive' conversation with your opponent in which you seed one or two critical thoughts in their mind, although they won't be instantaneously persuaded the seeds can germinate into full persuasion later on. However, this technique requires avoidance of confrontational behaviours that cause your opponent to activate their mental defenses.

[Vinnl]

To me it felt like the article lured you in pretending to be a guide on how to change other people's minds, but the arguments seem to involve that you can only do so by being open to having your own mind change.

I mean, I scrolled back up to the title - "A Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds" - and note that it doesn't even mention other people's minds; it could refer to changing your own mind as well. Point two is about being OK with your point of view being rejected, and point three about considering the other person's point of view. And then the conclusion is:

> But if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world. Launching a rhetorical grenade might give me a little satisfaction and earn me a few attaboys on social media from those who share my views, but generosity and openness have a bigger chance of making the world better in the long run.

[nuancebydefault]

> listening... will manipulate them...

I also read in the article that you should listen in a genuine way. Would it be possible that this act could change your own mind? Would that fit your definition of being open-minded?

[skyfaller]

This is a "trick" that Socrates was famous for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning

Many of his contemporaries hated his guts and ultimately they condemned him to death. It may be a good way to keep an open mind, but it may also be a terrible way to make friends and influence people.

[goto11]

He wasn't condemned to death because of his annoying questions, he was condemned because he was considered partly responsible for the "Thirty Tyrants" rule of terror which replaced democracy in Athens. Socrates was vehemently opposed to the democracy, and one of the leaders of the tyrants had been his student. When democracy was restored, Socrates was condemned to death.

[etherael]

I think it's because the political process is all about getting people into groups where they can thus cooperate with each other as an economic bloc, a perfect lie is the optimal unifying concept in this model; something that pulls everybody together into the same single political structure.

If on the other hand all you care about is the truth, you're directly corrosive to the above. You're looking at all the edge cases where the lie breaks down, and worse yet you're spreading disintegration of the otherwise unified political bloc by infecting other agents with your same methods.

It's a matter of perspective which side is "right", because those resultant atomised and fractured political blocs that can no longer bring themselves to accept the beautiful lie that otherwise would have successfully united them are now competitive rather than cooperative, and the game gradually slips closer to zero sum with the bloc most closely pursuing the optimal strategy in the light of the cold hard cynical truth winning out at the direct expense of all the other groups, and the resulting accelerating wealth inequality that implies, having real concrete negative effects on the lives of all those people in the suboptimal factions that frankly they may never have even had a chance to join letalone have been made aware of the existence of any alternatives because of the nature of their worldviews. Is it "right" to pursue truth even if it makes the quality of life of billions much worse?

It's a frightening and enlightening thing to sit down with an ideologue and come to understand not just what they think, but how they got to think that way. The common thread I have found is that default worldviews are both extremely sticky and subject to almost no critical analysis by the people that hold them, and unifying the galaxy of irrational but widely held default worldviews that exist flatly requires extensive narrative manipulation and outright lying, and that lying and manipulation is what politics actually is.

Imho this is why widespread censorship has gone from intolerable anathema to the sine qua non for the existence of the dominant shared mass hallucination about the state of the world in just a few short decades. Like it or not, politics has won out soundly over truth past a certain social scale.

Disclaimer; acknowledging reality is not approving of it. Socrates was right and should have beeen feeding his prosecutors hemlock, not the other way around. Damn the consequences and embrace the truth, whatever the outcome has always been my view. I just also know that view is extremely unpopular today.

[jdmdmdmdmd]

>Many of his contemporaries hated his guts and ultimately they condemned him to death

And they are forgotten where he is remembered thousands of years later.

[ledauphin]

Do you think the author might have written it with that 'presumption' intentionally?

I'd guess that the author is trying to, as gently as possible, suggest to people that there are better ways to go about thinking about those with whom you disagree, _regardless_ of who is right or wrong. Which is really a different point than "you should be less certain about your beliefs."

[xani_]

> Here's a good trick I picked up for discussing contentious things - if you're ever tempted to dish out a sick burn, try to rephrase the point into a genuine question. Then the other person will have to walk through the logic of it, and if it turns out there is a real logic to their side of things, you don't get your ego bruised, cause you just asked a genuine question.

And if it doesn't they can figure it out and have a way to fuck off without losing face too much

[chiefalchemist]

You raise an interesting question: Does the right-leaning media publish the same type of articles? And if not, what type of "conflict resolution" content do they publish instead?