In the latest edition of "complicated communication misfires I want to pick at," remember that your knowledge isn't always common.
People form simple opinions about complex issues. The mind you may find yourself arguing with doesn't necessarily have ANY awareness of the complexities and nuances of the thing they're arguing about. They may very well be parroting talking points which were fed to them.
If you're arguing presuming they know the roots of a systemic problem, you could be wrong.
@TechConnectify "I don't know enough about <thing> to form any valid opinion about it." is always an option. It's one I exercise frequently. There is no actual obligation to Dunning-Kruger oneself into oblivion on every conceivable topic.
@TechConnectify The other side of this coin is that, especially on the broader social media internet (maybe less so on Mastodon IDK) there are genuine troll farms designed to stir shit with the sole intention of stirring shit.
At some point it has to be accepted that some percentage of the time there isn't a "getting through to them" because there's not really a "them" to get through to.
@TechConnectify That being said, it is important, especially when convercing face-to-face, to pull outwards from the "point" slowly to help fold in more of the complexities, rather than jumping from concept to concept like a pinball machine with ADHD.
@SteveHeist Absolutely, but we can't take the existence of this to be reason to not engage with one another in good-faith. Because that only furthers what those troll farms want to achieve - a broad acceptance of their POV.
My balanced position would be the one that I think most people reasonably operate with: if the entity you're speaking with doesn't engage with your points but instead deflects at every turn, just bow out. Works for trolls just as well as genuine folks who can't be persuaded.
And consider what that looks like from the other side:
"Suddenly this person is bringing up outside issues to muddy the conversation! The people I watch on the news warned me about this. They won't stay on topic because they're disingenuous and they know it."
We have to listen to each other and engage with the individual things we are wrong about. We have to be very careful about labeling an entire person as "wrong." That presumes they cannot change or improve themselves: a very dangerous idea
@TechConnectify Your heart is very much in the right place, I appreciate it.
So much can be accomplished by respecting that a person always has more going on inside than we can know.
Starting with taking people at face value and being direct about addressing only what they are saying can definitely keep communication open.
@hopeward you know, this is going to sound bizarre but I really think the reason my brain is being stirred in this way is that I have been watching Perry Mason.
Yes, it's television from the 1950s and there are things about it which are not true and never were true. But the fact that the stories are believable, stories featuring arguing parties address misunderstandings with a simple "I didn't say that" and they continue on in agreement, feels like a lost art we need to get back.
I believe we've stopped looking for the harmless ways in which they are right. I mean that literally - we presume that their beliefs are well-informed and operate from that assumption. If that's where you start, then even if you correctly identify a harmless thing they believe is at play which you could agree with, you might be concerned that it's a deliberate trick to pull you into a debate you might lose so you just don't engage and continue as enemies
@TechConnectify Dude, I have a hot take: people on all sides of the political equation are projecting their personal pathologies into the world. This is 'personal anxiety', politicized to the extreme. Whereas in the past somebody might have smoked a cig or IDK drunk themselves asleep, now they are weaponising the whole thing, and creating the whole shebang, to distract from the personal anxieties and other pathologies.
@rooneel I don't think I disagree - it sounds like a different way to describe what I'm getting at.
A thing that I've recently started to take to heart is that nearly all people you speak with don't intend to mislead. They believe they are speaking the truth, because they are. Their own truth may have faults which need to be corrected - and that's what you need to chip at. You can't discount them as "wrong," you should consider them misled and attempt to find out how so you can correct it.
@rooneel This movement we've made to discussing adversaries as a conscious collection of deliberate lies rather than a person we can persuade has caused us to look for things which are wrong and not consider whether they matter.
And I think this is the root cause of conversations between allies turning into petty arguments. If you've got an ally, it doesn't seem wise to concoct tests to determine whether their position comes from the same places yours does. You want the same things.
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