Note: if this is better off OT/Discussion Club, apologies
Today's political discussions often have a participant who doesn't ally with the same principle task: getting to the truth. This is markedly different than when a person holds different views or understands facts differently or is personally inflexible in challenging their perceptions. Under those considerations, there is still a motivation intrinsically to share a common understanding of an actual reality even should it be completely impossible to get there. The alternative goal is to frustrate, demoralize, and normalize deviance irrespective of whether the proposed reality is accurate as evidence by the persistent pivoting and simple denial of even basic facts and past positions they have held. It is amazing to me to witness how dependent our lives have been on a cooperative goal that we take for granted.
There is hope, I believe, to have these conversations more productively. That hope has actually come to be from a legal analysis on YouTube of the Kavanaugh hearings. There are some basic principles of questioning a witness laid out which are intuitive to me, but without intentional focus on them have readily fallen prey to the basic assumption that my conversation partner desires to establish a consistent narrative to argue from. They don't. So you can't argue with them until you've pinned them to a narrative.
So, you break down what you are doing into a questioning phase to pin them to a specific and singular story before making any argument against it. This will be resisted heavily, and the likelihood is your conversation partner will simply disappear in the process. Well, that's one way to defeat their disinformation campaign. Sorry, they're not on a witness stand with consequences for non-responsiveness.
Tips:
- you are trying to get them to flesh out their story, not yours. Do not harken on inconsistencies except to pin them down to one story
- stick to very basic questions, ideally yes or no questions
- don't move to the next question until they answer yours, and make sure they give a specific, singular answer in the end so they can't back out later and say the answer was also XYZ. If necessary, confirm e.g., "yes or no, what you are referring to is only the investigation into Burisma started by Shokin and not any other investigation or potential investigation?"
- only ask questions you know the answer to, or at least the answer they will give when pinned down to it
- you will receive a lot of nonsense arguments either in substitution of an answer or in addition to an answer. Ignore them completely. You must not address them at all until you have pinned them to their story. If they throw it back at you, tell them you will respond, but you can't until you are sure you have understood their argument and go back to your basic questions
Once you have established their singular story, it ought to be fairly easy to argue why it is rubbish, and any attempts to counter it that don't comport with their established narrative can be redirected to not fitting with what they have already established instead of argued against as if you are ok that they have changed their story on a whim. If you do wish to allow them to change their story, you must tell them that, since the story has changed, you will need to be sure you understand the new one before engaging in arguments about it and restart the process of pinning them to that story.
If someone wants to share their opinion and truly believes they are objectively right, then it will be easy to get them to tell a consistent narrative even if flawed. Otherwise, I highly doubt someone will stick around past the first few questions at best.
Of course, the alternative to being easy to refute their narrative once you have pinned them to it is that you are in fact the person who is wrong. So it's a win-win process.
Today's political discussions often have a participant who doesn't ally with the same principle task: getting to the truth. This is markedly different than when a person holds different views or understands facts differently or is personally inflexible in challenging their perceptions. Under those considerations, there is still a motivation intrinsically to share a common understanding of an actual reality even should it be completely impossible to get there. The alternative goal is to frustrate, demoralize, and normalize deviance irrespective of whether the proposed reality is accurate as evidence by the persistent pivoting and simple denial of even basic facts and past positions they have held. It is amazing to me to witness how dependent our lives have been on a cooperative goal that we take for granted.
There is hope, I believe, to have these conversations more productively. That hope has actually come to be from a legal analysis on YouTube of the Kavanaugh hearings. There are some basic principles of questioning a witness laid out which are intuitive to me, but without intentional focus on them have readily fallen prey to the basic assumption that my conversation partner desires to establish a consistent narrative to argue from. They don't. So you can't argue with them until you've pinned them to a narrative.
So, you break down what you are doing into a questioning phase to pin them to a specific and singular story before making any argument against it. This will be resisted heavily, and the likelihood is your conversation partner will simply disappear in the process. Well, that's one way to defeat their disinformation campaign. Sorry, they're not on a witness stand with consequences for non-responsiveness.
Tips:
- you are trying to get them to flesh out their story, not yours. Do not harken on inconsistencies except to pin them down to one story
- stick to very basic questions, ideally yes or no questions
- don't move to the next question until they answer yours, and make sure they give a specific, singular answer in the end so they can't back out later and say the answer was also XYZ. If necessary, confirm e.g., "yes or no, what you are referring to is only the investigation into Burisma started by Shokin and not any other investigation or potential investigation?"
- only ask questions you know the answer to, or at least the answer they will give when pinned down to it
- you will receive a lot of nonsense arguments either in substitution of an answer or in addition to an answer. Ignore them completely. You must not address them at all until you have pinned them to their story. If they throw it back at you, tell them you will respond, but you can't until you are sure you have understood their argument and go back to your basic questions
Once you have established their singular story, it ought to be fairly easy to argue why it is rubbish, and any attempts to counter it that don't comport with their established narrative can be redirected to not fitting with what they have already established instead of argued against as if you are ok that they have changed their story on a whim. If you do wish to allow them to change their story, you must tell them that, since the story has changed, you will need to be sure you understand the new one before engaging in arguments about it and restart the process of pinning them to that story.
If someone wants to share their opinion and truly believes they are objectively right, then it will be easy to get them to tell a consistent narrative even if flawed. Otherwise, I highly doubt someone will stick around past the first few questions at best.
Of course, the alternative to being easy to refute their narrative once you have pinned them to it is that you are in fact the person who is wrong. So it's a win-win process.