They never mention they could’ve been wrong. The author assumes they’re always right, but that trying to convince others and argue them to their right side is not valuable.
How about: maybe I’m wrong and I didn’t let their ideas influence me. How about: even when I think I’m right, it will be better to calmly kindly discuss, listening as much as talking, not debating or arguing or speaking over them, but attempting to see new perspectives.
I think you are spot on. Also if you are actively listening you may learn that the fault is in how you are communicating your ideas instead of the ideas themselves being flawed
So: I state my point. They can take it or leave it. If passionate I'll follow up offline/async with more ideas.
You really wanna be working with good faith people who are reasonably smart or all bets are off. Put the effort into a better work circumstance if not.
> When you argue with someone, you think you’re debating an idea. Often you’re not. You’re challenging their sense of self.
This seems more true for the author than everyone else.
They didn't discover anything new about others, nor did they learn to argue more effectively. They just discovered their own ego, finally realized how often it gets in the way, and gave up.
While I agree that the best course of action is often to "do nothing", sulking is not nothing. I'm convinced they're the type of person who still argues with people on reddit all the time, but decided to stop doing that at work and with family. That's still unhealthy.
>Slartibartfast: I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
>Arthur: And are you?
>Slartibartfast: No. That's where it all falls down of course.
>Arthur: Pity. It sounded like rather a good lifestyle otherwise.
Adulthood, career, marriage, parenthood, nearly everything since I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a (pre?)teen has been slowly, stubbornly learning that this exchange is basically the key to everything.
“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
― George Bernard Shaw
Some of the best professional advice I ever received was "Half your job is being liked by those you work for and with, everything else you can learn."
Being right is important in the context of the work you're responsible for delivering on, but so is knowing when to be right, and knowing when not to care if they're wrong. If the decision is outside of your control, document extensively, establish and preserve a paper trail, and move on. "Thoughts, knowledge, and opinions, loosely held."
(i believe that is the point of author's piece; pick your battles, you will not win every one, nor should you try or think of it as winning)
One of the most cancerous developments of our generation is a bunch of people isolating themselves from everyone else, and having their perfect unchallenged audience captured views spread far and wide.
On a more personal level, the reason people are frustrated about arguing is because they can’t fully articulate their reasons. They don’t realize it themselves. The older you get and the more practiced you get at arguing, the less contentious it becomes, as you can simply say what underpins what you’re saying in an easily understandable way, and then if that didn’t convince the other side, you did all you could.
My definition of a cult is a group where members don’t trust people outside the group. We have a lot of news sources saying that we should not trust other news sources. Especially statements like “that other news source lied once, so you should never trust them.” I think this promoted mistrust has created a lot of cults.
When members of a cult don’t trust outsiders, it allows their beliefs to drift away from reality. They’re not getting the feedback necessary to keep information grounded.
And reality is a great mechanism for keeping beliefs unified. The creation of cults has splintered the USA.
I think the Internet has helped foster this. It made it cheaper and easier to create a new news source. It is cheaper and easier to fund that news source through ads or direct payments from customers. And the resulting market incentivizes news sources to keep customers by denigrating the competition, which creates cults.
We need to redesign the market for news sources, to disincentivize that behavior.
There are news, and there's entertainment (opinions and punditry).
News actually have journalistic standards. They try to stay truthful and retract errors.
But what most people follow are shows/personalities that aren't even allowed to be officially called news, and independent media online influencers who are much more easily and directly corruptible and audience captured by much less money, with basically zero accountability.
The truth is, mainstream news (the actual news) are still good. But it's so easy nowadays to get on a platform and discredit everyone with almost no evidence, and have thousands of people believe you. And then sell your sponsors to that audience, because you sound trustworthy. It's so much easier to discredit everyone else than to build your own true credibility.
The goal is not to make you believe that "we are better than them". The goal is to make you believe that "everyone is equally bad, everyone is lying to you". It's like when phone scammers tell you that the other phone scammers are real scammers to appear more trustworthy.
I think the problem is with independent media and "opinions" replacing news. If everyone yells bullshit for personal gain at the top of their lungs and creates cults (as I agree these become), that's basically not free speech anymore.
Either HN has become much more accepting of LLM-generated content or it can't tell the difference. Still, it was a decent skim. These models are fairly smart; I wouldn't say they are complete wastes of time. I find LLM articles are best read impressionistically. Don't take every sentence or even paragraph too seriously as no one, not even the machine put that much effort into it.
I stopped engaging in arguments once I realized there's very little to gain by trying to convince someone you're right (regardless of who's actually right).
If there's nothing major at stake (say, trying to convincing someone with cancer to seek treatment instead of ignoring it), it's not worth your (or their) time.
Most people are ego-driven and won't listen to your logical arguments. They will only get angry with you even if you're right. So don't argue with them. Give advice only if they ask.
If you really know something others don't realize, maybe that's a valuable edge for you to profit from. Use it.
And don't hesitate to ask others for advice when it might help you.
There is arguing, and then there is arguing. The whole post discusses whether to argue or not, without touching on the fairly important (imho) topic of how to argue and how not to argue.
Vast majority of people probably hate to argue with someone who's a jerk during said argument, regardless of their correctness.
I've also found myself arguing against someone whose point I actually support, but who is arguing in a non-sensical way, or with bad arguments for said point. Because I don't want that point to be dragged down by easy-to-defeat arguments, even if I then have to fight both sides.
But anyway: how you argue matters, put some effort into it, and don't assume that being right means you're doing a good job.
They say "arguing", but really this is about bickering. Arguments are constructive. Bickering is just engagement. I argue with people so I can construct my worldview, and maybe sometimes even construct the world around me. And, being honest, I occasionally find myself bickering, too; though I do tend to avoid it well.
What the author says about ego goes both ways. People often reject arguments because of ego. Arguments can imply that they way someone has been doing something is suboptimal or even flat out wrong, or at least that's how they may be perceived. Even if something you're arguing for can improve the situation, the other parties may refuse to give it a chance because they need to protect their egos.
At some point, people have to introduce ideas into a broader consciousness, even if they clash with other ideas. How else will anything actually get done? Putting forth an argument doesn't necessarily have to come from the ego. Even if one does come from the ego, that doesn't mean the idea itself is bad.
I've mostly stopped trying to argue or debate on any topic because the probability of being chronically misunderstood usually outweighs any benefit that would come from successfully persuading the other person. I'm never convinced that I'm 100% right on anything, and life is too short to spend it arguing with those who do; which describes a lot of people.
The other reason I rarely argue anymore is that, if I am correct on something, reality usually proves that I was. That doesn't mean everyone else is gonna say "Ravenstine was actually right", because they never do, but at least I get the satisfaction of having been able to trust myself.
231 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 79.1 ms ] threadHow about: maybe I’m wrong and I didn’t let their ideas influence me. How about: even when I think I’m right, it will be better to calmly kindly discuss, listening as much as talking, not debating or arguing or speaking over them, but attempting to see new perspectives.
I could well be wrong about this :)
So: I state my point. They can take it or leave it. If passionate I'll follow up offline/async with more ideas.
You really wanna be working with good faith people who are reasonably smart or all bets are off. Put the effort into a better work circumstance if not.
This seems more true for the author than everyone else.
They didn't discover anything new about others, nor did they learn to argue more effectively. They just discovered their own ego, finally realized how often it gets in the way, and gave up.
While I agree that the best course of action is often to "do nothing", sulking is not nothing. I'm convinced they're the type of person who still argues with people on reddit all the time, but decided to stop doing that at work and with family. That's still unhealthy.
>Arthur: And are you?
>Slartibartfast: No. That's where it all falls down of course.
>Arthur: Pity. It sounded like rather a good lifestyle otherwise.
Adulthood, career, marriage, parenthood, nearly everything since I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a (pre?)teen has been slowly, stubbornly learning that this exchange is basically the key to everything.
Being right is important in the context of the work you're responsible for delivering on, but so is knowing when to be right, and knowing when not to care if they're wrong. If the decision is outside of your control, document extensively, establish and preserve a paper trail, and move on. "Thoughts, knowledge, and opinions, loosely held."
(i believe that is the point of author's piece; pick your battles, you will not win every one, nor should you try or think of it as winning)
On a more personal level, the reason people are frustrated about arguing is because they can’t fully articulate their reasons. They don’t realize it themselves. The older you get and the more practiced you get at arguing, the less contentious it becomes, as you can simply say what underpins what you’re saying in an easily understandable way, and then if that didn’t convince the other side, you did all you could.
When members of a cult don’t trust outsiders, it allows their beliefs to drift away from reality. They’re not getting the feedback necessary to keep information grounded. And reality is a great mechanism for keeping beliefs unified. The creation of cults has splintered the USA.
I think the Internet has helped foster this. It made it cheaper and easier to create a new news source. It is cheaper and easier to fund that news source through ads or direct payments from customers. And the resulting market incentivizes news sources to keep customers by denigrating the competition, which creates cults.
We need to redesign the market for news sources, to disincentivize that behavior.
There are news, and there's entertainment (opinions and punditry).
News actually have journalistic standards. They try to stay truthful and retract errors.
But what most people follow are shows/personalities that aren't even allowed to be officially called news, and independent media online influencers who are much more easily and directly corruptible and audience captured by much less money, with basically zero accountability.
The truth is, mainstream news (the actual news) are still good. But it's so easy nowadays to get on a platform and discredit everyone with almost no evidence, and have thousands of people believe you. And then sell your sponsors to that audience, because you sound trustworthy. It's so much easier to discredit everyone else than to build your own true credibility.
The goal is not to make you believe that "we are better than them". The goal is to make you believe that "everyone is equally bad, everyone is lying to you". It's like when phone scammers tell you that the other phone scammers are real scammers to appear more trustworthy.
I think the problem is with independent media and "opinions" replacing news. If everyone yells bullshit for personal gain at the top of their lungs and creates cults (as I agree these become), that's basically not free speech anymore.
> "If you remember one thing, it's this: if you are arguing, you are losing."
If there's nothing major at stake (say, trying to convincing someone with cancer to seek treatment instead of ignoring it), it's not worth your (or their) time.
Most people are ego-driven and won't listen to your logical arguments. They will only get angry with you even if you're right. So don't argue with them. Give advice only if they ask.
If you really know something others don't realize, maybe that's a valuable edge for you to profit from. Use it.
And don't hesitate to ask others for advice when it might help you.
Vast majority of people probably hate to argue with someone who's a jerk during said argument, regardless of their correctness.
I've also found myself arguing against someone whose point I actually support, but who is arguing in a non-sensical way, or with bad arguments for said point. Because I don't want that point to be dragged down by easy-to-defeat arguments, even if I then have to fight both sides.
But anyway: how you argue matters, put some effort into it, and don't assume that being right means you're doing a good job.
At some point, people have to introduce ideas into a broader consciousness, even if they clash with other ideas. How else will anything actually get done? Putting forth an argument doesn't necessarily have to come from the ego. Even if one does come from the ego, that doesn't mean the idea itself is bad.
I've mostly stopped trying to argue or debate on any topic because the probability of being chronically misunderstood usually outweighs any benefit that would come from successfully persuading the other person. I'm never convinced that I'm 100% right on anything, and life is too short to spend it arguing with those who do; which describes a lot of people.
The other reason I rarely argue anymore is that, if I am correct on something, reality usually proves that I was. That doesn't mean everyone else is gonna say "Ravenstine was actually right", because they never do, but at least I get the satisfaction of having been able to trust myself.