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For a healthy diet make sure to only eat reasoned rebuttals sparingly. You should get most of your nutrition from name calling. /s
Each level of argument has a purpose. Know your audience and use whatever is most effective. You’re not going to get anywhere calling a doctor a poopyhead just as you won’t accomplish anything by presenting facts to a conspiracy theorist.
Your audience will be most effectively convinced by logic, emotion, or authority. It should be pretty simple to figure out which one to use.
Calling a conspiracy theorist a poopyhead won’t help either (they thrive on perceived persecution). The only thing I think Might help (and it’s a longshot) is along the lines of Socratic Method.
Or even just avoidance of trigger topics and only talk to them about normal everyday stuff. That’s what I try to do with my mom, even if I’m not changing her mind on anything, at least I’m not actively pushing her farther down the pit and away from me/society.
Fair warning: This only works if the other party, or the people watching the argument care. If the other party is just arguing in bad faith, don’t expect to have a productive conversation. If the people watching the argument don’t care and just want to see a spectacle, logic ain’t gonna work.
Covid conspiracy nuts taught me that what wasn’t originally reasoned in can’t be reasoned out. These people don’t play by the rules of logical arguments, so don’t expect your logic to work with them. What they need is therapy, and possibly even some stabilizing medication.
What does a “COVID conspiracy nut” believe? I’m just curious.
And they will only care if you also show you care.
I would say even higher than “refuting the central point” is “extracting the central truth from both sides and finding enlightenment”.
Note: this is only useful if the opponent has some redeeming quality in his argument.
If you have a bad faith actor, just find the quickest and cleanest way to exit. If clean isn’t possible, prioritize quickness.
Mfer just said “enlightenment”, “central”, and “both sides”. The enlightened centrist has entered the chat
And why is it you, instead of them, that went aaaaall the way to the bottom :/
Because I am not reasonable >:)
As with many things, it can be contextual. For instance, it might be pertinent to know that the person with whom you’re discussing climate change is a flat Earther.
Which is true, and their note agrees with that. You won’t always be talking to someone who cares. Or even normally, arguing on the toilet with bored strangers on the internet, where most people are just looking for entertainment and one or both people is usually dismissed entirely the moment they don’t wholesale agree.
Which is not how a conversation is supposed to work. But it’s almost never about convincing anyone, is it? It’s about yelling at whichever people it’s socially acceptable to yell at for points, and encouraging people to listen to each other garners insults. From often the same people who complain nothing is getting fixed and people are so mean these days.
Their main point — that there are three sides to an argument: yours, theirs, and the truth — is still salient if you want anyone in any situation to hear anything you’re saying who didn’t already agree with you anyway. If you’re talking past each other, you might as well just shut up and go look at memes.
Especially irl. There was another commentor here that said everyone just wants to be heard. This is 101 in defusing an (honest) argument, and nothing is moving anywhere until they feel like they’re being taken seriously. Go to any type of counseling, and the first thing they’re going to do is make you sit there, fingernails digging into the upholstery, and listen to each other without interrupting.
The onus is not always on you. There are millions of people that just have to see it for themselves before they’ll admit anything you say is actually happening or indeed important. Maybe not even then.
But the snarky name-calling dismissal the internet approaches every argument with doesn’t even include room for a maybe, and it objectively doesn’t make sense to bother engaging in. Getting to the bottom of what the problem someone is having actually IS, even if you think it’s a stupid problem, can only be a benefit to solving it and making the stupid thing go away.
That user isn’t actually the “what if the nazi has some points” kind of centrist that they got called. They’ve just been to therapy before, or had parents and spouses who cared how they felt, and now they care how others feel.
Also, a general prerequisite: you need to know yourself well enough to be able to identify, and admit to yourself, when you’re no longer rational and are controlled by emotion. Imo this pyramid is based on this fact alone, and most people are naturally capable of seeing through the facade of others once they’re able to face their own shortcomings (wear it like armor).
Play to your audience, not your opponent. Occasionally they’re the same person.
Even then it might not work. If you use this “guide” for arguing with your SO, you are in for a bad time.
People don’t want to be refuted, they want to be heard.
Is it an argument in the first place then? It seems to be a different scenario that needs to be recognized as different.
In some contexts arguing is synonymous with conflict.
how about “fuck off”?
From the bottom up…
Whatever you say asshole.
A moron like you has no idea on how arguments should work.
Your self righteous infographic is just arrogant.
I know how to argue far better than you do.
I get in many arguments and I almost always win them.
You talk about disagreement, but your pyramid only works when both people are arguing in good faith.
You say that attacking the central point of an argument is the most effective, but often the stated central point is not the central point at all, especially with emotion based positions. For example, a more conservative person arguing against liberal changes will state specific objections to these changes, but arguing those objections is futile if the real underlying objection is simple fear of change.
Jokes aside-this pyramid is right on the money.
Nice
You missed one
Missed a line break but the text was there. Check now?
I guess the pyramid did too, 'cause I can’t see whataboutism fitting in anywhere. So what about that OP!
No, I ALMOST WIN THEM ALL!
You’re short, so you lose and I win, lalalalaa I don’t hear you
But also, learn how to identify trolls and don’t waste your time on them.
And also bots
Also works in terms of time & effort.
Why is this a pyramid?
[the illuminati would like to know your location]
Because you need to eat more Name-Calling each day than any other type of argument, followed by Ad-Hominem, etc. You only need a little bit of Refuting the Central Point to reach your daily nutritional needs.
According to this the very base of all argument is name calling.
Cockmonger.
“Cockmonger” (noun) :
- Someone who’s milkshake brings all the boys to the yard and then sells them on for profit.
did I ask you to define my words titgoblin?
“Titgoblin” :
-
(noun) : infant, any being that derives sustenance from suckling.
-
(verb) : sex act. Note: linguists despair over the “verbification” of nouns, and warn that if current trends continue, language will run out of nouns some time in the 2040’s. Use with caution.
-
Maybe reasonably but people are very irrational. Wish they had a cheat sheet on how to disarm the natural stubbornness and inability to admit mistake or fault. That’s usually far tougher than actually reasoning.
all part of a balanced diet :)
Note that only works if the person argues in good faith. If they’re not, you’re just wasting your time.
put this on the pile of pyramid charts that have nothing to do with pyramids and would have been better expressed in a different format.
like yes, the point conveyed here is not wrong, and i’m not trying to pull a “responding to tone” and discredit it for being a pyramid, but entirely without challenging the point made about arguments here, i find it so fucking stupid to put everything in pyramids. apparently people who like to think they have business smarts absolutely love a structure with few on top and many on the bottom, especially if it comes with a tidy little guide on how to hopefully reach the top. and that shows a worrying mindset, if you think about it for a bit.
Don’t you know? Name calling is the foundation of all good arguments. Don’t even think about ad hominems until you get that part down.
EDIT: TL;DR: don’t do this if you’re trying to convince irrational people; pull their emotional strings instead. And for rational people, focus on logic reasoning and consistency with the observed results.
For rational people*, a better way to handle this would be:
- Showing logical flaws in their reasoning;
- Showing that their reasoning conflicts with the observed results;
- Showing that your own reasoning is logically neater;
- Showing that your reasoning fits the observed results.
Most [all?] things outside those four points are fallacious mush, making shit up, etc.
For points #1 and #3, it’s damn useful to know basic informal fallacies. Things like appeal to authority, false dichotomy, non sequitur, etc. You don’t even need to remember their names, as long as you can spot them in an argument (including yours, before you utter it) and say “wait a minute this is wrong”.
Now. When dealing with irrational people, you’re probably better off sticking to the middle of that pyramid, because even if you refute the central point… guess what, the moron will put it back in place using some insane [lack of] logic. In special, fallacies like appeal to emotion, appeal to consequences, ad hominem (more on that later), genetic fallacy (pretending that shit becomes truer/falser or more/less moral depending on who says it) is damn effective to convince those people, even if logically unsound.
Regarding ad hominem. A lot of people confuse it with insults, when both things are completely orthogonal. Ad hominem boils down to “this is false because of the person saying it”; you can do it in a non-insulting way, and you can insult without using ad hominem. (For example: “Alice, you think that the Sun is green? Goddammit you’re fucking stupid, here, LOOK AT THE FUCKING SUN! And here’s a spectrogram of the Sun’s radiation! The only green thing here is your green-stained arse, you fucking cattle” is not ad hominem, even if rather colourful with the insults.)
*“[ir]rational people” in this context should be seen as solely shorthands for “people behaving [ir]rationally towards the subject being discussed”. Those are not true categories of people, just a convenient abstraction.
Mucho texto
Che, es verdad, pero ya ya resuelvo esto con un TL;DR. (edit: hecho)
Mind you, regarding the sun being green, it’s worth noting this observation from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien’s_displacement_law
The effective temperature of the Sun is 5778 Kelvin. Using Wien’s law, one finds a peak emission per nanometer (of wavelength) at a wavelength of about 500 nm, in the green portion of the spectrum near the peak sensitivity of the human eye.
The Sun does emit a lot of cyanish green light, but the overall colour from the space is white, as it emits comparable amounts of light in the rest of the visible spectrum:
And, if talking about the colour of the sun as seen from Earth, it should be a yellowish orange (as the atmospheres filters some higher frequency light).
Another detail: blackbody radiation is an approximation. A useful one, but as seen in the graph above, at least for wavelength it peaks around blue or violet. And if you plot it by frequency instead, it should peak the closest to red (counting only visible rad).
I could’ve used purple in the example too. Dunno why I decided for green.
so the sun is purple but our eyes are flawed and therefore we see it as white when directly watching it and yellow when we look at it through the atmosphere
