2:25am September 27, 2013

➸ Social skills for autonomous people: Rhetorical might doesn't make right

youneedacat:

realsocialskills:

Not knowing how to articulate something doesn’t mean you are wrong.

Being elequoent doesn’t mean you are right.

Making someone look stupid doesn’t mean you are right.

Words are tools. They aren’t everything. They aren’t all of knowledge either.

So if someone tells you something that sounds…

I really hate having conversations with people who think they’re better and righter than me because they can sound more rational or cite more sources. Like every conversation is a debate club.

I think one reason people overrate rhetoric is because they think if you’re more eloquent you probably have a better (i.e. more logical, better-supported) argument. Actually, that isn’t true—maybe you need to be good with words to convey a good argument precisely, but you can have a logical argument and not have the words to explain it.

But even if you have a good argument, that isn’t enough.

One reason I didn’t go into philosophy, even though it’s arguably the best fit for my strengths and weaknesses, is that the standard for success is making the best argument. I’m pretty good at that, and I didn’t want to be fooled into thinking I was right if I happened to have the tightest, most logical argument. I also didn’t want to be fooled into thinking I was wrong because I had intuitions that I couldn’t justify—like that there is something it is like to be a person or animal, which is pretty much the foundation of my ethics. I’m honestly not sure which fear pushed me away harder.

I took a history class on the American Revolution in college, where the professor asked us, “When did it begin?” ”When did it end?” Then he asked, “What caused the American Revolution?” The story you tell will be very different if you start with the end of the French and Indian War than if you start with the Declaration of Independence. It will also be different if you finish with the end of the war than if you end with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Now, there are some arguments about the event that are obviously really bad and aren’t likely to be true. if I remember correctly, there was one about there being some sort of psychoactive drug in the colonists’ grain. But just with the different starts and endpoints I’ve listed here, you could come up with 4 equally good stories, and if they were all equally well argued, how would you know what was true? We’re missing so much information about that time that we probably will never know definitively what caused the American Revolution, or why it succeeded.

TL;DR, if people think you’re wrong because you can’t argue eloquently, they’re probably elitist and wrong.

Yeah the part about if you just know something intuitively then you’re automatically wrong bothers me too. Not that intuition is automatically right. But it’s often right. Even in matters usually seen as the domain of the logical argument. And assuming that presenting the best logical argument should always make you better aware of a situation has always made me feel about two inches tall. Especially when I’m pretty sure I’m right and someone is asking me for studies to prove something that isn’t even the sort of thing studies can prove.

Notes: