A Proper Argument

Very recently it was vigorously brought to my attention just how far out of the mainstream I am.  I have views on how to properly conduct an argument that are at variance with a lot of people.  That is perhaps not surprising.  But I find that I hold views that are at variance with pretty much everybody.  Someone whose thinking I thought was not wildly different from mine turned out to in fact be wildly different from mine.  That was both disappointing and deeply distressing.

I have put more than fifty years of thought and effort into my thinking on the subject of how to determine what's true and what isn't.  I have tried very hard to figure out what works and what doesn't in the context of this pursuit.  I think everybody should value the truth and am disappointed when I come across people who don't.  But it turns out my focus was too narrow.

A lot of my blog posts over the years have been attempts to correct the record.  If there is something floating out there that I think is wrong and others are doing a good job of getting the correct information out there, I leave it to them.  I try to stick with situations where there is either insufficient effort being made to correct the record or where everybody seems to be missing something important.

And I am actually humble when it comes to a monopoly on the truth.  I screw up all the time.  But I figure that if I have gotten something wrong then the only way someone can set me straight is for me to say what I think.  That way people know where I am off base and, therefore, need correction.  I take it as a plus when somebody sets me straight about something I have gotten wrong.

This seems to me to be a reasonable way to approach life.  And I know all about the white lie designed to soothe someone's feelings.  I know that a well placed white lie can smooth out many a social situation.  I am just bad at it.  I know this often holds me back in social situations.  I would dearly love to be much better at it.  I have just never been able to find a way that I can consistently pull off.

But there are social situations and there are social situations.  I try to not be abrasive in purely social situations.  But what about a discourse on the issues of the day?  Is disagreement permitted in these situations?  I would have said the answer to this question would be "yes".  Apparently, I am wrong.

There is a lot of discussion of "echo chambers" and "people talking past one another".  This is universally decried as being a bad thing.  I agree.  But what's the remedy?  Before going into that, at the risk of coming off pedantic, let me restate the problem.  The problem is that disagreement is not allowed.  Beyond that, no one directly engages with the other side's arguments.

The "fix" now becomes obvious.  People should stop engaging in the problematic behavior.  People should be allowed to disagree not only with what the other side says but with what their side says.  Further, both sides should understand and engage with the other side's argument.  And all disagreements should be with the argument, not the person making the argument..

I don't think there is much disagreement with anything I said in the previous paragraph.  (I will go into why there is not across the board agreement below.)  I have now outlined exactly how I proceed.  And I am in trouble for doing so.  Before continuing I am going to make a digression.

Lots and lots of people have outlined roughly the same "fix" as the one I outlined above.  But far too often they add something.  And this is most common when politics is being discussed.  They say some variation on "both sides do it".  This is misleading.

It is true that to some extent both sides do this.  But one side does it a lot more than the other side.  This "both sides do it" argument provides cover for the side that is doing it the most.  They can say "we are only doing it because they are doing it".  I don't think that's true, but as a tactic for getting off the hook, it works great.

Now I could be wrong.  When engaging with this "both sides do it" claim I say "here's why I believe they do it a lot more than we do it".  All you need to do to destroy my argument is to provide evidence that my claim is false.  But nobody ever does that.  Instead they get mad at me.  In other words, they treat me as being on the other side then they fail to engage with my argument.  I have a blind spot.  I am always surprised when this happens.

I think having the argument is critically important.  So there need to be "rules of engagement" for how to conduct a proper argument.  The rules I try to follow are:

• Understand your argument and the evidence that goes along with it.
• Understand the other person's argument and the evidence that goes along with it.
• Engage with the evidence, the data and analysis.  Do it to both sides' argument.
• Do not confuse the argument with the person who is making it.

Stated this way, I think most people would agree.  But I find that often people don't behave that way.  I find the last item critically important.  I never confuse the argument with the person making it.  But this concept is honored in the breach far more often than I thought it was.  I wasn't expecting that.

I very carefully separate the arguments from the person making it.  Just because I disagree with an argument someone had made I don't think they are a bad person or stupid or ignorant.  I just think that in this specific case they have gotten it wrong.

On the other hand, maybe I have gotten it wrong.  If you point out the error of my ways then I am better off for it and that's how I see it.  I am well aware that not everybody operates the way I do.  But I still think it's the best way to operate and I am disappointed when someone who I thought operated that way doesn't.

And I know a big source of my divergence from the norm.  I spent a lot of time interacting with computers.  To state the obvious, computers are not people.  I find that I get along much better with computers than I do with people.  Computers play by rules I am comfortable with.  People often don't.

Computers are good at giving you instant and unambiguous feedback.  I will write and run a computer program.  It will either behave the way I want it to or it won't.  Here's the thing.  Computers don't hold grudges.  If I run a program and it messes up badly the computer, in effect, says "here's the story".  I look at it and try to figure out what I did wrong.  Then I fix it and try again.  The computer doesn't remember what happened last time.  It just notes what happens this time.

I have gone through this "try - fix" cycle so many times I long since lost count.  In each case I soldiered along until the program did what I wanted it to.  And the computer is a neutral arbiter.  It just follows the instructions my program contains and lets me know what happens.  It does not denigrate my looks or ancestry.  It just does what I tell it to.  If I told it right then the right thing happens.  If I told it wrong then the wrong thing happens.  But the computer doesn't even venture an opinion with respect to the right or wrong of what it was told to do.

I flourished in that atmosphere.  I never took it personally when the computer told me I got it wrong.  I just dug in and tried to do better next time.  I was also okay with not receiving praise from the computer when the program worked.  In short, there was an implicit "nothing personal" about how the computer behaved.

So, what's all this have to do with a proper argument?  Just this.  Computers taught me to get comfortable with criticism of my argument/program and to not take it personally.  In the real world, there is the argument and the person that is making the argument.  They are two different things.  Even though most people don't have the computer background I have I thought thoughtful people knew that.  Apparently I got that wrong.  Silly me.

I have no problem separating the person from the argument they are making.  Maybe it's my computer experience.  Maybe I am just wired that way.  But it just seems so obvious to me that I don't continuously say anything about it.  I think objecting to an argument is NOT objecting to the person making the argument.  But apparently way more people than I thought always see objecting to an argument they are making as some kind of personal attack on them.

It would be nice if this didn't matter but it does.  The Greeks made a distinction between "logic" an effort to determine what is right and true, and "rhetoric", the best tactics to use if you want to win an argument.  Their study of rhetoric focused on what was effective.  But along the way they identified both fair and foul ways to be effective.

If "winning is the only thing" then, by all means, use whatever works.  (These are the people who would not go along with the list of principles I outlined above.)  But we should all be able to identify when someone is using one of those foul means to advance their position.

One of the most common foul means is called the "ad hominem" argument.  "X" and "Y" have a difference of opinion.  "X" says "I'm right because of blah, blah, blah".  "Y" says "X is a bad person so you don't have to pay any attention to what he said".  If a person quickly resorts to ad hominem arguments I assume they are in the wrong unless I see substantial evidence to the contrary.

But, since nothing is ever as simple as I would prefer, sometimes an ad hominem argument is justified.  If a person says "I'm right because I'm and an expert and I have studied the situation carefully" but an opponent presents evidence that the person is not an expert and has not studied the situation carefully, then it is appropriate to take the characteristics of the person making the argument into account.  This all assumes, of course, that the opposition provided credible evidence to back their claim up.

Ad hominem attacks are deployed in order to avoid engaging with the meat of a person's argument.  Unsubstantiated or easily disproven ad hominem attacks are the worst.  They should be routinely denounced.  But this almost never happens.  Instead, we are subjected to ad hominem attacks all over the place.  I try my best to make things better, not worse.

The problem is that in the present environment, bad behavior works.  The most generic version of this sort of thing is called "going negative".  When someone runs for public office they should advocate for their positions and qualifications.  If they instead say "my opponent is a bad person", that's going negative.  And this kind of attack is often extended to "my opponent and all of his supporters are bad people".

A couple of generations ago "going negative" was widely derided.  But it worked and it kept working.  It turns out that voters are happy to support a candidate who go negative.  When it became apparent that going negative was effective everybody started doing it.  I never liked going negative but that is an argument I lost a long time ago.  How long ago?

An early proponent of going negative was Richard Nixon.  He used it successfully to get himself elected to the US House of Representatives.  He later used it to a lesser extent to win a Senate seat and then a slot as Vice President on a winning ticket.  In 1960 he decided to run for President.

He also decided to run a positive campaign.  He was obviously more qualified than his opponent, a relatively inexperienced Senator named Kennedy.  So why not win fair and square?  He lost.  If you look at the debates they engaged in, you will find that their positions were little different.  And conventional wisdom had it that Nixon won the debates if you talked to people who heard them on the radio.  But TV viewers gave the nod to Kennedy.  He looked handsome and confident.  Nixon looked swarthy and untrustworthy.

People didn't decide based on the quality of the candidate.  They decided based on likability and personality.  Nixon also didn't go negative when he ran against a far less well qualified candidate to become Governor of California in '62.  He lost again.  In '68 he went back to his "tricky dick" tactics and won the Presidency.  He won big in his reelection campaign in '72 by using even less savory tactics.

It is hard to fault Nixon for reverting to type.  Playing fair was not a successful strategy for him.  It was the voters who decided what worked and what didn't.  He just decided to go with what worked.  For a while the thought was that Nixon was an outlier.  But then more and more candidates went negative and won as a result.  Voters decided that going negative was okay.  If they had decided otherwise we would now be in a far different place.

I have known for a long time that going negative works when it comes to elections.  But that hasn't meant that I liked it.  And it has not worked when it comes to my vote.  But I do confess to being typical in that I make my decisions based on many factors.  I don't just go with the candidate that is the most honest or the most competent.  I do, however, accord those factors a lot of weight.  But elections are not the only thing we argue about.

This is not my first run at this subject. Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post called "Faith Based Conflict Resolution".  Of all my posts, it is the one I am most proud of.  Here's a link to it:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/12/faith-based-conflict-resolution.html.  Looking back at it I find that I was too optimistic.  I just assumed the whole business about separating out that argument from the person making the argument was commonly accepted and just focused on the mechanics of the argument.  Before moving on, here's the meat of the argument:

Ultimately the only tactic that is effective in this environment [a "faith based" environment] is the power tactic.  And do we really want to decide all conflicts by a test of power?

A little later I partially answered that question.  I pointed out that my preferred approach, the scientific one, frequently leads to embarrassment.  Then I said:

Well, there's the whole "inconvenient" thing.  In the world of science it is frequently true that everybody is wrong.  An outcome where everybody is wrong is the only one that is worse on our egos than an outcome where we are wrong.

 I knew that this approach would not appeal to everyone.  After all, some people are more interested in being on the winning side than they are on getting the facts or the tactics right.  But I truly believed that there were lots of people who shared my "facts first" attitude.

But the whole "how should conflicts be resolved" issue presupposes that that it is possible to go about the business of disagreeing without it instantly and inevitably turning personal.  Lots of people are comfortable engaging in ad hominem attacks.  Turning all disagreements into something personal is something they are comfortable with.  Apparently more people are comfortable with ad hominem attacks than I thought.  That's bad.  I still think it is important to be able to disagree without it getting disagreeable.

So is all lost?  Actually, no.  I take hope from the most unlikely of sources, sports.

People take their sports and their favorite teams very seriously.  And you don't have to look far to find examples of fans getting totally out of control.  But mostly the opposite is true.  Sports bars are everywhere.  And they serve alcohol, which usually makes things worse rather than better.  But things getting out of hand is actually the exception rather than the rule.

On any day in any city you can find lots of sports bars full of rowdy fans.  And many of these bars are populated by heterogeneous groups.  One group consists of fans for one team or athlete.  Another group consists of fans of another team or athlete.  And they are often very vocal when it comes to their opinion.  And large quantities of alcoholic beverages are consumed.  But at the end of the day almost all of these rowdy fans go home peacefully and quietly.

This actually happened to me.  Many years ago my then girlfriend and I visited the "Cheers" bar in Boston.  Locals take the Sox very seriously and there was a game on between the Sox and the Seattle team when we arrived.  When patrons found out that we hailed from the land of the enemy they derided our team and exalted theirs.  But then the Sox lost quite unexpectedly.  Things could have gone south at that point but they didn't.  Instead, all sides were good sports about it.

So what's going on?  I'm not much of a sports fan.  But I do routinely skim the sports section of the paper.  You know what it's full of?  Facts and data.  Sure, there are opinion pieces.  But page after page is full of box scores, statistical breakdowns, and all kinds of detail about teams and players.  And ask the typical fan in the typical sports bar.  They can reel off statistics and figures until your eyes cross.

Sports fans are deeply knowledgeable about their passion.  Couple that with an unambiguous result.  This team or player won or lost.  The score was whatever.  Modern day sports coverage is deeply analytical.  And that means that sports fans are intolerant of BS.  Even the opinion columns have to back up their opinions with facts and data.  Fans get into arguments with other fans all the time.  But "'cause I say so" just doesn't cut it.

And, while a lot of trash talk goes back and forth, no one gets upset by it.  At the end of the day it's mostly "no hard feelings" and "see you at the next game" rather than "I now hate you from the bottom of my heart".  Sports fans, even drunk ones, have mastered the art of separating the argument from the person making the argument.  That makes them role models of a kind we badly need.

And I think the fact that sports and sports coverage is now so data driven that is a major contributing factor.  Michael Lewis wrote a book called "Moneyball" way back in 2003.  The book discussed something called "sabermetrics", an effort to replace emotion with data when it came to evaluating baseball players.

Baseball fans will no longer tolerate a team that doesn't adopt a sabermetric approach.  And many other sports have since adopted similar approaches.  Fans now demand no less.  A team that now tries to take a "seat of the pants" approach can count on such a decision being greeted with scorn and derision from their fans and from the press.  So sports and sports fans have adopted a scientific approach to their fandom.

Sports is definitely the better for it.  And sports betting is about to become ubiquitous.  It will soon be easy for a fan to lose a lot of money by betting from the heart rather than from the head.  And this will provide additional inducement for fans to behave responsibly.

Sports is supposed to be less important than politics.  But more people invest more time and effort in sports than they do on politics.  Unfortunately, it shows.  Politics would be better off if it adopted the kind of data driven approach that is now common in sports.  Where's the call for a "sabermetrics of politics"?

And people who are not that into sports need to behave more like sports fans do.  Remember!  You heard it here first.