the problem

i feel like over my life, i have had some tendency for ending up having conversations with a lot of people who are similar to me. so much so that i feel like my skills to actually hold productive conversations when there is a lot of disagreement have atrophied a bit.

this is something i want to intentionally work on! i think i come out of disagreements learning a lot more about the world than i do when ... i am just parroting the same opinion back to to a person that agrees with me.

why disagreement feels bad sometimes, common failure modes of human communication

communication is lossy

there is some fundamental issue with communication, which is that it can be quite lossy.

let’s say Alice and Bob are talking to one another.

• Bob has thought A

• Bob tries to communicate thought A by saying B

• Alice hears B

• Alice perceives B as C , which can be influenced by emotional state, how she feels about Bob, her existing belief structures, etc.

abstract concepts are hard to talk about

i also notice that when talking about fuzzy/abstract concepts (like power, autonomy, or justice), you and the other person may be holding different definitions without noticing it. something like power can be used to describe all kinds of phenomena on different scales, from a parent setting a curfew for their kid to congress passing a new law that impacts the whole country. abstractions compress all those examples into just one word, and can cause people to talk past one another.

brains are lazy and see disagreements as threats

i was curious about why humans sometimes have an inclination to resist changing their beliefs, even when presented with conflicting evidence. i think one reason is that it is simply more work to think through and process a new perspective, and it’s easier to just spew whatever cached take you might already have queued up.

it also seems that the brain registers disagreement (especially identity flavored disagreements) similar to how it would register physical danger. during disagreements where someone is resisting belief change, there is greater activity in the amygalda and insular cortex (involved with threat detection and emotional processing) and less activity in the regions of the brain associated with cognitive flexibility, such as the orbitofrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. this usually then manifests as a tendency to turn inward, possibly to search for ideas that reinforce existing mental models, rather than listening to the other person earnestly and evaluating the merits of their argument.

practical techniques

• to avoid having super lossy communication, get into the habit of paraphrasing the other person’s argument back at them before responding. this also gives you some time to chill if you are noticing yourself getting worked up. also don’t feel the need to respond immediately. it’s ok to pause and think!

• when talking about abstract concepts, say what you mean without using the abstract word. giving specific examples helps! maybe even arrive at an agreed-upon definition if said abstract word will be used heavily.

• think more about the logical structure of the flow of arguments. something like discussion trees. when someone responds to your A with B, you are now at a new node. (1) you can counter B with C or (2) show that B doesn’t actually counter A or (3) concede that B is actually pretty valid. i’ve also heard of flow a concept that comes from policy debate. less tree-like and more of a columnar system to track of arguments and counterarguments.