Disagreeing Productively

[packbat]

A while ago, a group I was in decided to have a meetup on the subject of "Disagreeing Productively", and I volunteered to give a talk, saying that it would be based on what I learned relevant to having conversations on the Internet. One of the other people organizing this meetup immediately said, "Well, that's easy - never have an argument on the Internet."

It was a funny line and a funny anecdote, so the first index card in the stack of index cards I wrote my notes on just said doing better than "never have an argument on the Internet" as a rule, and I opened the talk by sharing the anecdote, reading out what I wrote on the card, and saying, "This is my goal for this talk."

I don't remember everything I said at that meetup - I was too busy talking, and too nervous to remember to record myself, and it wasn't scripted. Those index cards were cues for extemporizing, not slides to keep me on script. But I still have the stack of index cards and what I said was stuff I knew, so at the very least, I can go down that stack again and extemporize on the same subject, and even add some things I learned in the time since I did the talk. That's this post.

(Words in bold text - technically, strong emphasis text - appear at the beginning of each of the cut-tag sections below, if you're wondering how I'm dividing this up.)

To start with, it's often worth asking yourself, "Should I voice my disagreement, here and now?" Sometimes you can't change the mind of the person you're talking to. (Frankly, the only person who can change a mind is the person whose mind it is - all you can do is give them material with which to do so.) Sometimes you can't change a mind; sometimes you don't have a right to take up someone's time with the discussion. Sometimes other considerations take precedence - if you are protesting anti-trans legislation, there are more important things to do that day than argue with the biblical hermeneutics of other peoples' protest signs.

All that said, changing minds isn't the only reason to voice disagreement. You might establish community norms, communicating through your disagreement that We Don't Tolerate Bigotry Here or whatever else. You might establish a personal boundary, communicating that You Don't Tolerate Bigotry Here or whatever else. You might debunk falsehoods for the benefit of the bystanders - unsurprisingly, it's a lot easier to change your mind if you're not the one arguing (more on saving face later). There's more than one possible answer to "what will I get out of this?", and different answers imply different approaches and different stopping-points. Ginny Brown wrote an essay called Five Questions To Ask Before Getting Into An Online Argument - it's a pretty good resource.

One of the biggest family of criteria is context.

Whose space are you in?

You automatically have a lot more authority to shape the conversation in your own space than in someone else's. The person (or business establishment, or public museum, or tradition of meeting under a linden tree, or whatever) hosting this conversation has their own priorities and boundaries and needs, and if you're going to be defying their wishes, you ought to be doing so consciously and knowing what the consequences can be.

What are your emotions about this?

Emotions affect our judgment. Emotions are probably a big part of our judgment, don't get me wrong, but where our heads are at can push us towards misinterpreting the situation. If you're defensive or resentful or just irritable for unrelated reasons, it's easier for you to take something innocent as something malign and blow up at someone and look like a jackass. Or to take something malign as a lot more comprehensively harmful than it is and undermine the persuasiveness of your points by bringing in a pile of irrelevancies. This one's not going to have an easy rule of thumb guideline, it's just hard.

(Okay, maybe it does have one easy rule of thumb: if you're in a conversation in an atemporal medium, like the comments section of a blog, stepping away for five minutes before hitting "post" so you can reread everything while you're a bit calmer is an A+ too.)

(Two rules of thumb: roping in friends to give you a sanity check is A+. Treasure those friends.)

(...three rules of thumb: if you know or suspect that an upsetting conversation is coming and you know that your answer is fixed, the broken record technique is a fantastic tool. It's way easier to stay calm when all you need to do is repeat and reemphasize a point you've already decided how to state.)

What is your relationship with the person you're disagreeing with?

Toward the end of Ian Danskin's talk at Indivisible Somerville (I think I stole half this essay from Ian Danskin, either that video specifically or videos he posted on his channel, Innuendo Studios), he talks about three questions: "Does this person know me?", "Does this person respect me?", and "Do I have authority over this person?". The more of these questions you answer with "yes", the more likely they are to let your disagreement challenge their beliefs. (And just for the record, if your relationship with the person is "they are currently harassing or abusing me", the chance of them listening to you is nil. Just do what you need to protect yourself.)

Where do you and they stand in terms of relevant experience and expertise?

Right off the bat: don't assume that where they stand is "doesn't know anything". That's 'splaining territory, it's rude and contemptuous, just don't do it. Actually, just always be prepared for them to know more about the exact topic they're talking about than you do, and be extra prepared for that if they're a person of color talking about racism, a queer person talking about heteronormativity, or otherwise a marginalized person talking about an aspect of their marginalization. That doesn't mean you can't speak up, but you need to be prepared for there to be a really good reason why they didn't say what you just said.

If, however, you do know that they don't know the topic like you know it: be informative? Give them the information from which they can deduce why you disagree with them. If you're talking to inform them, then iterate as needed, figuring out what context or assumption they're bringing if they continue to disagree (who knows, it might turn out that the situation they're thinking of is a special case where the rule doesn't apply!), and if you're talking to inform bystanders, you'll have been calm and clear and entertaining, and that can work well sometimes.

What brought the topic up?

If a violent ideologue just engaged in mass murder, it's probably a bad time to talk about the points you agree with them on. (I wish this were a hypothetical example.) Context changes what your words will mean, and if you don't understand why it does or can't come up with a way to share your opinion that does not, for example, hold up the grievance that the mass murderer invoked to justify wreaking death as legitimate (oh goodness do I wish this were a hypothetical example), then maybe just rant to your friends in private and let it go.

Speaking of which: disagreeing in public and disagreeing in private are very different propositions. A conversation can take on a very different tone when it is happening in front of a world of strangers versus a small circle of friends versus just the person you're talking to.

A big part of that is face. There was an old story of (I think) a mailing-board where the message that got sent to someone who made an inappropriate post started with "Someone has used your account to...". The reason that move worked isn't because the person who made the post didn't make the post; it was because the person didn't have to admit any fault to back down from the post. They could express dismay, change their password, and that veneer of deniability meant they could continue contributing while everyone pretended they never said it, and that meant they didn't have to feel like they were being shamed or maligned. There are lots of ways you can let someone avoid losing face in a conversation - for example, treating their disagreement as innocent and sincere, whether or not that's plausible (although it does happen, even for awful opinions) - but the more private the conversation, the less face they have at stake.

(That said, changes of mind happen slowly, and often when you're not there. I distinctly remember multiple occasions when I kept up my side of the argument until I left to go home and quietly changed my mind without admitting it out loud. Also, it takes a lot of moments for someone to change their mind about core beliefs - your pulling someone aside and having a long conversation about the difference between gender and anatomy might be point number 37 from a list that doesn't flip them over to queer-supporting until 104. Every one of those points is important, but the one you were there for isn't always gonna be the emotionally satisfying one.)

That said, there are several other big parts to the whole public-vs-private part. A lot of them come up in the "should I voice disagreement at all" questions we talked about above (you're not going to educate bystanders if there aren't any bystanders), but here's one which is a little special-purpose but also important and non-obvious from the first Alt-Right Playbook video (and ultimately from some of the targets of a certain anti-feminist videogame hate mob): a lot of violently-authoritarian right-wing ideologues will have specific people they think of as The Symbol Of This Thing I Hate (possibly because they're authoritarian - if they don't see facts as true until signed off on by an authority, and expect everyone else to reason the same way, then these figures might be the false-in-their-eyes authorities that they think we rely on), and if you engage one them in a debate about something and they come off the worse, they might just decide to take out their rage on those people. They've done it before. Often, it's better to just explain the truth to the same audience than it is to reply to that person directly.

Actually, that can be true generally. As Jay Smooth said, don't link to the line-steppers: don't boost the arguments or words of people whose game plan is to say something awful in order to get quote-tweets from people with a hundred times as many followers as they do. There's a degree of uncertainty to what extent this is a thing, but there's something called the "backfire effect", where saying "here is a myth, and now here is the reality" can cause people to buy the myth more. A lot of these myths are short and pithy, the kind of thing that sticks in your head even though it's wrong, so as The Debunking Handbook from Skeptical Science says, put the facts front-and-center, in the headline, and if you mention the myth at all, do that after everyone can already see why it's false.

The above is the bulk of this essay. Up to now, I have been talking mostly about the context of disagreements, the strategy - this part is the tactics, the these are things I think you should do in arguments part.

It's pretty short. And frankly, the first part of this is me ranting about a pet peeve, and doesn't deserve the wordcount I'm giving it. But it's stuff I know, and I want to share what I have.

The pet peeve I'm talking about here shows up in arguments about corporal punishment.

To be clear: corporal punishment does not make kids more well-behaved or the adults they grow into more functional. A long history of scientific studies - including both studies comparing individual families and studies comparing whole countries with different rules about corporal punishment - shows that corporal punishment does two things:

• It teaches kids that violence is an appropriate way to express anger. Kids learn by example. Spanking, slapping, caning, and so on? They offer an example of violence.
• It traumatizes them. The effects of corporal punishment are pretty much the same effects you'd see from physical abuse, and the more intense the use of corporal punishment, the more severe are the effects.

Corporal punishment harms kids. Do something else. (Fandoms and Feminism wrote a post about this a while ago that I think is pretty solid.) That's where I want to start here.

And the thing that I get peeved about comes from people who agree with me about that, but think the right way to do that when someone tries to support spanking or other corporal punishment is to dunk on them. To hear an advocate of corporal punishment say, as many of them do, "I was spanked as a kid and I turned out fine", and to reply, "If you think hitting kids is okay, you didn't turn out fine."

The thing with dunking is: it's an argument aimed at an imaginary audience that agrees with you about all points except the very specific narrow one that you want to argue. Further, it is specifically an argument about making your opposite number lose face. It's a bad look, it's an asshole move, and it doesn't teach anyone anything, because:

• Everyone knows spanking is hitting; the disagreement is whether this act of violence is morally justified by (in the case of corporal punishment) the child 'learning a lesson'.
• The only evidence being proposed that spanking causes harm is that the corporal punishment advocate ... advocates for corporal punishment. The argument consists entirely of insult.
• It's not even true. My mom was spanked as a kid, and decided because of it that she was never going to use corporal punishment with myself or either of my siblings. By the time kids become adults, they've reached a point where they can use a parent as a negative example, a This-Is-Doing-It-Wrong example.

It's a terrible argument, it will never teach the person you're talking to anything and it will never teach bystanders anything. The people saying it might as well paste in a gif of Supa Hot Fire, because the only value to come from it is them feeling smug and them getting kudos from other smug people who agree with them.

(Okay, pet peeve over.)

If you want to have an informative discussion as opposed to a public debate (I suck at public debate, don't ask me for debate tips), in a lot of cases, figuring out what the person you're talking to actually means is most of the work. Ask questions, ask clarifying questions, offer paraphrases and ask if they're correct.

And something I do sometimes that seems to work well is stealing the predictions of the person I disagree with. If an advocate of corporal punishment (maybe pet peeve is only mostly over) says spanking makes misbehaving kids shape up, I might tell them that spanking makes kids cowed, makes them fear your violence and hide anything that might lead to punishment from you. What they, the person doing the spanking, see is the misbehavior go away, but what happens is that it goes away to where they can't see it. I acknowledge what they observe, but offer a more accurate explanation for it.

One last thing, something not on my notecards because I only learned it from the Innuendo Studios curiouscat.me this month: you don't have to have the argument even when you're talking directly to the person you're disagreeing with. You can just talk about your life and not hide the implications.

...that's all I got for now. I mean, maybe a link to How to be a fan of problematic things, because I've spent a lot of time in fandom spaces and I think that's a good bit of advice for fans, but that's about it. Comments section is down there if you want to comment - I'd love to have corrections and additions and "thank you, that was a good post"s.