alt Hacker NewsThis article really resonates with me. During college and graduate school studying philosophy, picking apart someone's argument and pointing out the esoteric and nuanced ways which made it wrong was celebrated. The general attitude in my cohort was:
"I want to be wrong, because when I realize I'm wrong, I've become smarter."
This was probably the most intellectually fulfilling period of my life.
(Note here: some of the greatest moments were realizing when I was wrong in my criticism of an argument. It wasn’t about me “winning.” It was about collaboration)
After graduate school, I literally had to re-learn how to interact with people. No conversation was good faith. Everyone cared much more about the vibe of the conversation -- even when discussing highly nuanced political opinions suggesting they were genuinely curious for feedback -- more than they cared about having a coherent view on the topic.
I slowly realize that the best way forward was to have three interaction profiles with people. Generally there is the "I don't know you" profile, with all Dale Carnegie's rules fully in place. After that, there is the "we know each other" profile, where I would occasionally offer some probing questions on more or less uncontroversial topics to see whether or not good faith disagreement is allowed. And lastly there is the "we know and trust each other" profile, where I can actually have the open and honest real discussions with people that were so trivially normal in the philosophy department lounge.
Learning to do this was honestly one of the saddest and most disheartening things I've gone through in my life. It's genuinely stupid that we can't just talk to each other like adults.
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We can talk to each other like adults, the key is understanding what the goal of any given conversation is. Truth-seeking is just one possible goal among many.
Part of becoming an adult is learning how little most people care about that particular goal, and how big the buffet of alternatives is: creating shared meaning, understanding each other's values, building trust, giving/receiving emotional support, processing grief, etc. (Think of this as an upfront taxonomic exercise, followed by lots of in situ calibration exercises.)
Even for something like "decision making", which, naively, one might assume should be grounded in facts, a lot of the "facts" wind up being fuzzy and subjective. This is baked into the social fabric.
I think I have a similar style, I can sound like I’m ‘arguing’ with a person but really I’m arguing with my own internal model. If I say “but what about….”, “what if…..” or “then how….” I probably mean it literally as a question, not “I’m trying to poke holes in your argument and prove you wrong”. I’m trying to poke holes in MY understanding.
I respectfully submit that your neat categorization of interactions into those three profiles may reflect a gap in your understanding of others. Namely, that your definition of what makes a "good faith" conversation may not be the only one, nor the only correct one.
The vibe that people care about - that's the unspoken channel in any conversation. Physical, emotional, thoughts that don't get said. Perhaps to the one you're talking to, a good faith conversation is one that cares about or prioritizes the vibes.
IANAP (I am not a philosopher)
I've come to view a lot of these things as questions of a kind of conversational (/computational) tractability. People have limited time and so most discussions are subject to numerous constraints.
People communicate the main thing they want to say and hope the decompression algorithm on the other side sorts the rest out. Most of the time it's very lossy or just broken. But satisfices over the alternative.
I understand completely. I have colleagues who have been denied promotions and bonuses due to their way of communicating, which was indeed pointing out esoteric and nuanced ways that their colleagues are wrong. There was a specific scenario were someone held a slightly incoherent opinion, yet somehow it was "wrong" to correct that opinion for the rest of the meeting.
In some ways, I feel like everyone should start by reading the HN guidelines as a way to structure their communication around.
Went from working in a highly specialized DoD lab to corporate america, and this too was a horrific surprise. Everyone turning work into the promotion hunger games was great for the mental health.