There is the possibility that the other party is able and willing to punish you for refusing to engage. Aside from promoting them from “treat as Hostile Arguer” to “treat as hostile, period”, I’m not sure what to do about this.
It's a situation akin, in form if not in degree, to those of hostages in a prison camp. The usual suggestions indeed apply:
1 - submit and cooperate;
2 - study the environment;
3 - try to gain small victories;
4 - as soon as it's feasible, get out.
Not to detract from anything you wrote, just to provide some perspective.
Never try to defend a proposition against a hostile arguer.[2] They do not care. Your best arguments will fall on deaf ears. Your worst will be picked apart by people who are much better at this than you.
I have noticed a similar pattern right here on LW. If someone defends their "obviously wrong" beliefs, like religion or homeopathy or what have you, many people tend to ask them to explain, but only to cleverly strawman and pick apart their real or perceived erroneous arguments. Of course, when dealing with what Eliezer used to call a "settled issue" in this community, it is hard to give the other side a benefit of a doubt, given that they tend to rehash the same, or apparently the same, logic.
But if you flip the sides, it's basically the same, only more grave. Your religious parents know with absolute certainty that they are right. They know that you are misguided and that your feeble juvenile mind is corrupted. They have heard all the arguments you may present and rejected them as erroneous. It's a settled issue in their community. They feel responsible for you. If they are unable to save you and bring you back into the fold, they have failed as your parents. They have failed their God, they have failed their congregation and they have failed you. How can one expect them to engage you if not in the Hostile Arguer mode?
Some red flags I've noticed:
Calls you names instead of engaging in your arguments
Tries to put you in a group (e.g. only an X would something like that)
Says "you'll realize that I'm right when you're older". That's not a statement that comes up when people are doing Aumann updates (unless one person is unaware of the other's age).
One thing it seems pretty important to establish is the difference between ① someone who will (predictably) have hostile-type arguments with you, and ② someone who will actually do you harm for disagreeing with them.
Or between hostile arguing and abusive conduct.
If your parent mocks your atheism or tries to guilt you into going to church, that is one thing. If they beat you up, lock you in the basement, steal your property, or kick you out of the house at age fifteen because you don't want to go to their church any more, that is quite another. The former may well be emotionally abusive, or it may just be an incompetent way of expressing their fear that you will go to hell. (Or both.) The latter are threats to your well-being as a living organism ... and, in quite a few places, also illegal.
Similarly, if someone on the Internet makes fun of your views, that's one thing; if they organize all their pals to stalk your children, slander you to your boss to get you fired, or call you on the phone and threaten to rape and murder you, that's quite another.
"Are we having an unpleasant disagreement, or are you threatening me?" seems like a pretty useful question in situations that involve both hostile argument and a substantial difference of physical, social, or economic power.
This has some similarities to the coming out process, but the analogy breaks down in a few places. Being gay isn't a belief as such (queer theory notwithstanding), but coming out does position you within a fairly specific ideological region. My own Gay Talk with my parents had some friction, and the struggle to be understood was definitely a part of that, but I don't think I ever tried to convince them of anything really. It was more about being honest and getting the ball in their court. It's less common these days for (anti-gay) people to respond to homosexuality as if it were a wrong opinion, so exposing the gulf is less likely to provoke that kind of argument, hostile or otherwise.
Incidentally, if an underage LGBT person is worried about strong condemnation from their guardians, the usual advice is to lie until they're no longer in a position of dependence- you don't gamble with basic access to food and clothes. I'm not sure how much that advice can be generalized.
I think it's very important to distinguish A. the 'hostile arguer' from B. the 'person with a willingness to make actionable threats and a vested interest in your beliefs'. And when you disentangle the two, I th...
Never try to defend a proposition against a hostile arguer.[2] They do not care. Your best arguments will fall on deaf ears. Your worst will be picked apart by people who are much better at this than you. Your insecurities will be exploited. If they have direct power over you, it will be abused.
I'm not sure I agree with this advice. First, interacting with the hostile arguer can make one more clear on why one actually believes what one believes - one just shouldn't have your expected goal in that context of actuallying convincing them. Second, many peop...
You should have had some discussion of how to distinguish a hostile arguer from one who simply disagrees with you. A lot of people believe they're dealing with hostility even in cases where they actually aren't.
Eliezer warned against the use of the Clever Arguer as a fully general counterargument in the referenced post on that subject. I tried to do the same at the end of this one, because yeah, it's a legitimate issue. I'm hoping someone with a better grasp of human signalling will suggest a way to tell the difference.
It seems to me to boil down to the difference between honest disagreement and dishonest disagreement; between argument as contest of truth and argument as contest of dominance. Characterizing that difference alone doesn't help, though. The piece I'm missing is: What signals indicate one or the other? Especially, what signals that are hard to misread through biased thinking? Everyone wants a reason to dismiss the other guy while believing their hands are clean.
The heuristic that comes to mind first, and isn't necessarily correct but might squint towards correctness: Someone who's unwilling to let you tap out is probably hostile.
ETA: Another possible heuristic: If the other party insists on attacking your position, but is unwilling to explicitly defend the one they want you to adopt against attack, that is probably also a bad sign. Especially if they act offended by counterargument, repeatedly cut you off, or take other actions that indicate that they don't really have any interest in anything you have to say.
To me, any argument always comes back to the Seven Habits principle: "Seek to understand before you seek to be underdstood."
Hostile argumentation can quickly be defused if you show genuine curiosity about the other persons views.
But if the other person(s) is/are your parent(s), it might somewhat difficult to signal "genuine curiosity" about their views, especially considering that these sorts of arguments generally arise because because the child said or did something the parents didn't approve of, e.g. became atheistic, admitted to homosexuality, etc. If you grew up in the same household as them, then you've been absorbing their viewpoints your entire life, and they know you've been exposed to their viewpoints all your life. So from their perspective, it's hardly going to sound realistic if you try to express "curiosity" about views that you should damn well already be familiar with. Somehow I don't think "Oh, hey, Mom, Dad, I've been introspecting, and I think I'm gay--but I know you think that sort of thing is bad, so now I'm curious why" is going to help defuse the situation.
There is the possibility that the other party is able and willing to punish you for refusing to engage. Aside from promoting them from “treat as Hostile Arguer” to “treat as hostile, period”, I’m not sure what to do about this.
You're dealing with children[1], but you're treating them like adults[2]. Throw your resentment away, stop arguing, and start manipulating with kindness [3].
[1] Children: Humans with certain mental blocks who nonetheless are good hearted. They might be better than you in some areas, but they can't really think properly. When dea...
I find myself almost in this situation.
It's probably very difficult to reliably identify a hostile arguer. I mean, my first thought on how to identify such a person is to try and model them to the point where you can think of anything you could say to change their mind. This is probably easier said than done.
You presumably love your family and want them to understand you. I think it's likely that it's easy to delude yourself into thinking you can argue your position to them well enough to convince them of it.
Family is difficult.
You should question your unstated but fundamental premise: one should avoid arguments with "hostile arguers."
A person who argues to convince rather than to understand harms himself, but from his interlocutor's standpoint, dealing with his arguments can be just as challenging and enlightening as arguing with someone more "intellectually honest."
Whether an argument is worthwhile depends primarily on the competence of the arguments presented, which isn't strongly related to the sincerity of the arguer.
meta: On top of the article please link the LessWrong Study Hall to the wiki page about how to access it.
A point against this: I have heard several anecdotes of the following form, as well as a purported explanation using catastrophe theory.
Person A and person B are arguing over X and Y. In the heat of the argument, person B has already determined which position (Y) they believe to be correct, and is looking for clever arguments for it, paying little attention to the arguments for X being advanced by person A, except insofar as they can attack them. Later, when they are in a calmer state, they reflect, and update their position. On subsequent occasions they m...
It's important to remember that the truth is decided by reality, not by argumentation. But of course, we've already potholed that Sequence entry here. Discussion is about pulling yourself and others into correspondence with the reality that already exists, not about deciding what is true.
I don't think the clever arguer or hostile arguer is a gigantically useful label. In my own case, many of my arguments probably sound like hostile or clever arguer to my counterparty. This is because I start out in most discussions with a previously thought out belief. I can be swayed from my position, and have been often enough.
Many religious people have rehearsed theological arguments. I don't think this means that they are hostile or clever. They are sincere, they are telling you what they believe. My cousin the Jehovah's witness argues with me ...
If you need to defray an argument, when someone asks for a justification, hand someone a link to a website, or, even better, a whole paper book, written by someone else. Then they'll have to do a bunch of homework before they continue. ;)
For example, you could send them to http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ ...
Never try to defend a proposition against a hostile arguer.[2] They do not care. Your best arguments will fall on deaf ears. Your worst will be picked apart by people who are much better at this than you. Your insecurities will be exploited. If they have direct power over you, it will be abused.
I'm not sure I agree with this advice. First, interacting with the hostile arguer can make one more clear on why one actually believes what one believes - one just shouldn't have your expected goal in that context of actuallying convincing them. Second, many people are not true hostile arguers in the sense that their complete goal really is to be a hostile arguer, but rather people have a mixed set of intended goals. Third, arguing with hostile arguers in front of bystanders can convince bystanders who are leaning on the fence, or are considering similar ideas. Fourth, in many cases (such as the parental example) the hostile arguer has an emotional connection to one and so making the argument may be successful in helping keep an emotional bridge that may be burned if one simply refused to discuss it.
“Your instinct is to talk your way out of the situation, but that is an instinct born of prior interactions with reasonable people of good faith, and inapplicable to this interaction…” – Ken White
One of the Less Wrong Study Hall denizens has been having a bit of an issue recently. He became an atheist some time ago. His family was in denial about it for a while, but in recent days they have 1. stopped with the denial bit, and 2. been less than understanding about it. In the course of discussing the issue during break, this line jumped out at me:
“I can defend my views fine enough, just not to my parents.”
And I thought: Well, of course you can’t, because they’re not interested in your views. At all.
I never had to deal with the Religion Argument with my parents, but I did spend my fair share of time failing to argumentatively defend myself. I think I have some useful things to say to those younger and less the-hell-out-of-the-house than me.
A clever arguer is someone that has already decided on their conclusion and is making the best case they possibly can for it. A clever arguer is not necessarily interested in what you currently believe; they are arguing for proposition A and against proposition B. But there is a specific sort of clever arguer, one that I have difficulty defining explicitly but can characterize fairly easily. I call it, as of today, the Hostile Arguer.
It looks something like this:
When your theist parents ask you, “What? Why would you believe that?! We should talk about this,” they do not actually want to know why you believe anything, despite the form of the question. There is no genuine curiosity there. They are instead looking for ammunition. Which, if they are cleverer arguers than you, you are likely to provide. Unless you are epistemically perfect, you believe things that you cannot, on demand, come up with an explicit defense for. Even important things.
In accepting that the onus is solely on you to defend your position – which is what you are implicitly doing, in engaging the question – you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. That is the real point of the question: to bait you into an argument that your interlocutor knows you will lose, whereupon they will expect you to acknowledge defeat and toe the line they define.
Someone in the chat compared this to politics, which makes sense, but I don’t think it’s the best comparison. Politicians usually meet each other as equals. So do debate teams. This is more like a cop asking a suspect where they were on the night of X, or an employer asking a job candidate how much they made at their last job. Answering can hurt you, but can never help you. The question is inherently a trap.
The central characteristic of a hostile arguer is the insincere question. “Why do you believe there is/isn’t a God?” may be genuine curiosity from an impartial friend, or righteous fury from a zealous authority, even though the words themselves are the same. What separates them is the response to answers. The curious friend updates their model of you with your answers; the Hostile Arguer instead updates their battle plan.[1]
So, what do you do about it?
Advice often fails to generalize, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems to me that argument in this sense has at least some of the characteristics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Cooperation represents the pursuit of mutual understanding; defection represents the pursuit of victory in debate. Once you are aware that they are defecting, cooperating in return is highly non-optimal. On the other hand, mutual defection – a flamewar online, perhaps, or a big fight in real life in which neither party learns much of anything except how to be pissed off – kind of sucks, too. Especially if you have reason to care, on a personal level, about your opponent. If they’re family, you probably do.
It seems to me that getting out of the game is the way to go, if you can do it.
Never try to defend a proposition against a hostile arguer.[2] They do not care. Your best arguments will fall on deaf ears. Your worst will be picked apart by people who are much better at this than you. Your insecurities will be exploited. If they have direct power over you, it will be abused.
This is especially true for parents, where obstinate disagreement can be viewed as disrespect, and where their power over you is close to absolute. I’m sort of of the opinion that all parents should be considered epistemically hostile until one moves out, as a practical application of the SNAFU Principle. If you find yourself wanting to acknowledge defeat in order to avoid imminent punishment, this is what is going on.
If you have some disagreement important enough for this advice to be relevant, you probably genuinely care about what you believe, and you probably genuinely want to be understood. On some level, you want the other party to “see things your way.” So my second piece of advice is this: Accept that they won’t, and especially accept that it will not happen as a result of anything you say in an argument. If you must explain yourself, write a blog or something and point them to it a few years later. If it’s a religious argument, maybe write the Atheist Sequences. Or the Theist Sequences, if that’s your bent. But don’t let them make you defend yourself on the spot.
The previous point, incidentally, was my personal failure through most of my teenage years (although my difficulties stemmed from school, not religion). I really want to be understood, and I really approach discussion as a search for mutual understanding rather than an attempt at persuasion, by default. I expect most here do the same, which is one reason I feel so at home here. The failure mode I’m warning against is adopting this approach with people who will not respect it and will, in fact, punish your use of it.[3]
It takes two to have an argument, so don’t be the second party, ever, and they will eventually get tired of talking to a wall. You are not morally obliged to justify yourself to people who have pre-judged your justifications. You are not morally obliged to convince the unconvinceable. Silence is always an option. “No comment” also works well, if repeated enough times.
There is the possibility that the other party is able and willing to punish you for refusing to engage. Aside from promoting them from “treat as Hostile Arguer” to “treat as hostile, period”, I’m not sure what to do about this. Someone in the Hall suggested supplying random, irrelevant justifications, as requiring minimal cognitive load while still subverting the argument. I’m not certain how well that will work. It sounds plausible, but I suspect that if someone is running the algorithm “punish all responses that are not ‘yes, I agree and I am sorry and I will do or believe as you say’”, then you’re probably screwed (and should get out sooner rather than later if at all possible).
None of the above advice implies that you are right and they are wrong. You may still be incorrect on whatever factual matter the argument is about. The point I’m trying to make is that, in arguments of this form, the argument is not really about correctness. So if you care about correctness, don’t have it.
Above all, remember this: Tapping out is not just for Less Wrong.
(thanks to all LWSH people who offered suggestions on this post)
After reading the comments and thinking some more about this, I think I need to revise my position a bit. I’m really talking about three different characteristics here:
For all three together, I think my advice still holds. MrMind puts it very concisely in the comments. In the absence of 3, though, JoshuaZ notes some good reasons one might argue anyway; to which I think one ought to add everything mentioned under the Fifth Virtue of Argument.
But one thing that ought not to be added to it is the hope of convincing the other party – either of your position, or of the proposition that you are not stupid or insane for holding it. These are cases where you are personally invested in what they believe, and all I can really say is “don’t do that; it will hurt.” Even if you are correct, you will fail for the reasons given above and more besides. It’s very much a case of Just Lose Hope Already.
I’m using religious authorities harshing on atheists as the example here because that was the immediate cause of this post, but atheists take caution: If you’re asking someone “why do you believe in God?” with the primary intent of cutting their answer down, you’re guilty of this, too. ↩
Someone commenting on a draft of this post asked how to tell when you’re dealing with a Hostile Arguer. This is the sort of micro-social question that I’m not very good at and probably shouldn’t opine on. Suggestions requested in the comments. ↩
It occurs to me that the Gay Talk might have a lot in common with this as well. For those who’ve been on the wrong side of that: Did that also feel like a mismatched battle, with you trying to be understood, and them trying to break you down? ↩