Selective listening is a real problem. It’s really hard to listen to someone when you think you already know what they’re going to say; the words get filtered through our biases and expectations, and sometimes those filters remove the important bits. I want to talk about a specific way I've seen this happen. I don't know if there's a name for it already, so I'm going to call it the counterargument collapse until someone suggests a better term.

The pattern I’m talking about is three levels of progression through an argument, followed by a misunderstanding that collapses the discussion in an unpleasant way.

Level 1: A naive but widely accepted statement (“Eat less fat if you want to lose weight”.)

Level 2: A more sophisticated counterargument (“That’s a myth, fat doesn’t actually make you fat, it’s eating too many calories that makes you gain weight”.)

Level 3: A counter-counterargument. (“Actually, fatty foods tend to be more calorie-dense, so avoiding them can be beneficial if you’re trying to diet”.)

Collapse: If someone didn’t follow the whole reasoning chain, then they’ll often confuse Level 3 with Level 1 and think you’re dumb. If you’re not paying attention, then the third argument sounds a lot like “fat is bad”, so people lump it in with outdated diet myths and judge you for believing something so clearly false.

Here are a couple more examples:

I’m a chemical engineer, and many of the other engineers in my program ended up going into petroleum. I wanted to do something that had a positive impact on the world, and I thought that petroleum would be the opposite of that because of the negative effects on the environment (Level 1). But then a professor explained that engineers make oil extraction and utilization more efficient by reducing unwanted emissions, which is good for the environment overall (Level 2). I agreed with them for a while. But then I learned about the Jevons paradox, where increased efficiency leads to lower cost, higher demand, and increased resource consumption, which is bad for the environment after all (Level 3). It can be difficult to convey the idea of the Jevons paradox if the other person isn’t listening closely, and so I’ve had conversations where people think I just don’t understand the Level 2 argument.
There was a Reddit post a long time ago that now I can’t find, but it was what inspired me to write ab

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