How to Make a Good Argument
Episode Stats
Summary
Whenever you get into an argument, whether you re discussing politics with a colleague, or the distribution of chores with your spouse, you can feel like you re getting your point across much less convincing the other person of it, and the conversation simply goes in circles. If you can t feel like a rank amateur at arguing? Maybe what you need are some pro tips from someone who spent his life arguing competitively. In this episode, my guest Brett Mckeay speaks with two-time world champion debater and former coach of the Australian National Debate Team, Bo Sow, about the art of argument, and why it s important to establish what an argument is really about before you start into it.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast whenever you get
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into an argument whether you're discussing politics with a colleague or the distribution
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of chores with your spouse you likely feel like you're floundering you feel worked up but you
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don't feel like you're getting your point across much less convincing the other person of it and
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the conversation simply goes in circles you can feel like a rank amateur at arguing maybe what
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you need are some pro tips from someone who spent his life arguing competitively enter my guest bo so
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bo is a two-time world champion debater a former coach of the australian national debating team in
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the harvard college debating union and the author of good arguments how debate teaches us to listen
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and be heard today on the show bone i discuss why learning the art of rhetoric and debate was once
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an integral part of education in the west why the subject disappeared from schools and the loss this
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has represented for society we then turn the lessons bo's taken from his debating career that
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you can apply to your own everyday arguments whether big or small bo explains why it's important
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to establish what an argument is really about before you start into it and shares a rubric for
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homing in on which of the three types of disagreements may be at the core of a conflict he then explains
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two things a strong argument has to do and four questions to ask yourself to see if you've met these
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requirements bo also impacts his three p's for creating persuasive rhetoric and how to effectively
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rebut someone else's claims we end our conversation with how to determine whether it's worth getting into a
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particular argument and when it's better to walk away after the show's over check out our show notes at
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awim.is argument bo so welcome to the show g'day brett thanks so much for having me on so you are a
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two-time world champion debater you also served as the debate coach for the australian national team
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and you got a new book out called good arguments how debate teaches us to listen and be heard now i
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think a lot of people listening to this podcast they probably had a debate team at their high school
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and they might have had a friend or two that was on the debate team but they probably haven't seen
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a competitive debate in action so for those of us who don't know what this is like walk us through
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what is a competitive debate like because the way you describe in the book it sounds really intense so
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like like what's involved how long do they last how do you keep score give us the introduce us to the
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world of competitive debate sounds good and i do think it's a good thing for people to know because
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otherwise you have these kids in ill-fitting suits in your high school walking around looking very
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serious and you don't know what they're up to a debate round is pretty simple really it's between two
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sides and on each side there's a team of kind of between one to three people depending on the format
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of the debate and one side argues in favor of a topic the other side argues against them so if the
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topic is that we should introduce an inheritance tax one team is saying yes we should the other is
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arguing against and it goes from the affirmative to the negative affirmative negative affirmative negative
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until all the speakers have spoken and an independent adjudicator who's watching them
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comes to a decision about which team was more persuasive and so depending on the format of the
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debate you either have some period of time a couple of weeks to you know one week to prepare or a few
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days to prepare for the topic in other formats you get between 15 minutes to an hour and the debate
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itself takes about an hour as well and then you get the adjudication so it takes on average probably
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two hours to do a debate round and in a debate competition in a typical tournament you would have
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two to three of those per day and you would do that probably for a weekend and at some point
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it'll get to a knockout stage until one team in the competition is named the winner
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okay so that's and so i one question i had i had i had a friend in debate now i always saw him
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carrying like that tub of so is that just like the prep like the prep materials is that what that is
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yeah it is it is and so that's the format of debate where you get to do advanced preparation
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and it's usually articles that they're flagged or bits of research and and they're big tubs aren't
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they yeah and people are called two tubber or three tubber based on how many tubs they've got
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carrying around and it becomes a bit of an arms race at that point of who can do more research and
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come up with more stuff and when the the adjudicator is determining who's more persuasive like what are
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they what factors are they looking at they're asked to consider three things for the most part
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the first is manner the the way in which someone presents the material the matter which is the
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arguments and the evidence that they present so it's what they say and method or strategy which is
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usually how they respond to the other side and how they prioritize arguments so it's more about
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the overall strategy they employ in the debate so those are the three main factors they consider
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manner method and matter but in the end for the ultimate decision they have to just consult their
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conscience on one question only which is which of the two sides persuaded them and what's interesting
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you're from australia and this seems like debates are really it's a big thing down there and also if
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you look at throughout all of you know countries that derive from the united kingdom so you had the
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commonwealth countries canada united kingdom australia and then even countries that were part of the
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british empire uh america debate that used to be like it competitive debate it played an integral part
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of the education in 18th and in the 19th centuries what was going on there why did schools have young
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people debate each other what was the purpose of that yeah i love that brett there's an older
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origin story here which stretches back to antiquity actually and the ancient greeks had an idea that
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to be a citizen meant to possess the skills of persuasion of being able to talk to your fellow citizens
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and to make your case in front of them and that this was integral to self-governance which is what
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democracy really is and there are eastern counterparts and obviously the talmudic tradition
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is really rich in debate and that's a different kind of a heritage so it is a kind of a long history and
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one that is common across a lot of different cultures the more immediate background for the kind of
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debate i was engaged in as you note comes from the uk and i think this is actually a misconception about
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debate that it comes out only out of the chambers of parliament but in fact where the kind of competitive
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debate i was engaged in comes from is next to the parliament there were pubs and coffee houses
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where people would mimic some of the structures of parliamentary debate and and take what was on
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the agenda and have these kind of raucous public discussions about the issues of the day and so
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there is a kind of a real grassroots communal fun rambunctious kind of tradition that it grows out of
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and the way it came to this country the united states is the founding fathers were themselves
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debaters they often started the first debating societies at the university level in the united
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states and you know one of the things that struck me when i came to the u.s for college
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and i went to philly is that the place that's credited as the birthplace of this nation which is
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independence hall isn't like the seat of a monarch or even a battlefield or a shrine to a deity it's a
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debating chamber and for much of the early years of this republic and of many parliamentary democracies
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around the world it was a feature of the school system that you would learn rhetoric and that as
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part of a well-rounded education you would engage in they had different names like disputations and
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and debates but they were essentially opportunities to argue your case before an audience before an
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opponent whose task it was to disagree with you and to handle yourself in that kind of exchange
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and when did that started to go away because like i didn't take debate in high school like a debate
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was like elective it's like an extracurricular activity when did it stop being a required part
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of education yeah that's a good question it came i think i charted in the book to sort of the rise of
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the written writing requirement at universities and this was sort of in the 1800s and there were probably
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lots of different reasons for it one of it was the universities themselves becoming much larger
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there being this trend towards standardization in the education system there might have been an
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impulse to take politics away from the education system too and the idea of learning being kind of
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less political a little bit more kind of pure skills based being able to apply across lots of
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different contexts so for some of these reasons the the practice of speech making and of argument
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kind of declined over time and i think maybe the the other reason for it is there's always been a
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kind of a suspicion of rhetoric and for as long as there has been arguments in favor of it there has been
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opposition to it and i think probably a number of different factors converged that made the argument
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against rhetoric win out so that nowadays when we talk about rhetoric we we kind of mean it in a
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pejorative sense and what do you think have been the consequences of the decline of rhetoric in america
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and in other western countries that's a big question one of the things that i'm very interested in in with
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the book is what i perceive to be the loss of a shared set of skills that we used to possess and that's the
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skill of making an argument for yourself but also being able to discern it when it's presented by other
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people and i think the consequence of that has been that first of all many people don't feel like
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they're communicating in a way that's getting through to people and on the receiving end i think we've
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become less sensitive to what we would have then understood as you know manipulations of rhetoric being
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able to discern good arguments from bad arguments and the atrophying of that skill set both of
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expression on one hand but also being able to discern and listen and critically judge i think that the
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consequence of those two things has been a kind of a degradation of the quality of our public
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conversation yeah without without those shared skills i think people resort to just yelling at each
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other because that's well yeah exactly yeah exactly well let's let's talk about how we can
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revise some of these skills um so in your book you lay out you extract lessons from your career in
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competitive debate this goes all the way back when you were in middle school you extract these lessons
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that can be applied to everyday disagreements that we have and even big even the big disagreements
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we have and the first lesson from competitive date that we can all take is to figure out what the
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debate is actually about and this is actually harder than you think it would be you think it'd be easy
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when you're yelling at someone you know what you're yelling about but typically most people aren't very good
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at sticking to a topic rather you say that people have a tendency to talk topically than sticking to
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the topic what do you mean by talking topically yeah i love that i mean you know so we're talking about
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climate change and you make some some point about needing to take greater action on it and i say
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but you drive a hammer you know and both are kind of topics both are comments related generally to the
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to environmental issues i guess but there's not really any real sense in which those two claims are
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talking to one another right and and you see this a lot in in discussions where
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there's an attempt by both sides to rest the debate onto more favorable terrain and you know you
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can't i guess begrudge people for for wanting to eke out an advantage that way but the consequence is
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that you don't end up meeting on shared ground at all and so one of the first insights that i start
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the book with is that every disagreement has to begin with an act of agreement and that is an agreement
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about what the discussion is actually about so we are just talking about your ideas for responding
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to climate change not about your car or what you said in the past or your personality those can be
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conversations we have later maybe but for the moment this is what we're talking about and being able to
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agree to a topic of conversation and by extension being able to say some things are irrelevant for the
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purposes of this discussion i think that's one of the ways in which we can keep our discussions on
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track and you provide this really useful rubric i thought this was a this was a it's so simple but
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once you see it you can't unsee it you make the case that when you're in any debate or argument
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people can disagree about three types of things they can disagree about facts they can disagree about
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judgments and they can disagree about prescriptions tell us like what is the difference between like how can
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people disagree on facts judgments and prescriptions yeah thanks for pointing that out so the key thing
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is these these three types of debates tend to they tend to be alive even when we in what we consider to
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be one argument so let me give you an example so let's imagine two parents are having an argument about
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whether to send their kids to the local public school and you might start by saying oh that seems
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to be a debate about prescription which is a debate about what we should do namely whether we should send the
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kids to the school or not but you might find in actually having the conversation there's also a descriptive
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disagreement which is a disagreement about the facts just about the way things are so one parent might believe this
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this school does have adequate sporting facilities whereas the other parent might not believe that
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so that's not a debate about what they should do and whether they should send their kids there
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it's just a disagreement about the facts and it has a pretty simple fix or a simpler fix probably than the
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prescriptive debate because it just involves going to the school or giving them a call or looking up the
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information then in having the discussion further they might find they also disagree about
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in their normative views which is a kind of sort of a disagreement about judgment disagreement about
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what's morally right what's morally required and that might be a normative disagreement about what their
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obligations as citizens might be so one parent might think as a citizen as a resident in this community as a
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neighbor we have an obligation to participate in this public education system to do what we can to
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improve it the other person might think actually our main obligation as a parent is just to get the best
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possible education for our child and again that's not straightforwardly a prescriptive debate about
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what we should do it's more about the beliefs that we have about the way things should be and and how we
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should behave and so within this one disagreement which just looks like a decision about where we
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send the kids there's a prescriptive debate that appears on the face of it but there's also descriptive
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debates and there's normative debates and being able to identify which of those is at the core of the
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dispute i think is a really good first step to making some progress on it all right so yeah before you even
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get into the debate figure out what you're actually debating is it a debate of fact judgment prescription
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and i think that can solve a lot of problems just taking that five ten minutes to do that
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yeah exactly and i like the and i like how you how how you put a fine point on that i mean it's five to ten
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minutes slightly awkward talking about the talking rather than doing the talking but um as any anybody who's been in a
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contentious disagreement knows i mean it can stretch for hours right so it is a time saver to have that
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kind of preliminary agreement we're gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors
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and now back to the show okay let's say you've honed in on the the point of disagreement let's say it's
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just a point of prescription like you've agreed on facts you agreed on judgment now you have this point
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like i want i think this should be the thing yeah how do you go about forming a strong argument or a
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strong logical argument yeah so the starting place is knowing what we want our arguments to do and i
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think at the moment just the general perception of what an argument is is just anything that vaguely
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supports your case or that expresses your point of view which is not really what an argument is
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an argument has to do two things the first is it has to show that the main claim that it's making
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is in fact true and the other is that it is important which means it supports the conclusion
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that you're advocating for so let's say you're arguing that we should send the kids to the local
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public school because they'll get a great academic education there let's say so the first is you you need
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to show that that is in fact true right that they're going to have a good academic experience and you
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might give some reasons why you might say something about the local curriculum seems really rigorous
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to you or you might marshal some evidence of how the school has performed in the past of the kinds of
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classmates they would be learning alongside so all that is to show that it is in fact true they're
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going to get a good academic experience and then the second which i think people often neglect is
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it's not enough to just show that what you're saying is true you have to actually explain how that gets
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you to home base right of of being able to prove what you're trying to prove which is we should send
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our kids there so why is them having an academic experience so important as to justify us making this decision
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as opposed to all the other things we might care about like them having good sporting facilities or other
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things that that you might get if you sent them to a private school for example so there's an argument
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about truth that you have to prosecute and then you have to flip and say here's why that then means we have to do
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what i'm arguing we should and this yeah this requires knowing your audience right like you could you have
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this great arguments like yeah it's true but like your audience is like yeah no whatever okay it's true so what
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i love that i love that it's about i mean you know the aim of any argument is you're trying to get a person
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from point a to point b right and point b is just somewhere that's probably not point a
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and i think people usually have a pretty clear sense of the destination which is where they want
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the person to be at the end of the discussion but they often ignore or overlook where that person is
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starting from and you you do as you say brett want to be really attentive to what the person who's
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listening where that person is at and what they care about and at least two of the most basic desires
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that i think we have when we're responding to an argument is to know that it's true and to know that
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it justifies the conclusion that you're um trying to persuade me of and uh you use you have this rubric
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when you're constructing an argument or a point i think is really useful it's the four w's what are the
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four w's yeah so this is a kind of a quick shorthand to make sure you're meeting the two
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burdens that i've just described the first is being clear about what the point you're actually
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making is so what is the point the second question is why is it true the third is when has it happened
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before so that's a kind of a an invitation to give an example or a case study or some evidence that
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supports your claim and then the last point is who cares right so again who cares whether the kids are
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getting a good academic experience why is that important why does that justify the main the main
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claim that you're making so what's the point why is it true when has it happened before and who cares
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okay yeah i think the big takeaway from that chat that i got it was like make sure don't overlook
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importance yeah in your argument because i think that's happened to a lot of people you feel like you
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really got this strong argument and just falls on deaf ears uh and i feel that way too yeah i feel
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that way yeah it's because you didn't think about well is this how is this important to the to the
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listener so let's talk about how do we we want it we want the argument to feel like it's important to
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someone so how do you form an argument so that it hits home with people like where they they start
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listening like yeah this is important that's a good that's a really good question and it's obviously
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very it's going to be very situation specific right and i think again this is the point about
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getting to some agreement before we get into disagreement i think sometimes you know when
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you're in the heat of a disagreement you can get so caught up with the sound of your own voice and
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and so you know burning with conviction you just try and steamroll over the other side whereas
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i think there is a probably a moment to pause and even ask questions right of what well what is it
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that you care about what is it that you're hoping to achieve what is it that you want for our kids in
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that example that we had before and by listening to the other side and sometimes by asking them
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what is it that most moves them that they're most interested in i think that's probably where we can
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tailor our argument to respond to that question of why is this important so the truth is you know
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probably less um reliant on the other side because it's it's the truth and you're trying to prove it
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but that that importance point um which i agree with you brett is kind of where what a lot of people
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overlook that's the point where you're inviting the other side into a conversation and where you're
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making them a kind of a collaborator and a and a co-author to your ideas and this is where rhetoric can
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come in like aristotle in his uh work the rhetoric he he talked about in any argument you have you have
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to appeal to someone's logos what's the pathos there's what's the emotion what's ethos ethos so
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that's the personality yeah and so uh this is when you when you're constructing an argument using
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rhetoric like you want it this is like when this is the opportunity to figure out how can i really
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reach and touch this person emotionally yeah i love that so they can connect and you're right and so far
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we've been kind of on the on the straight and narrow of trying to come up with logical arguments and
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that's important but in debate the truth of your argument and its persuasiveness are two separate
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skills that you have to kind of develop and as you say the logic part of it the rational part of
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it is one important puzzle but another is i think debate doesn't shy away from the fact that
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we are people who are emotional are passionate are personally invested in our arguments and in the quality
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of our conversations and in that instance how we use words how we put together sentences the order of
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our paragraphs how we say something that tends to be really important so you got your art your logical
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argument down pat it's just you get the evidence but now you're thinking how am i going to deliver
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this in a way so that it connects with people are there any i don't know i'm gonna call them hacks or
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tricks or just heuristics that you that you use when you're when you're constructing that yeah there's a
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number and i go through word by word sentence by sentence paragraph paragraph in the book but maybe
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the easiest thing for me to just communicate briefly is this principle that i call the three p's in the
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book the first is proportionality so one of the ways in which our rhetoric feels kind of weird and
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difficult to listen to is when it's like grossly overselling or underselling the argument so
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the way in which you're speaking the language you're using the gesture the tone the the stance that
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you're taking has to roughly fit with what you're saying the second p is personality and this is that
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that aristotelian triangle that you were talking about before brett people are pretty you know we don't
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know everything about everything you know and we don't know about the particular evidence that's
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being presented sometimes the particulars of the argument that is being presented sometimes but we
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have a we're pretty good judges of character most people because we have to do it every day and so
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get putting yourself into the argument a little bit explaining how you went through the journey of
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becoming convinced of your point and using it as an opportunity to acknowledge that you are kind of
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one perspective not a sort of a voice of god omniscient all-seeing kind of person but you're just you and
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and you're you're trying to make this argument best you can i think can often be humanizing and can
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lead to connection and then the third principle of rhetoric that i put forward is called panache which is
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you know i think one way to elevate the quality of our discourse is to invest in rhetoric again to
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put aside some time to thinking about you know what's the combination of words that's going to most
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effectively get across this argument and in debate we call it the applause line it's the kind of short
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snappy encapsulation that you could imagine the audience clapping to and there's something a bit
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you know self-important about that but viewed a bit more charitably
00:28:32.000
it shows a kind of an attention to the audience that you've put together this rhetorical passage this
00:28:40.400
line to be able to move them and to cut through in a world where there's a whole lot of noise to be able
00:28:47.180
to cut through that and to and to make your mark so the three p's of proportionality personality and panache
00:28:54.160
panache are kind of one one set of ideas to to think about with that panache part and find the
00:29:00.040
the applause line i know winston churchill when he wrote his speeches out yeah he'd actually find
00:29:04.400
moments like right pause here because this is when this is when people are going to be like huzzahing
00:29:08.360
yeah exactly exactly and and you know again like it takes a bit of thick skin to do that you know
00:29:15.580
because you know the world might look down on that and and even in debating one of the things that
00:29:21.520
was said about me was that he's obsessed with talking pretty you know and there's kind of a
00:29:26.900
set of assumptions about that and and a preciousness or maybe they're trying to pull something over you
00:29:33.540
but i don't think we can elevate the state of our public conversation unless we start acting out the
00:29:41.380
kind of conversation we want to have and i think one of the things we want to have is a conversation
00:29:46.920
that's respectful and faithful to the real power that words do have and churchill was obviously one
00:29:53.800
master at that and there have been many others but we want a conversation that is alive to that
00:29:59.520
possibility of what words and language can do yeah i want to hear arguments that sound sound pretty
00:30:05.460
yeah me too okay so you put up put out your argument or maybe you're listening to someone give you
00:30:11.300
give their argument you have to rebut but i think people are typically terrible at this because
00:30:16.040
when you're rebutting you're in the defensive mode and you tend to get angry and nasty um yeah what
00:30:22.300
are some ways that we can uh rebut arguments more effectively i think the and i should sort of share
00:30:28.820
your your view on that brett it feels almost like a kind of a personal attack when someone's making an
00:30:36.280
argument against you and maybe the first step is just a mental one of just saying it's not an attack
00:30:43.160
it's an argument that they are presenting that demands a certain kind of response and and maybe
00:30:50.400
the other brief thing i would add there is you know like there's something very distorting about
00:30:57.420
platforms like twitter where you're meant to kind of like like own them you know at every exchange and
00:31:06.260
and we know that a conversation isn't like that it's we try in our best way to express our view but we usually
00:31:14.220
don't get it a hundred percent but you often get another chance at it and and so the conversation develops
00:31:20.760
in terms of then how we do that i'd say two things one is the framework that i presented in in presenting an argument
00:31:30.060
can often be useful here so just the way that an argument needs to show that it's true and that it
00:31:36.660
supports its conclusion those are the two main areas where you can focus a lot of the critique of
00:31:42.520
is your claim that the opposing argument is in fact not true or is it that it doesn't support the
00:31:48.940
conclusion and by being clear about what the nature of your criticism is i think you can be a little bit
00:31:55.220
more focused than just generally saying things that are contrary to what the other side has said
00:32:00.400
the second thing which i think is often overlooked is we can get very caught up in highlighting the
00:32:09.340
flaws of the other side's arguments but that's really usually half the battle because the other side is
00:32:16.520
well if the opposition's argument has all of these flaws then what are you for right what do you stand for
00:32:24.880
and so this is something i call the counterclaim in the book which is saying if not this then watch
00:32:33.680
and i think it's a hard it's an easy thing to forget that even when you're criticizing a proposal or when
00:32:41.060
you're proposing a criticizing an idea you're still arguing for something right so if if your partner is
00:32:48.700
saying let's go to hawaii for the holidays or go down charleston for the holidays and you're coming up
00:32:54.320
with a thousand reasons why not for each one you're still arguing for something you might be arguing for
00:33:00.240
not taking vacation at all it might be staying in your house it might be going to the place that you
00:33:05.680
usually go to but whatever it is there's a an argument that you're making that is a positive
00:33:11.140
advocacy as well and so being able to switch between criticism and advocacy i think is an important
00:33:18.580
skill for debaters and i like the way you propose rebutting because it does make it once you see
00:33:25.120
where you can rebut like whether it's you know facts or uh importance or yeah like you can there's
00:33:32.260
there's you there's way for you to find a room where you can find common ground which sort of
00:33:36.780
diffuses the situation a bit so you can say yeah look hey i agree with you like i think you got the
00:33:42.120
facts right i think that's true but despite that this this is how i this is why i think this is
00:33:46.320
important or more important and then now you know what you're you know what you're disagreeing
00:33:50.620
about like you find some commonality which kind of diffuses and kind of makes a connection uh but
00:33:56.380
then you're able to still point out differences exactly and and you know i think some of the
00:34:01.880
defensiveness in argument comes from a sense that you're kind of helpless or you know something is
00:34:07.980
wrong but you're a bit tongue-tied as to explain how or you think everything is wrong and and so
00:34:14.240
you you you're kind of stuck as to where to begin and one of the things that i hope to achieve is i
00:34:19.920
i don't want people to feel hopeless in argument or helpless in argument and there's always a kind of
00:34:25.480
a way into responding and as you say i think one of the really important things about seeing how an
00:34:33.100
argument works and the menu of potential responses that you have available to you is you don't have to
00:34:40.680
use all of them and being able to concede parts of an argument or set aside an argument um as you said
00:34:49.980
that's a really important skill too because it helps you make progress the ideal progression of a
00:34:56.540
disagreement i think is you start to narrow down the area of disagreement so that even if you aren't able
00:35:04.200
to reconcile all of your differences you can say uh we've sort of found the heart of where we
00:35:11.320
diverge and and it's not that we disagree on everything we usually don't but this is this is
00:35:17.280
the heart of our disagreement okay so every day we're encountered with just a million different
00:35:22.600
opportunities to to start an argument or to keep an argument going but you make the case that part of
00:35:27.280
arguing well means knowing when it's sometimes not good to argue and you developed a rubric for that
00:35:34.980
uh to help you determine whether ah should i really should i get in with this person it's r-i-s-a-r risa
00:35:40.500
uh tell us about that that's right it's a kind of a checklist and i'm a kind of a generally
00:35:46.300
a big believer in the idea that if you're about to do something that's going to consume your energy
00:35:52.720
that can potentially be a source of division and pain.
00:36:01.780
that it's going to be most conducive to a good discussion.
00:36:07.860
I came to the conclusion that the most productive disagreements
00:36:13.980
tend to have four kind of background conditions
00:36:18.720
So it's a checklist that I would encourage people to use
00:36:33.480
or some issues that actually don't have two sides, right?
00:36:39.860
that's not really a kind of a proper subject of debate
00:36:56.700
And this is a question about the importance of the issue,
00:37:01.000
not just about the importance of the other side, for example.
00:37:10.800
but is this particular argument important enough
00:37:24.840
but a disagreement about just about how we respond
00:37:34.560
probably won't take us very far because it's too big
00:37:37.880
and it gives too much room for people to slide around
00:37:59.260
you want the two sides to be aligned in their objectives.
00:38:02.220
So if the other side is just getting into a fight
00:38:14.940
that's not going to be very productive for debate.
00:38:25.960
and whether the two sides are aligned in their objectives.
00:38:35.660
Typically when people get into arguments online,
00:38:42.300
And everyone just kind of yells different things
00:38:47.540
some people are actually interested in good faith debate
00:39:16.760
The problem is that bad actors can take advantage of that.
00:39:30.060
And one where I think there are no easy answers.
00:39:44.880
So debate can help us improve the quality of our conversations,
00:39:48.960
but without a kind of other kinds of improvement, right?
00:40:12.680
whether that be lying or interrupting all the time
00:40:19.120
And going back to that idea of not being helpless,
00:40:29.460
kind of a defense against the dark arts available to you.
00:40:42.240
essentially good faith debaters or bad faith debaters.
00:40:47.460
I think that these are instincts that we all have.
00:40:56.420
And one of the strategies that I offer in the book
00:41:01.160
when you're up against a kind of a bully is to say,
00:41:16.760
and reminding them that walking away is always an option,
00:41:26.900
because I agreed with your description of social media is
00:41:36.700
we should not pretend that where we have the exchange
00:41:44.960
we should not pretend those are neutral forums.
00:41:58.800
we also have to have a little bit of situational awareness
00:42:17.520
The book is out with Penguin Press in the United States
00:42:27.160
And I'm very eager to engage in conversations about...
00:42:33.340
And one of the most rewarding things, you know,
00:42:35.580
of rolling out the book has been hearing people adapt
00:42:39.240
some of these ideas to their own corners of the world
00:42:48.280
And to be in that conversation is a real honor.
00:43:10.920
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash argument.
00:43:22.900
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:43:25.560
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com.
00:43:29.240
as well as thousands of articles and other news
00:43:46.680
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00:43:54.440
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