> I think that listening is probably more important than talking. In fact, it might be possible to change someone’s mind simply by listening and reflecting back what the person says, until he or she starts to think it over and reconsider.
This is a very wise point. I volunteer to canvass for a political party, and my most successful interactions are with people who say "I typically voted for [your party] in the past, but I won't now." They're always keen to tell me why, and I listen politely, nodding and agreeing, and by the end, a good half of the time, they've talked themselves into voting for us again.
But this would never work on someone set against us.
Well, I'm a paid-up member, official, and elected representative in said party, so I think it would be a little hypocritical for me to use any other word, no?
Finding a better fit for one's own instinctive temperament is a big deal. I have always been instinctively anti-authoritarian, and was a youthful leftist because the left seemed at the time a better fit for that. I remember vividly the joy of discovering libertarianism in my mid teens and feeling I had come home. That has since become a much more complicated feeling, but that's another story.
Besides that, clearly exposure to either real-life people, or credibly attested facts, that complicate one's existing narrative can be an effective mind-changer. Unfortunately, because we love engaging with stories more than coolly analyzing data, we face two obstacles to getting closer to truth through that process. One is the temptation to under index on a single case by dismissing it as unrepresentative -- the "present company excepted" problem. The other is the opposite, taking a single shocking or heartwarming case to be much more representative or common than it really is -- the "ban this thing completely because it caused something heartbreaking this one time" problem.
Arnold's father, Merle Kling, certainly "changed my mind" when I was an undergraduate student of his in the early 1970s in the political science department at Washington University in St. Louis. Although it might be more accurate to say that Professor Kling guided his students in the process of developing the capacity to think contextually: to understand the role of theoretical frameworks, and to appreciate how those frameworks help to place empirical findings in a meaningful context. (Kling's Iron Law of Social Science: "Sometime it's this way, and sometime it's that way.") This capacity to think contextually, in turn, encouraged me to "change my mind" as I accumulated more knowledge about life and politics over the subsequent decades. In my case, I moved from the liberal/left views of my youth to a more center-left position, and eventually (currently) to "just a political centrist, I guess," as Jonathan Haidt stated in an interview a few years ago. (A prominent social scientist and public intellectual who teaches in a well-respected business school !)
It was interesting for me to read about Arnold's changing political views, and about his father's political views. Many times I wondered about Professor Kling's politics, because he didn't give a hint about his own opinions while in the classroom. Hard to imagine such a feat (or even the desire for such a feat...) in today's social science and humanities departments at our elite universities ! But in the somewhat similar hothouse world of an urban university in the early 1970s, he encouraged students to express their views, while strictly maintaining his consummate ability to utilize Socratic-type dialogue to encourage critical thinking Professor Kling did seem to be "conservative" in the sense that he demonstrated great respect for his institutional role as teacher. (And, more generally, for the role of the university in civic life.) It seemed unimaginable that he would use his podium and power to become a political advocate inside the classroom. He never seemed to be trying to "change the minds of others." (At least not directly; and certainly not with pressure.)
Perhaps paradoxically, this personal style and this value system resulted in Professor Kling having an enormous influence on his students. And also on his colleagues, it seemed: he served twice as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and then as Provost/ Executive Vice Chancellor of Washington University.
Arnold Kling has changed my mind. He helped clarify my thinking on so many issues. When I first started reading him on EconLog, I had no idea who he was or what he did. But his ideas were so clear and obviously true (even compared to other EconLog bloggers) that began seeking out his writings and books. In an ideal world, the paradigms he lays out in "Three Languages of Politics", "Specialization and Trade" and in his best blog posts and essays, would be part of our shared terminology and the platform for broader discussions. I'm still not particularly interested in Arnold Kling as a person or from where he gets his authority. The ideas speak for themselves.
1. There are quite a few people out there who are persuadable on specific issues. IE, they identify with the left or the right, but are heretics when it comes to a specific issue. You may be able to convince them that the logic they applied when they arrived at their heretical stance on issue A should also be applied to issue B.
2. I think changing personal circumstances can have a significant impact on people, apart from just a different set of peers. There's the stereotype of the young person as an idealistic leftist because he/she has a heart who becomes a conservative by age 40 because he/she also has a brain. Having kids also tends to re-orient people psychologically. I would guess that persuasive writing can nudge people like this further in the direction they were already going, or serve as a catalyst for them breaking their current tribal affiliations.
3. There's definitely a lot to be said to just exposing people to different viewpoints. I read Freakonomics when I was college back in 04 or 05 or whenever that was, and later discovered that Levitt and Dubner had a blog, which I began reading fairly regularly, since blogs were the hip new thing back then. They had links fairly regularly to Econlog and Marginal Revolution, which I also read a bit of, and our host, along with Caplan and the rest of the GMU mafia provided a perspective I'd simply not been exposed to before.
A lot of naive beliefs about humanity are only sustainable so long as one is removed from the reality of the situation. Make a person actually responsible for something that cannot succeed when one implements false ideas is a 'traumatic' way to quickly change minds. Irving Kristol wrote about how it was easy for him to be a Trotskyist and believer in the essential goodness and nobility of the working class, because he had never spent any time among the intergenerational working class, that is, those who weren't well-behaved immigrants with kids going straight to the top in one generation. Then he became an infantryman in WWII fighting with and directly, intimately exposed on a daily basis for several years to lower working class personalities (iirc, many from Chicago) and he returned very much wisened up in that regard.
One of the best ways to learn about how minds change is to attend 12-step meetings - AA being the most famous, but not the best to learn how to change a mind. The best for that is AlAnon. AlAnon is a 12-step group that grapples with the question: how does a mind change? Specifically how do I change the mind of the alcoholic in my life? The short answer is that you can’t; you can only change yourself. Unfortunately that answer doesn’t suffice. It’s extremely painful dealing with that answer. And maybe it isn’t true? And so a big part of AlAnon is how to deal with not being able to change someone’s mind, or finding the way to change their mind if you can.
It seems like such a simple problem to fix. There is a truth that the alcoholic doesn’t get. Get him to understand the truth, (about his drinking) and he will quit. Then everything will be better.
Why does simple logic and persuasion not work to change the alcoholic’s mind?
Is it because the alcohol serves a positive purpose that we often fail to understand?
Is the real problem not to get the alcoholic to stop drinking, but to allow him to discover for himself how to replace the alcohol with something better?
That is a very delicate task. To the extent that it can be done, how do we do it?
The beauty of Russ Roberts is that he isn’t trying to get the alcoholic to stop drinking. Russ is listening to the alcoholic and presenting himself as a role model, “an impartial spectator,” that the alcoholic comes to respect and trust.*
Respect and trust are closely associated with love. Russ’s favorite quote from the Theory of Moral Sentiments is that “Man desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”
We need a mirror in order to change a mind. This mirror allows the mind a way of seeing itself. This mirror is the impartial spectator.
The impartial spectator can take on a few different forms. It can be another real person like Russ Roberts. It can be a composite of multiple people - like the Econtalk audience. It can be an imagined person as in God or “the Jesus Christ written about in the Bible” - the one perfect person who Christians continue to talk about even if they don’t believe he had supernatural powers.
The important idea is to talk and write about the impartial spectator - the role model, the mentor. This is our mirror. Once we have the mirror, we can talk to the mirror in private — in our prayers and meditations, in our ponderings, in our inner dialogues — and discover whether and how to change our mind.
This is one reason why monotheistic religions are so popular and successful. They present very effective impartial spectators to help us see ourselves. Even if fictional. Often through metaphor. Often through poetry and song. And in the future, through an AI mentor? Through an AI impartial spectator? Through an AI God? Through mathematics?**
One of the great joys of life is to come to see oneself through an impartial spectator (a special mirror) and to change for the better.
* Remember Russ’s analogy from years ago - that his task was like dripping water on a rock, ever so slowly wearing that rock down. He encouraged us not to try to win the argument right in that very moment. Winning in that moment, really meant losing.
**If God isn’t made of mathematics, what is He the Author of Nature made of? Mathematics is a universal language describing the universe, through which we can understand the universe. Mathematics transcends us. Existing before us and after we go extinct. Like God, mathematics represents perfection. Computers speak in terms of mathematics, but we aren’t very good at math. Our voyage into AI is our latest attempt to create a better impartial spectator, a better image of God. AI is our translator from human language to mathematics and physics, the language of Nature. AI is our latest attempt to get closer to God in order to change our minds for the better.
Arnold aptly discusses persuasion and deference as social mechanisms. These are, so to speak, micro phenomena.
My intuition is that technology shock, broad prosperity, and the emergence of a massive entertainment industry are the macro causes of changes in political preferences.
If no pill, then no sexual revolution. If no Zoom/Amazon/Netflix, then no lockdown.
Re: "What is the point of writing on issues?"
It is helpful to distinguish beliefs and preferences. Beliefs may be about facts or mechanisms (causality). Preferences may be goals, values, or policies to achieve goals in light of beliefs and values.
For example, during the pandemic, casual observation and sharp blogposts changed my beliefs about efficacy/wisdom of any "test-and-trace" policy, which seemed promising at first.
Say a person's political preference is to promote Israel's long-term security. What specific policies will help? Much depends on beliefs about causality. One theory is that Israel must maintain broad international good will. Another theory is that Israel must eliminate Hamas now, even by methods that undermine international good will. The environment is strategic and there is uncertainty about long-term effects. To complicate matters, humanitarian values ("What about the children?") and citizen sentiments ("Retaliate!") may constitute a tangle of constraints.
My point is that the point of writing on issues should be to clarify distinctions among (a) beliefs about facts and mechanisms, (b) normative goals, and (c) values or normative constraints -- in the hope of achieving also clarity about policy preferences.
"I remain curious about people’s beliefs and will share my perspectives when it’s a safe space or when I think they’re open to persuasion, but I’m not trying to risk relationships with friends by deliberately trying to change their minds."
I think we all agree on the value you see in writing but some venues might not be right for that.
“Someone has to become exposed to people with an outlook that differs from those of the people he currently relates to.” This, in addition to your point about willingness to listen, is the heart of the matter. The whole in group / out group business and why changing people’s minds is a low percentage task. The traumatic or emotional event may be one of the very few ways to bring someone to that point. Probably there is research on this - thanks for piquing my interest.
There is a "static vs dynamic analysis" issue here that points to a much larger and more worrying problem.
If you look back at even something like opinion and editorial articles from 40, 50, 60+ years ago, it's hard not to notice the general trend of a decline in quality and rigor of argument, to the point that these days one often can't find any argument aside from assertions and appeals to authority. It's clear that even writers for high-prestige outlets were once worried about being publicly embarrassed by an opponent demonstrating intellectual negligence or a blunder according to the consensus discourse 'rules of the game'. That worry kept them on their toes. Their successors at those publications are clearly unworried about their ability to get away with various bad practices.
What seems to have happened in that every time the 'rules of the game' stood in the way of the success of some political influence goal, many of the other players on that team did what they could to question and attack the rules themselves as purportedly unfair, biased, suspect, racist, etc., and also to disqualify formerly acceptable the sources of evidence, and to go after the personal lives of those making the arguments. Remember that Smithsonian poster about intellectual whiteness?
The 'dynamic analysis' point is that the nature of mind-changing had been changing over time, rapidly in some respects, and in the direction of making it easier to get away with poor rigor and harder to penetrate epistemic social bubbles. The mechanism is as above: whatever technique of persuasive conversion seems to be working becomes high value target #1 for neutralization, regardless of the fallout or intellectual collateral damage.
If your country has compulsive military service, your youth will be exposed to people from different social backgrounds than their own. And have to learn how to work with them Also, ideally, they will get a strong dose of 'competence matters'.
On the subject of peer group influence, one factor that influences adolescents' development is exposure to adult role models outside their families. I propose that the lack of maturity among many teenagers today is partly due to their limited interaction with adults in the workplace. As a teenager, I had part-time jobs throughout high school, which allowed me to learn from adults other than my parents ( what teenager thinks their parents know anything?). For instance, I remember once boasting to my coworkers, who had low-paying and unskilled jobs, that I was considering quitting school to earn more money. They quickly admonished me for being foolish and urged me to pursue higher education to have better career opportunities in the future. They spoke from their regrets and challenges, which I might not have heard otherwise. Teenagers are often naive and impulsive. If they only socialize with their peers, who share their ignorance and immaturity, they will not grow as much as they could. Nowadays, many teenagers do not work at all. Some of them do not enter the labor market until they finish college. I believe that working with adults at a young age is beneficial for maturing.
I've seen public opinion change on a lot of issues in my lifetime, and people writing and talking about them seems to be part of the influence. So while each person has a tiny impact, many tiny impacts put together changes society.
Also, there is something to be said for motivating/de-motivating people. In many cases change comes not from people changing their mind, but from proponents being energized and opponents being demoralized. For instance, a lot of people are never going to admit they were wrong on COVID, but they no longer live as if they were right.
Personally, I've had a few transformative political re-alignments in my life:
1) Experience with modern dating and urban life
2) The Bell Curve and all its associated works
3) Seeing "very smart people" not be so smart (I did not grow up near these people or institutions, so I didn't know)
There is great value in offering opinions, especially in revealing otherwise UNexpressed preferences. A favorite tactic of left is to flood media with preferred narrative, make a minority seem popular. That deception must be answered, like the little boy saying the king is in fact naked.
The four-stroke regime is a two-story state. When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”
Shared story has root privilege. It has no natural enemies and is automatically true. Injecting ideas into it is nontrivial and hence lucrative; this profession is called “PR.”
There is no reason to assume that either pole of the spectrum of conflict, or the middle, or the shared story, is any closer to reality than the single pole of the one-story state.
Dividing the narrative has not answered the old question: is any of this true? Rather, it has… dodged it. Stagecraft!
This is even better than supposing that, since we fought Hitler and Hitler was bad, we must be good. These very basic fallacies, or psychological exploits, are deeply embedded in our political operating systems. Like bugs in code, they are invisible until you look straight at them. Then they are obvious.
Along similar lines, Monica Guzman wrote something akin to the following:
On hearing a story that aligns with ones beliefs, a person is inclined to ask, "Can I believe it?" On hearing a story not aligned with ones beliefs, a person is inclined to ask, "Must I believe it?"
Most of us evolve as we age and observe more things. We see that unintended consequences outnumber easy answers. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try anything nor believe in nothing, but focusing on a big issue in some fashion (which can be iterated later) is more important than ideological purity. Problem is we don’t agree on the big issues (wedge issues get more coverage than, say, unsustainable government finances and underemployment/miseducation of the bottom third of the country)
I am not interested in persuading anyone or changing anyone’s mind. I am interested in hearing the views of thoughtful people- those who do not express their views to signal their tribe identity and engage in mutual grooming, and I will share my views with them (not to persuade but to explain how they came about). It doesn’t offend me to have a friend who disagrees or who takes an opposite position. Hearing how they came to those views can be interesting even if I disagree. It usually tells me a little about how they think and the self-image they are managing.
Unfortunately, the majority of friends and colleagues don’t fall into the thoughtful category (despite being smart people about other things). We are all tribal about certain things, and it is a complete waste of time to listen to members of the MSNBC or the Fox tribe. If I wanted to hear those tribal legends regurgitated I could watch MSNBC or Fox (I don’t). I hear nothing surprising or interesting when I talk with these tribe members, so I don’t waste my time talking politics with them. That box has been ticked. I just nod my head if they insist. I’d also be embarrassed to view any political candidate as a hero who should be fawned over.
> I think that listening is probably more important than talking. In fact, it might be possible to change someone’s mind simply by listening and reflecting back what the person says, until he or she starts to think it over and reconsider.
This is a very wise point. I volunteer to canvass for a political party, and my most successful interactions are with people who say "I typically voted for [your party] in the past, but I won't now." They're always keen to tell me why, and I listen politely, nodding and agreeing, and by the end, a good half of the time, they've talked themselves into voting for us again.
But this would never work on someone set against us.
You lost me at “us”
Well, I'm a paid-up member, official, and elected representative in said party, so I think it would be a little hypocritical for me to use any other word, no?
Finding a better fit for one's own instinctive temperament is a big deal. I have always been instinctively anti-authoritarian, and was a youthful leftist because the left seemed at the time a better fit for that. I remember vividly the joy of discovering libertarianism in my mid teens and feeling I had come home. That has since become a much more complicated feeling, but that's another story.
Besides that, clearly exposure to either real-life people, or credibly attested facts, that complicate one's existing narrative can be an effective mind-changer. Unfortunately, because we love engaging with stories more than coolly analyzing data, we face two obstacles to getting closer to truth through that process. One is the temptation to under index on a single case by dismissing it as unrepresentative -- the "present company excepted" problem. The other is the opposite, taking a single shocking or heartwarming case to be much more representative or common than it really is -- the "ban this thing completely because it caused something heartbreaking this one time" problem.
Arnold's father, Merle Kling, certainly "changed my mind" when I was an undergraduate student of his in the early 1970s in the political science department at Washington University in St. Louis. Although it might be more accurate to say that Professor Kling guided his students in the process of developing the capacity to think contextually: to understand the role of theoretical frameworks, and to appreciate how those frameworks help to place empirical findings in a meaningful context. (Kling's Iron Law of Social Science: "Sometime it's this way, and sometime it's that way.") This capacity to think contextually, in turn, encouraged me to "change my mind" as I accumulated more knowledge about life and politics over the subsequent decades. In my case, I moved from the liberal/left views of my youth to a more center-left position, and eventually (currently) to "just a political centrist, I guess," as Jonathan Haidt stated in an interview a few years ago. (A prominent social scientist and public intellectual who teaches in a well-respected business school !)
It was interesting for me to read about Arnold's changing political views, and about his father's political views. Many times I wondered about Professor Kling's politics, because he didn't give a hint about his own opinions while in the classroom. Hard to imagine such a feat (or even the desire for such a feat...) in today's social science and humanities departments at our elite universities ! But in the somewhat similar hothouse world of an urban university in the early 1970s, he encouraged students to express their views, while strictly maintaining his consummate ability to utilize Socratic-type dialogue to encourage critical thinking Professor Kling did seem to be "conservative" in the sense that he demonstrated great respect for his institutional role as teacher. (And, more generally, for the role of the university in civic life.) It seemed unimaginable that he would use his podium and power to become a political advocate inside the classroom. He never seemed to be trying to "change the minds of others." (At least not directly; and certainly not with pressure.)
Perhaps paradoxically, this personal style and this value system resulted in Professor Kling having an enormous influence on his students. And also on his colleagues, it seemed: he served twice as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and then as Provost/ Executive Vice Chancellor of Washington University.
Arnold Kling has changed my mind. He helped clarify my thinking on so many issues. When I first started reading him on EconLog, I had no idea who he was or what he did. But his ideas were so clear and obviously true (even compared to other EconLog bloggers) that began seeking out his writings and books. In an ideal world, the paradigms he lays out in "Three Languages of Politics", "Specialization and Trade" and in his best blog posts and essays, would be part of our shared terminology and the platform for broader discussions. I'm still not particularly interested in Arnold Kling as a person or from where he gets his authority. The ideas speak for themselves.
A few points I would make here:
1. There are quite a few people out there who are persuadable on specific issues. IE, they identify with the left or the right, but are heretics when it comes to a specific issue. You may be able to convince them that the logic they applied when they arrived at their heretical stance on issue A should also be applied to issue B.
2. I think changing personal circumstances can have a significant impact on people, apart from just a different set of peers. There's the stereotype of the young person as an idealistic leftist because he/she has a heart who becomes a conservative by age 40 because he/she also has a brain. Having kids also tends to re-orient people psychologically. I would guess that persuasive writing can nudge people like this further in the direction they were already going, or serve as a catalyst for them breaking their current tribal affiliations.
3. There's definitely a lot to be said to just exposing people to different viewpoints. I read Freakonomics when I was college back in 04 or 05 or whenever that was, and later discovered that Levitt and Dubner had a blog, which I began reading fairly regularly, since blogs were the hip new thing back then. They had links fairly regularly to Econlog and Marginal Revolution, which I also read a bit of, and our host, along with Caplan and the rest of the GMU mafia provided a perspective I'd simply not been exposed to before.
A lot of naive beliefs about humanity are only sustainable so long as one is removed from the reality of the situation. Make a person actually responsible for something that cannot succeed when one implements false ideas is a 'traumatic' way to quickly change minds. Irving Kristol wrote about how it was easy for him to be a Trotskyist and believer in the essential goodness and nobility of the working class, because he had never spent any time among the intergenerational working class, that is, those who weren't well-behaved immigrants with kids going straight to the top in one generation. Then he became an infantryman in WWII fighting with and directly, intimately exposed on a daily basis for several years to lower working class personalities (iirc, many from Chicago) and he returned very much wisened up in that regard.
How does a mind change?
One of the best ways to learn about how minds change is to attend 12-step meetings - AA being the most famous, but not the best to learn how to change a mind. The best for that is AlAnon. AlAnon is a 12-step group that grapples with the question: how does a mind change? Specifically how do I change the mind of the alcoholic in my life? The short answer is that you can’t; you can only change yourself. Unfortunately that answer doesn’t suffice. It’s extremely painful dealing with that answer. And maybe it isn’t true? And so a big part of AlAnon is how to deal with not being able to change someone’s mind, or finding the way to change their mind if you can.
It seems like such a simple problem to fix. There is a truth that the alcoholic doesn’t get. Get him to understand the truth, (about his drinking) and he will quit. Then everything will be better.
Why does simple logic and persuasion not work to change the alcoholic’s mind?
Is it because the alcohol serves a positive purpose that we often fail to understand?
Is the real problem not to get the alcoholic to stop drinking, but to allow him to discover for himself how to replace the alcohol with something better?
That is a very delicate task. To the extent that it can be done, how do we do it?
The beauty of Russ Roberts is that he isn’t trying to get the alcoholic to stop drinking. Russ is listening to the alcoholic and presenting himself as a role model, “an impartial spectator,” that the alcoholic comes to respect and trust.*
Respect and trust are closely associated with love. Russ’s favorite quote from the Theory of Moral Sentiments is that “Man desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”
We need a mirror in order to change a mind. This mirror allows the mind a way of seeing itself. This mirror is the impartial spectator.
The impartial spectator can take on a few different forms. It can be another real person like Russ Roberts. It can be a composite of multiple people - like the Econtalk audience. It can be an imagined person as in God or “the Jesus Christ written about in the Bible” - the one perfect person who Christians continue to talk about even if they don’t believe he had supernatural powers.
The important idea is to talk and write about the impartial spectator - the role model, the mentor. This is our mirror. Once we have the mirror, we can talk to the mirror in private — in our prayers and meditations, in our ponderings, in our inner dialogues — and discover whether and how to change our mind.
This is one reason why monotheistic religions are so popular and successful. They present very effective impartial spectators to help us see ourselves. Even if fictional. Often through metaphor. Often through poetry and song. And in the future, through an AI mentor? Through an AI impartial spectator? Through an AI God? Through mathematics?**
One of the great joys of life is to come to see oneself through an impartial spectator (a special mirror) and to change for the better.
* Remember Russ’s analogy from years ago - that his task was like dripping water on a rock, ever so slowly wearing that rock down. He encouraged us not to try to win the argument right in that very moment. Winning in that moment, really meant losing.
**If God isn’t made of mathematics, what is He the Author of Nature made of? Mathematics is a universal language describing the universe, through which we can understand the universe. Mathematics transcends us. Existing before us and after we go extinct. Like God, mathematics represents perfection. Computers speak in terms of mathematics, but we aren’t very good at math. Our voyage into AI is our latest attempt to create a better impartial spectator, a better image of God. AI is our translator from human language to mathematics and physics, the language of Nature. AI is our latest attempt to get closer to God in order to change our minds for the better.
Re: "How does a mind change?"
Arnold aptly discusses persuasion and deference as social mechanisms. These are, so to speak, micro phenomena.
My intuition is that technology shock, broad prosperity, and the emergence of a massive entertainment industry are the macro causes of changes in political preferences.
If no pill, then no sexual revolution. If no Zoom/Amazon/Netflix, then no lockdown.
Re: "What is the point of writing on issues?"
It is helpful to distinguish beliefs and preferences. Beliefs may be about facts or mechanisms (causality). Preferences may be goals, values, or policies to achieve goals in light of beliefs and values.
For example, during the pandemic, casual observation and sharp blogposts changed my beliefs about efficacy/wisdom of any "test-and-trace" policy, which seemed promising at first.
Say a person's political preference is to promote Israel's long-term security. What specific policies will help? Much depends on beliefs about causality. One theory is that Israel must maintain broad international good will. Another theory is that Israel must eliminate Hamas now, even by methods that undermine international good will. The environment is strategic and there is uncertainty about long-term effects. To complicate matters, humanitarian values ("What about the children?") and citizen sentiments ("Retaliate!") may constitute a tangle of constraints.
My point is that the point of writing on issues should be to clarify distinctions among (a) beliefs about facts and mechanisms, (b) normative goals, and (c) values or normative constraints -- in the hope of achieving also clarity about policy preferences.
It might change someone's mind!
"I remain curious about people’s beliefs and will share my perspectives when it’s a safe space or when I think they’re open to persuasion, but I’m not trying to risk relationships with friends by deliberately trying to change their minds."
I think we all agree on the value you see in writing but some venues might not be right for that.
“Someone has to become exposed to people with an outlook that differs from those of the people he currently relates to.” This, in addition to your point about willingness to listen, is the heart of the matter. The whole in group / out group business and why changing people’s minds is a low percentage task. The traumatic or emotional event may be one of the very few ways to bring someone to that point. Probably there is research on this - thanks for piquing my interest.
There is a "static vs dynamic analysis" issue here that points to a much larger and more worrying problem.
If you look back at even something like opinion and editorial articles from 40, 50, 60+ years ago, it's hard not to notice the general trend of a decline in quality and rigor of argument, to the point that these days one often can't find any argument aside from assertions and appeals to authority. It's clear that even writers for high-prestige outlets were once worried about being publicly embarrassed by an opponent demonstrating intellectual negligence or a blunder according to the consensus discourse 'rules of the game'. That worry kept them on their toes. Their successors at those publications are clearly unworried about their ability to get away with various bad practices.
What seems to have happened in that every time the 'rules of the game' stood in the way of the success of some political influence goal, many of the other players on that team did what they could to question and attack the rules themselves as purportedly unfair, biased, suspect, racist, etc., and also to disqualify formerly acceptable the sources of evidence, and to go after the personal lives of those making the arguments. Remember that Smithsonian poster about intellectual whiteness?
The 'dynamic analysis' point is that the nature of mind-changing had been changing over time, rapidly in some respects, and in the direction of making it easier to get away with poor rigor and harder to penetrate epistemic social bubbles. The mechanism is as above: whatever technique of persuasive conversion seems to be working becomes high value target #1 for neutralization, regardless of the fallout or intellectual collateral damage.
If your country has compulsive military service, your youth will be exposed to people from different social backgrounds than their own. And have to learn how to work with them Also, ideally, they will get a strong dose of 'competence matters'.
On the subject of peer group influence, one factor that influences adolescents' development is exposure to adult role models outside their families. I propose that the lack of maturity among many teenagers today is partly due to their limited interaction with adults in the workplace. As a teenager, I had part-time jobs throughout high school, which allowed me to learn from adults other than my parents ( what teenager thinks their parents know anything?). For instance, I remember once boasting to my coworkers, who had low-paying and unskilled jobs, that I was considering quitting school to earn more money. They quickly admonished me for being foolish and urged me to pursue higher education to have better career opportunities in the future. They spoke from their regrets and challenges, which I might not have heard otherwise. Teenagers are often naive and impulsive. If they only socialize with their peers, who share their ignorance and immaturity, they will not grow as much as they could. Nowadays, many teenagers do not work at all. Some of them do not enter the labor market until they finish college. I believe that working with adults at a young age is beneficial for maturing.
"What is the point of writing on issues?"
I've seen public opinion change on a lot of issues in my lifetime, and people writing and talking about them seems to be part of the influence. So while each person has a tiny impact, many tiny impacts put together changes society.
Also, there is something to be said for motivating/de-motivating people. In many cases change comes not from people changing their mind, but from proponents being energized and opponents being demoralized. For instance, a lot of people are never going to admit they were wrong on COVID, but they no longer live as if they were right.
Personally, I've had a few transformative political re-alignments in my life:
1) Experience with modern dating and urban life
2) The Bell Curve and all its associated works
3) Seeing "very smart people" not be so smart (I did not grow up near these people or institutions, so I didn't know)
4) COVID/Summer of Floyd
There is great value in offering opinions, especially in revealing otherwise UNexpressed preferences. A favorite tactic of left is to flood media with preferred narrative, make a minority seem popular. That deception must be answered, like the little boy saying the king is in fact naked.
I like Curtis Yarvin's take:
The four-stroke regime is a two-story state. When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”
Shared story has root privilege. It has no natural enemies and is automatically true. Injecting ideas into it is nontrivial and hence lucrative; this profession is called “PR.”
There is no reason to assume that either pole of the spectrum of conflict, or the middle, or the shared story, is any closer to reality than the single pole of the one-story state.
Dividing the narrative has not answered the old question: is any of this true? Rather, it has… dodged it. Stagecraft!
This is even better than supposing that, since we fought Hitler and Hitler was bad, we must be good. These very basic fallacies, or psychological exploits, are deeply embedded in our political operating systems. Like bugs in code, they are invisible until you look straight at them. Then they are obvious.
Along similar lines, Monica Guzman wrote something akin to the following:
On hearing a story that aligns with ones beliefs, a person is inclined to ask, "Can I believe it?" On hearing a story not aligned with ones beliefs, a person is inclined to ask, "Must I believe it?"
The mind has thousands of ways of tricking itself!
Good points.
Most of us evolve as we age and observe more things. We see that unintended consequences outnumber easy answers. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try anything nor believe in nothing, but focusing on a big issue in some fashion (which can be iterated later) is more important than ideological purity. Problem is we don’t agree on the big issues (wedge issues get more coverage than, say, unsustainable government finances and underemployment/miseducation of the bottom third of the country)
I am not interested in persuading anyone or changing anyone’s mind. I am interested in hearing the views of thoughtful people- those who do not express their views to signal their tribe identity and engage in mutual grooming, and I will share my views with them (not to persuade but to explain how they came about). It doesn’t offend me to have a friend who disagrees or who takes an opposite position. Hearing how they came to those views can be interesting even if I disagree. It usually tells me a little about how they think and the self-image they are managing.
Unfortunately, the majority of friends and colleagues don’t fall into the thoughtful category (despite being smart people about other things). We are all tribal about certain things, and it is a complete waste of time to listen to members of the MSNBC or the Fox tribe. If I wanted to hear those tribal legends regurgitated I could watch MSNBC or Fox (I don’t). I hear nothing surprising or interesting when I talk with these tribe members, so I don’t waste my time talking politics with them. That box has been ticked. I just nod my head if they insist. I’d also be embarrassed to view any political candidate as a hero who should be fawned over.