[extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds

[Lee Corbin]

Heartland writes

> [Lee wrote]
>
>> The other beliefs [e.g. differing philosophical and political ones] are
>> *not* [necessarily, I should have said] irrational. I wish that you and
>> John Clark could see this. It's possible that they're not even incorrect.
>> It's possible that it's a "conflict of visions" sort of phenomenon.
> 
> Perhaps I should have said "illogical" or "inconsistent" instead of "irrational."

No!  In the worst case phenomena, they aren't even illogical or inconsistent.
In the general case, say political disagreement, all that can be done (besides
in certain cases awaiting events, though people are still arguing about the
French Revolution), is to illustrate certain "awkwardnesses" that the other
position must accomodate.  For example, one minor awkwardness of my
position is that if someone asks "how are you" to an instance of me, they
must receive the muddled answer "This unit only knows how it is doing,
and it is doing fine, thank you very much.  This unit does not know in
general how LeeCorbin in general is doing, even though all LeeCorbins
are belong to us."

> The progress in this debate [or in many] does not necessarily come in the form of 
> someone changing his/her mind, but almost exclusively in the form of increased 
> clarity of our own thinking and increased ability to communicate our beliefs to 
> others that are byproducts of frequent interaction with our critics. Over the years 
> I was forced to update my argument many times in order to remove inconsistencies 
> that I was not aware of at the time. Almost all updates/upgrades were 
> caused/inspired by other poster's comments. Also, what used to take me 20-40 posts 
> to describe, now takes 1 or 2. To me, that's progress.

We concur.  I hope that everyone sees the light.  That is, I hope that there
are no "conflicts of vision" here, and that everyone can recognize what you
and I think are the truths of the matter here.

Lee