How to Engage in Difficult Conversations

i'm delighted to introduce peter pagosian i have known about him only for a few years but have been following him and his his activities and his his remarkable principled stand against illiberalism in academia and elsewhere and he probably needs almost no introduction with this audience but i want to tell you a little bit more about him dr pagosian is a founding faculty member at the university of austin texas a brand new university a founder and advisor to the foundation against intolerance and racism the acronym acronym for which is fair fair and the director of national progress alliance peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 25 years that focuses on the socratic method scientific skepticism and critical thinking peter's dissertation explored increasing the moral reasoning of prison inmates and aiding their desistance from crime his most recent book is how to have impossible conversations and his writing can be found in the new york times the wall street journal the philosopher's magazine scientific american time magazine skeptic national review and elsewhere his work is centered on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to a wide variety of contexts to help people think through what seemed to be intractable problems his current work and activity can be found on sub stack twitter and his web page which is peterboroughgoshian.com i want to say one more word peter's books are for sale out in the lobby and i encourage you to buy and read them i think you'll find them fascinating today he will talk about how to have difficult conversations warm welcome please for dr peter pagosian [Applause] thank you craig thank you [Applause] about five years ago i received a phone call the phone call was from someone whose voice i didn't recognize and they said to me your father has gone missing so needless to say i was i was completely freaked out by this i caught a plane the next day i was i live in portland oregon and my dad lives in las vegas so i caught a plane the next day um his car was found at a a grocery store like a safeway i didn't know what happened so i had called all the hospitals and he had been admitted to one of the hospitals in in a section of the city where he lived soon after that two days after that they found out they didn't know what was wrong but they found out that he had cancer and he died and i was completely inconsolable and and if you've ever lost a parent there's just literally nothing nothing can prepare you for that there's nothing you can do there's nothing you can read so so i was a mess i had no clothes i had the keys to his car which someone dropped off at the hospital so i would literally i got in his car and my mother had passed away two years before that and i drove to his house and fortunately i did not have to sleep in his bed but i i was wearing his clothes i didn't know what to do they had these my parents had saved generations of photos of people my grandpa so i'm looking through these photos i have literally no idea what to do it's like photos of my grandparents when they were younger and i'm looking i'm thinking at the time i was like i don't know i'm 55 now it's a 50 i'm thinking at the time like wow i am now older than all of the people in these photos so um so i didn't know what to do so i lingered there and i don't know what would have happened to me unless a really good friend of mine took the initiative and he flew out and he said let me help you let's get this in order so um he helped me put the house up for sale he helped me pack the items i just simply do not know from the bottom of my heart what i would have done if he did not come out and help me fast forward to a year later i was sitting at breakfast with the same my same friend josh is his name he's probably ideally suited in retrospect because he was a psychiatrist and i was not doing well i remember when the moment my dad died i was just you know just sobbing and the woman in the hospital who was in the room said you know we we have um psychologists people you can talk to on staff that they're available but for you i would urge you i would urge you to do this your special case so um so i was having breakfast with my friend josh and i told him about an audacious plan that i had and the plan was basically to publish a bunch of fake papers in her journals to expose corruption and josh said to me don't do it whatever you do don't do it and instead of listening to josh and asking him why i shouldn't do it i got in a defensive posture and i became belligerent and aggressive here's a guy who literally came who flew to las vegas to help me in the probably the most difficult period or one of the most difficult periods of my life and instead of actually listening to anything he had to say i not only became defensive but at some point in that conversation i went to into attack mode josh has never spoken to me since that day i've reached out to him i've texted him i've called him he hasn't returned my calls maybe he'll see this i don't know i can take him out for drinks but um the the lesson if you get nothing else from the talk today i'm gonna tell you how to have impossible conversations with people i'm gonna tell you about mistakes i've made so that that you won't you won't make them but if you get nothing else from this talk we are situated at a unique time right now with polarization fractionalization the new ruling on roe v wade is going to make communication even more difficult i will give you a single principle to think about and that principle is let friends be wrong someone doesn't have to believe exactly what you believe and if someone has a different opinion than you that's fine hear them out listen to them think about it the deeper the golf moral epistemological political the more important that listening phase is so here's what i'm going to do for my talk today i'm going to lay out a template from various forms of literature and i'll explain where each of these things come from in the literature it's almost like a flow chart that will enable you to have a conversation with someone a radically different belief than you and you don't think it's possible to have that conversation those are extremely possible conversations okay so let's let's do it the first stage the first thing you want to do when you meet someone when you want to have a conversation with them is you need to build rapport the rapport building phase usually takes about two minutes sometimes it can take three sometimes can take four if you're ever wondering of a question to ask somebody don't ask them what they do for work nobody wants to talk about their work it just keeps the conversation at one level ask them what they do for fun people love to talk about what their hobbies are their activities are it's a great rapport building we also live in a society right now without riding this whole hobby horse for too long where we've taught a generation of people to look for oppression variables and oppression characteristics in people to dig down into ever more granular niches oh this person's gay or this person's white or this person has some oppression variable they're gay or trans i'm going to suggest exactly the opposite instead of looking for differences among people with whom you're speaking look for commonalities oh this person lives in my city oh this person likes i like science fiction this person likes science fiction i like jiu jitsu this person does jiu jitsu you can usually tell if someone has like my ears are cauliflowered you can usually tell but but there are things that you can do to build rapport and build commonalities among people it takes a few minutes the longer the deeper the gulf politically epistemologically morally the more time you want to spend rapport building to let them get to know you as a person the second thing you want to do is people think that they can do this they think they're good at study after study has shown that that's actually not the case you really want to listen like truly genuinely listen and if you don't understand something somebody is saying put the burden of clarity on yourself never a word of criticism no criticism at all until you have understood now how do you know you've understood very simple you know you've understood when you repeat it back to them and this this technique or trick or what you're going to look for comes from hostage negotiations hostage negotiate people have written entire books about this they look for two single words that's right those are the words that's right having a conversation with someone you've just built rapport you've listened you're repeating back to them you're getting you're looking for that's right you know you're not always going to get it in fact maybe my my rate of getting it is around 20 25 at best if you get yeah okay yeah that's good take it okay you build rapport you've listened here's what i do at 55 that i wouldn't have done at 25. at 55 ma far more of my life is behind me than in front of me so i have to be judicious in my time i can't i can't screw around there's a technique that you can use that i this is really it's like magic when you get good at this it's called scales ask someone to put their belief on a scale on a scale from one to ten how confident are you in that belief because you now know because you've repeated back to them and they've said yes you've understood me correctly how confident are you in that scale from one to ten with one being i'm not i'm zero you know not confident at all five being you know so so confident seven being quite confident and ten being i'm absolutely positive so it is remarkable what you can do with scales i'll just give you a few examples one thing you can do with scales it will avoid a yes you can no you can't situation or yes it is no it isn't give an example um let's say that somebody says to you a phrase that i hear frequently the united states is a patriarchy so instead of saying yes it is no it isn't yes it is no it isn't here's a way to get around that oh so you always want to say when someone makes a claim you never you talk about later building a golden bridge you never want to shut them down you want to create a context and an environment for them where they're free to walk across the golden bridge so when someone makes a claim never defensive posture always an open but physically open and cognitively and intellectually open so some of these claim first thing i always the thing that my go-to is that's interesting because if you say that's interesting you're not agreeing with them you're just saying it's interesting almost anything any claim anybody tells you is going to be interesting anyway so so someone would say something united states is a patriarchy oh that's interesting on a scale from one to ten if saudi arabia is a nine where's the united states that avoids immediately yes it is no it isn't now the great thing about everything i'm going to say today is there only so many things people can say to you i learned that from the atheist movement arguments for the essence of god there's only so many things people can say to you so somebody can say to you well uh if saudi arabia is a nine the united states is a seven okay you know exactly where they stand someone could say to you well saudi arabia's 9 united states is a 10. then you need to decide whether or not you want to stay in that conversation someone could also say to you i i don't know okay i really i have no idea i don't know the first thing about saudi arabia as a rule not even as a general rule when someone says to you i don't know you should always compliment them thank you we always want to reward people for not pretending to know things they don't know okay so let's say that in the united states in the 1950s in the 1950s if the united states on a scale from one to the patriarchy scale was a seven where are we now and they'll tell you i know five seven nine they'll tell you what they'll tell you but asking people to put things on a scale that's one thing you can do here's some other things you can do when you start practicing the techniques in the book and they're so they truly are very easy to use when you start practicing these the physicist richard feynman says the easiest person to fool is yourself i use this to to use it as a verb to science it the beginning of the conversation i'll say oh well how confident are you in this claim they'll give me a number and at the very end of the conversation i'll ask them the same question again and i'll see where their confidence level has moved so that way i won't have to be telling myself oh i'm a great conversationalist or it's a way to keep your delusions in check you can do some remarkable things with scales they're very very counterintuitive but once you put that and always front load that in your conversations in other words use those right after you have asked you've repeated you've built rapport you've repeated they've said something here's another thing you can do with scales let's say that somebody tells you uh i usually don't like the abortion thing because there's so many beliefs that populate the structure of that but some of the things like immigration or what have you how confident are you the united states should build a wall on the border it doesn't matter what it is they'll give you a number let's say that they give you the number seven i'm seven confident that the united states needs a large wall across its southern border okay this took me 20 years to figure out publications thousands of people talking tens of thousands different contexts prisons etc if you ask somebody why they believe something the overwhelming majority of people are going to tell you why they believe it almost nobody will tell you to screw yourself they can say exactly why they believe it it's a great question it's socrates's question i don't mean to demean the question at all but it comes at a cost the cost of asking someone why they believe something means that they're going to tell you and they listen to what they tell you and they increase the confidence in what they believe i'm going to suggest in a moment a completely different question to ask that will shatter the way that people conceptualize their own belief structure but to do that you need a scale you need to know where somebody is on the one to ten oh by the way and if someone says to you you know what i don't want to use scales i don't like scales then don't use it just go with the flow or some so i don't want to use that scale people said that's not granular enough i want to use a 1 to 100 scale okay that's great great okay no problem no problem okay so it's counterintuitive but if someone says to you i'm for for for building a wall on the mexican border i'm a seven ask them oh that's it did i i phased out how's my mic good i think i phased off for a second um if somebody says to you i'm a seven on a one to ten don't say to them oh that's interesting why aren't you an eight or a nine for the same reason i just because if you say why aren't you eight or nine they'll talk themselves into it you need to do exactly the opposite oh that's interesting why aren't you a five and then they'll give you reasons against their own position really think about that let that percolate for a second okay so we can talk more about i could literally talk a day about scales but those are some of the quick things you can do about with scales here's something else you can think about so rapport repeating back to someone looking for that's right but getting it scales the one thing that that i found to be incredibly helpful and i would suggest that you do this have these conversations exactly in the order i'm presenting today is you ask somebody a dis confirmation question so remember i said before well why do you believe that i almost never ask people that anymore it's not only is it a total waste of time but it makes the conversation worse but you know you can adapt to your conversations however you want to adapt to them when someone gives you a number i said well why aren't you a lower number and i'm always ending each of these things just like the lesson from socrates it's always ending in a question when you ask a disconfirmation question here's a way to frame you're asking people to disconfirm this comes from the literature and philosophy on on applied epistemology it's the real name i call it disconfirmation but the real name in the literature is the feasibility these are defeasibility questions here's the question that i want you to ask everyone next time you're having a difficult if not impossible conversation oh that's interesting what would it take to change your mind if you're speaking to someone who's a little more educated you would say oh that's interesting under what conditions would you be willing to revise that belief let me repeat that that's so important under what conditions would you be willing to revise your belief because remember that's almost exactly the opposite question of why do you believe that because why do you believe that people just talk to themselves people just increase the confidence on the scales you're asking somebody else you're asking someone you're not telling anybody anything if you've noticed i haven't told anybody anything i'm just simply asking people why do you believe that no oh okay under what conditions could that be wrong how confident are you in that one of the problems that we have is that we look at the conclusions that someone utters and we try to attack those conclusions but i'm suggesting a completely different way to have a conversation across a divide and that is to think about to first understand the claim what you're talking about and to see if the reasoning somebody has justifies the confidence and their beliefs and if you've seen the videos that i just put out i do this on college campuses where i put painters tape on a sidewalk and we look at a claim and then i encourage people i i see if the reasoning that they have justifies the confidence in their claim you know strongly agree agree mildly agree neutral strongly disagree etc okay so let's go back to the disconfirmation question or defeasibility question excuse me under what conditions would you be willing to revise that belief the only four things people can say to you there's not much that's why i'm telling you just when you don't don't do anything radical when you first learn how to do this just stick to the template later on you can put stuff in you can play with it you can manipulate it but for now just follow the template the first thing they can say to you is there are no conditions i'm completely unwilling to revise my belief the person who says that would have answered 10 on the scale remember we talked about sales that would have been a 10 on a 1 to 10. here's the response to that oh that's that's interesting so that belief is informed on the basis of evidence well they say what what do you mean it's not formally basically well to form to to make a belief to form a belief on the basis of evidence means by definition that there has to be some other evidence that could come in that would cause you to change your mind and if you're not willing to change your mind then the belief is in form of the base of evidence so i'm curious how are you coming to that conclusion here's the key when you ask people that question often when we have conversations with someone we don't want people to feel uncomfortable and we just jump in don't jump in this is what i do and i'll just if i have to stand there for a minute i'll stand there for a minute two minutes three minutes i will not be the person who says something the greeks call that aporia wonder those pregnant pauses engender a sense of wonder in people um but by the way just parenthetically it's important to note every single thing i'm saying today the purpose of this is not to create confusion wonder in people but those things might come about as a as a consequence of people examining their own beliefs just a very very quick story i used to teach critical thinking and one of the things that i used to do is i used to ask people what would happen if you dropped an egg from a two-story window people people would look at me like i had lost my mind and they say the the um the egg will break not if it's dropped onto cement but if it's dropped onto grass and so what what i would do is i'd go get a dozen of eggs but they couldn't be the eggs the shells that you know those super thin ones that you just do this your buckminster fuller designed the geodestic dome on the base of an egg if you drop an egg from a toaster we can do it you can do it out here and do it anywhere i've done it literally thousands of times you drop it as long as it's a you know not one of those super flimsy egg shells and you you drop it onto grass the eggshell will not break now people will be confused about that but the purpose is not to confuse people so there's a difference when socrates does the socratic method the purpose is not to confuse people the purpose is to help them re-examine their own beliefs but confusion or perplexity more specifically will come as a consequence of people being honest with themselves and examining their own beliefs because remember most people will walk through their whole lives and nobody literally nobody will ever ask them under what conditions would you be willing to change your mind what they will ask them is why do you believe that and they'll have very very very well rehearsed lines or statements for their conclusions but literally nothing for their epistemology they'll have no way of engaging that okay so you built rapport you repeated something back to people oh in the rapport building stage you can also bring that in those examples if you can think of any other examples again just from the ones i use science fiction or jujitsu whatever your hobbies are objectivism doesn't matter what is you can perhaps bring those up later in the conversation you ask people to put their belief on a scale you ask people would it be what it would take to change their mind one of the four things that people said to you was nothing will change my mind the other thing that someone can say to you is evidence evidence would change my mind oh that's interesting what evidence and they'll tell you that's the ideal situation the ideal situation is someone will tell you exactly what changed your mind and then you see if you can provide that evidence but don't do that yet we're getting there the third thing that somebody can say to you is geez i really don't know i've never thought about it before i have no idea what would change my mind and the response to that should always be thank you that's a great response that's what i was it's a great risk that's a terrific response if we all did that more we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now we wouldn't have ideologues walking around pretending to know things they don't know okay the fourth thing that someone can say to you is the final thing someone can say to you they can tell you something wildly implausible when i was heavily involved in the atheist movement i would ask people who would profess a belief in a deity for example a a christ i would say under what conditions would you be willing to change your mind that christ was the son of god and smart apologists apology apology means you know defense of the face first peter 3 15 you know just defend people would say the bones of christ you present me with the bones of christ because if you presented them with the bones of christ that would mean that christ didn't resurrect to heaven so the resurrection narrative would fall so someone can present you with something wildly implausible i just want to take a pause and build off of a comment that i made during the panel let's say that you're having i'm having that conversation i'll place it on myself let's say that i'm having a conversation with somebody and someone says the bone the bones of christ and i say well this is a remarkable coincidence i've come from the holy land i just spent two weeks there and i plop a big bag down in front of them they would do absolutely everything in their power to disconfirm that those are the bones of christ take it to universities radiometric dating you name it they would do it that tells you that the belief is not held for epistemological reasons it's in other words it's not a problem of critical thinking people hold their beliefs not for epistemic reasons but for moral reasons that's a huge pill to swallow and unless i've spent most of my professional life thinking about that in fact when you look if you do watch the videos and maybe next time we can do a seminar when we put painters tape my team and i put painters tape remember how we told you ask people to stand alone you will find if you ask people enough like enough questions asked in a sincere way about their beliefs the only reason people stand on a particular line the only reason that people have confidence in their beliefs has nothing to do with evidence literally nothing it has everything to do with morality people hold beliefs for moral reasons not epistemological ones it's a huge pill to swallow okay so you just asked someone a disconfirmation question we know there are only four things people can say to you they can say they're not willing to change their mind which means their belief isn't based on evidence they can tell you exactly what it would take to change your mind and you see if you can provide that but we'll come back to that they'll say i don't know in which case you should always i literally say thank you thank you for being honest i really appreciate that i always make sure i'd linger on that for a moment or they can give you some wildly implausible claim like the bones of christ i want to take a second and i want to i want to drill down on some specific techniques that you can use throughout these conversations there's a study this is really interesting there was a study of of um researchers asked people how confident they were in how toilets worked and universally every single person who was asked how a toilet works gave they didn't use a scale but they said i'm extremely confident i'm very very confident i know exactly how the toilet works but when they ask people describe in as much detail as you can about how a toilet works people couldn't do it their confidence level was then then plummeted when you ask people to describe in tremendous detail oh well let's talk about to use an example again let's talk about the healthcare policy or the wall like how much would it cost what would the wall be built out of i mean you could generate the questions but ask people to describe in as much detail as possible and this works very well with empirical phenomena facts about the world just as an aside i'm a very boring person i never do anything but work um but my um jiu jitsu teacher is a good friend of mine invited me to his house this is true story for a party and uh i never go out but i had just read the original article about toilets and i'm like oh this is awesome i'm gonna like try this and see if it works so the the first guy i walked up to i did the rapport building phrase basically did stuff in my own book and i said hey man i'm just curious how confident are you and how you know the how a toilet works you saw i'm totally confident i said oh yeah how well does the toilet work the guy was a plumber he gave this incredibly he became a really good friend of mine actually we played dungeons and dragons together every saturday he gave this incredibly detailed response about how a toilet works but the great thing about that was that i got a free lesson so it is possible that you're in a conversation you have a belief yourself and you're asking someone about these questions and then you actually happen to come across an expert in something okay so when you're stuck ask people in to explain to you in extreme detail the other thing like you can do is i ask people what experts on the other side do you disagree with but respect their opinion now most people when you ask them that question they haven't actually read anybody on the other side it's made worse in our media ecosystem today some people will give you an answer and then you can change okay well let's say you might not have to agree with them but who on the other side do you think has a solid voice on this now you can pretty much gauge at this point in the conversation you should know where you are but if they tell you someone like sean hannity or someone who's not really who's just kind of a cultural critic or ideologue that will give you that will give you an idea but most people can't name three people on the other side of the equation okay so while you're doing this while you're talking to someone while you're engaging in this process one thing that i highly recommend doing this is extraordinarily difficult to do i'm not i'm not good at all i can explain it in two minutes it's very very difficult to do but don't try it yourself see if it works um this comes from improv improvisational comedy the technique is called yes anding when you yes and somebody someone says something and you're saying yes and you're not saying no but every time you say but i think it was a tyra lannister from the game of thrones said nothing that comes after the butt matters right nothing you can if you close your eyes you can actually feel when someone says yeah i think we should have a wall but boom yes i think we should have a wall and yes i i think that your arguments about building a wall on the mexican border were good but every time you butt somebody or you you can butt yourself all you want but every time you use butt in a conversation the consequences it raises the defensive posture and the whole goal of these conversations is to lower the diff lower the heat lower the defensive posture so you can think about that as a technique but i will say it's extreme i i i can't do it i make mistakes all the time it's very very very difficult to do because we have a lifetime and we traffic in the word but in ordinary conversation constantly okay so you can use the who are the experts on the other side you can ask people um to explain in as great detail as possible what they mean and again if you don't understand whatever those details are make sure you place the burden of understanding on yourself never say to someone that's unclear say to someone i'm not sure i understand what do you mean by that okay and then you can try the butt don't butt somebody yes and them so just that template alone should give you enough meat that you can engage somebody across a divide and when in doubt just go back to listening mode always listening mode is someone's confidence and their belief justified for why they believe in and even in the listening mode here's a wonderful thing to say but you have to be a little careful with it because some people it's because it's overused but you have to gauge you have to be a little savvy in your conversations if i really want to let people know this is also from hostage negotiations hostage negotiations and ones from psychology i'll i'll use what's called a minimal encourager so a minimal encourager would be someone would say something to me and i'll take the last few words of the thing they say to me and i'll repeat it back to them and that's it no commentary nothing else so someone says oh you know my boss at work today and he was he was a real ass he didn't let me you know he he cut you he cut my break eight minutes short minimal encouragement eight minutes short eight minutes short yeah eight minute and then the person will go on sometimes people just wanna be heard that's it they don't wanna and by the way when you post on social media people usually the research shows people post on social media not because they want robust conversations it depends on the platform certainly not twitter but because they want their ideas and opinions out there and they want those ideas and opinions validated okay so you can use a minimal encourager you can use and i do this very rarely but i do this sometimes you can use i hear you it's a very powerful but i think it's a little overused that's why i use it very frequently so you have to know let people know throughout the conversation that they're being heard excuse me one other thing that you can do when you're having these conversations is you have to give people the opportunity to change their mind and make it a value make it a value for change of mind the harvard negotiation project calls this i reference it before building a golden bridge you want to build a golden bridge here's the opposite of a golden bridge you're having a conversation with somebody he says something and you say man it took you long enough to figure that out okay so you can feel everybody a few laughs a bit it means to be funny i'm meant to be like you can actually feel in somebody you can feel in yourself what that would say or god you're so stupid um so what you want to do is you want to give the opportunity to build a golden bridge for the person to walk across and change their mind here's an example of a golden bridge yeah it's super difficult i had trouble with it as well i completely did that but i didn't know x y and z do you also did you see when i said i didn't know x y and z that brings it from the moral to the epistemological you always want to bring it back to the epistemological how people know as opposed to you good people believe this i am a good person i i believe this that's very the more moral a belief is the more difficult it is to for someone to revise their beliefs okay so we're working on a template we have specific techniques we've gone over not budding someone we've gone over specific details of things you can ask somebody we've gone over building a golden bridge giving someone an opportunity to cross the golden bridge to change their mind the highest level of this if you want the boss level if you will uh craig used the expression that i loved last night leveling up if you want to level yourself up uh particularly in hard mode the ultimate thing socrates in the gorgia says it is better to be refuted than it is to refute that is the greater gain of the two so if you're having a conversation with somebody the same things that apply to them apply to you you changing your mind about something is the best possible situation the best possible outcome because you then no longer harbor a false belief about the nature of reality what could be better than that it's like an intellectual delight so one thing you'll find that people almost never do is change their mind in real time that's why for example uh mormons when they send missionaries to the door they send them in twos there's some really interesting veins of literature in mormon in mormon missionaries about how to convert people to the faith my first book by the way was about how to deconvert people from faith but to do that i had to read an incredible amount of literature about converting people okay oh and by the way just to be completely clear about something when you're doing this well you're not giving anybody your opinion you're not making any assertions this is called street epistemology people have people are far better at that i am you can watch these videos online anthony magna bosco has a wonderful thousands of videos read nice wonder curio uh cordial curiosity so people basically take boots and they use the techniques from my books and they talk to people about contentious issues difficult issues okay so let's do a little summary i want to make sure that i'm pounding home all of the points so that people walk out here and they can immediately use something that's actionable you build rapport ask people what they do for fun if something's bogging but bothering you whatever as a general rule i found um my general rule is i always just talk about what's on my mind uh although a lot of people get sick of hearing about jiu jitsu and science fiction i know my my team is back there doesn't want to hear me talk about the people walking around taekwondo black belts anymore i think they've had it with me but as a general rule i i think a kind of authenticity in your relationships is if you just talk about what's on your mind and when someone talks to you about what's on their mind you sincerely engage sincerity is the key to this whole thing so you're building rapport you're asking them to put it on a scale we know there are four things that people can say to you on the scale you're asking a feasibility or disconfirmation question during the whole time you're building bridges golden bridges you're asking for detailed explanations you're attempting to not use but you probably will but forgive yourself if you do you're engaging people okay so we're now at a crossroads in the conversation it could be that the gulf is just incommensurable in other words it could be that they believe something about an economic system that you simply don't believe and the way to adjudicate that it's not really a dispute but it's a world view world views are much more difficult to adjudicate than matters of fact because within that view there are multiple it's populated by suites of beliefs multiple propositions that underline the belief that's why the abortion issue is so difficult because it deals with so many other issues beneath it it's like a it's like an architectonic structure it's like a big house and you have big beams and if abortion is the top is the conclusion the epistemology is a bunch of different beams in the house supporting it so even if you're successful in helping somebody question one of the beams the abortion belief in particular is held up by all these other reasons moral reasons legal reasons what what people think are reasons to constitute sufficient justification for the belief okay so you're it could be that the conversation is incommensurable the i just got back from i just got back from a couple weeks in dallas with the university of austin which is a new university and uh one of the things that was remarkable to me about that experience was how and craig mentioned this yesterday at dinner how um how wonderful it was to have conversations with people who disagree with us in a civil way the panel what we did yesterday was about civility civility is underrated despite what christopher hitchens might have said about it when you're civil with somebody not only can you figure out what they mean but you have an opportunity to figure out what you mean here's the problem with this and why i think that the having an impossible conversation is so important right now it is not only is it difficult to have these conversations but they're not being modeled for us in our academic institutions in fact they're being almost exactly the opposite is being modeled the consequence of that is think about this nobody knows what anybody else actually means nobody knows what anybody else believes and if you don't know what someone else believes you could never form an authentic relationship with them because you're only going off of what you think they mean and believe and they don't know what you believe and if you do that long enough you won't even know what you believe so you have to have honest authentic relationships in conversations where there's legitimate give and take and those criticisms that you receive deflecting them or engaging them as personal attacks is always the wrong way to go so i want to leave a couple minutes for questions but i want to bring it back to the original story of my friend josh i told you i haven't seen josh or talked to josh but i'm going to text josh tonight um and i'm i'm hopeful that those years in between will have and i'm going to apologize again i've apologized as long as your apology is sincere to someone who's your friend and in a conversation even if it does and i've lost a lot of friends because of this i've been doing recently the anti-woke stuff the anti-critical justice stuff the pro building people are even upset about the building of a new university i think the vital thing in all of those relationships let's say you you you're going through the template you're forming it it's going great you feel really good about it and there's still a difference guess what like that's okay and that's a main deliverable of the talk today is that you can let friends be wrong you don't have to agree with everything everybody says for them to be in your life in fact i realize i will acknowledge for younger people in the audience this is like i mean you can literally find p anybody with gray hair and you can ask them in this audience and you can say when you grew up did your friends did your parents have different friends of different beliefs and virtually everybody if not everybody in the audience will say yes to that right i see the people with gray hair nodding right my parents had democrats they've been republicans a green what one one guy kind of this is weird socialist but we we break off cushing writes about this in the big sword we break off into increasingly um fractured ideological tribes made worse by social media so if someone doesn't believe exactly what you believe that's okay you can actually have a great friendship with with the robust um ways of engaging people and you can actually learn more so you can let your friends grow in fact i would argue if you have friends who don't believe exactly what you believe and you have those conversations that's the only way that you can have a an actual authentic relationship because nobody is pretending anything nobody is pretending to believe things they don't believe nobody is pretending to know things that they don't know you know my parents i was fortunate i got to help hold both of my parents hands at their death did it matter if one of my parents was a trump supporter no that's insane so if you want to have deep relationships start with the conversations try the techniques be willing to admit that you made a mistake if you did be willing to revise your belief if you want other people to revise their belief you have to be willing to revise yours and if all else fails let friends be wrong all right thanks we have a few questions hello hello and thank you for the talk um i want to address what i think is the elephant in the room would you please explain how a toilet works [Music] a very reasonable question um i have no idea how to i would place my confidence of that in a two i honestly do not know how a toilet works i have the most vague of ideas in your view what do you view as being more important people getting along or people finding the truth that's a great question that's much easier to answer than the last question i don't think that those are discrete categories of things i would say that the truth is always the most important the truth should be the north star of every organization of every institution the guiding principle in your life often to and there's no but or however there often to get to the truth we need to engage veins of literature people who disagree with us things that don't comport with our comfort zones in life so i think that and i'm not saying that you should use somebody who has different beliefs as an instrument for you to find the truth but i i in no but i butted myself and i have found in my life that those kinds of engagements like for example when i've engaged my christian friends it's been incredibly useful to me because i've come cl i'll give you one example of this one of the things that i've learned from engaging christians for so long is when they say when atheists and a christian says you believe in debate you don't have any evidence for what you believe they don't believe well some people do but the vast majority of christians simply don't believe that what the problem in that communication is is that they believe that the evidence they have is sufficient to warrant their conclusion but not only that it's sufficient to warrant their confidence but i would never have understood that gotten to that realization if i didn't engage a thousands tens of thousands at this point of christians who i slowly figured that out so i think they're related but truth is always more important always thank you hi hey so uh there's obvious value in talking to people we disagree with but you've mentioned for example if somebody says that the u.s is more patriarchal than saudi arabia maybe they're not worth talking to so in objectivism there are these like three axioms which are considered so basic and so self-evident that pick off says that basically it's not worth having a serious discussion with somebody who denies them where do you think is this line when is it where when is it worth or not worth to discuss deep topics yeah that's why i said it's a deeply personal thing for when you want to have a conversation i find those fascinating and one of the reasons i find it fascinating if somebody the most fascinating i'm a little sick of it now but i find fascinating the move that we see now constantly to lived experience when people resort to lived experience it's not just it's floating out there it's tethered to a bunch of other propositions about pronouns and it's about the world i find those conversations extremely interesting but just because i find them interesting doesn't mean you should find them interesting the reason that i find them interesting is it because it enables me to plumb their epistemology in the book i give an example something that happened to both myself and a former colleague excuse me somebody was asking me to explain something super basic in the philosophy department and and i explained it to them and the a person who was there who overheard the conversation say if a white man told me one plus one equals two a white heterosexual man told me one plus one two i wouldn't believe him uh i have a whole chapter in the book of how to deal with that but i find that to be the beginning and not the end of a conversation so there are things that you can say oh well if would you fly in a plane if the pilot was a white heterosexual male again it's always a question right it's never a statement that's stupid that's wrong that doesn't build a golden bridge that increases the defensive posture makes it less likely that someone revised simply so it's a personal thing i like it i'm not telling you you have to like it but i find those conversations extremely interesting thanks thank you for our amazing talk uh iran herself said that she doesn't have beliefs she only has convictions what i found lacking in your speech was the term conviction where would you draw the demarcation line between the belief and conviction so let me translate this is a i love giving i love giving heresies at places i i don't even really consider myself a heretic i mean an atheist so much as an infidel it was the title of ayan's book um whenever i hear the word conviction i translate that in my head as like if i hear uh i am a man of conviction to me that translates as i am a man who sufficiently wedded to my belief unshakably wedded to my belief and i am not willing to change on the base of evidence to me the word conviction is a moral term and not an epistemological term i do not have any convictions if i guess if you had to have you know i guess if i had to have one conviction it would be what i said to the last questioners that truth should be the north star i think convictions are a weakness thank you very much your talk was very helpful in in conversations with people who are receptive um to having a conversation but there is an increasing number of people in today's culture who think violence is an acceptable response correct to being offended such as correct the will smith incident or punching a nazi the concept of punching another 100 percent correct do you approach that attitude yeah thank you so much for asking that okay so that i didn't mention this talk but i absolutely should have uh if you ever feel that you're in a conversation with someone that has the possibility to escalate to violence leave and no i mean for real like leave and leave toward a group of people which is just by the way i'll put a plug for it which is why everybody should be doing jiu jitsu uh but that's really important so if you're in a conversation with someone and you ever ever feel that there's a possibility that could escalate but i will tell you a very simple this is in the book so this is a little morally murky so we almost didn't put it in the book so i'm gonna limit what i'll tell you but there's a little kind of there are things that are very close to jedi mind tricks that you can do to someone one of those is called alter casting so i have alter cast i don't know thousands of people at this point but alter casting is like a mind control trick that you can do to someone it's so so simple it's so simple that you just people say oh it doesn't work it works i'm telling you i've done it a thousand times so if you alter cast somebody it must be like a weird quirk of evolution or some kind of a hiccup or something but you're casting them in a role unbewidding to themselves unknowing to themselves that they then live up to i'll give you two quick examples of altercasting um like let's say someone's texting on their phone you say to them oh wow well you're really fast texter they want to live to the role of being a really fast texter it's with my uh daughter i was myself my son now and her teacher was was talking about how the evils of gentrification i personally don't believe that but if i said well what's wrong with gentrification how confident are you in that i don't have the time i'm in a line it's the pta so i just altercasted her oh you seem like a person who's really interested in critical thinking what are you doing to show people the other side of the issue oh well i'm she wasn't doing anything but she just made it up so you can alter cast people so here's how i altercast people in conversations if i ever think that the conversation's going to escalate or i can see them i immediately altercast them i say wow you know like you seem like a kind of person who's really good at conversations and keeping you cool is that also how you change their minds about something no you don't so alter casting doesn't instill doubt in people ultra casting is an instrumental technique that you can use hi and how where's my time woman too you you were on the ball you didn't even have to flip that hi hi uh thank you for the lecture i'd like to ask with no mind you're asking two questions the first one is there is a group in brazil of influences and politicians that they actually they have been for very long show that they do not believe what they what they say in public but they have uh very important influences and there has been an approach of exposing those those people however in brazil what has uh have happened is uh there's a politician influencing you you expose them in the internet and television they don't know what uh they don't they know what they what they say but they not do not believe what they're saying and uh so what's your question my my question is uh decorative followers do not leave them how how can i make an approach or change my strategy to to to to show after expose someone is wrong and they actually believe the wrong how can i change to to to get this kind of followers to to to follow something else and if it might make me a second uh so uh uh i'm gonna do it i'm now i'm just i'm about to do what i actually said that you should do so let me on the burden of clarity let me understand i want to make sure i understand the point one minute you're very good um you mean what do you do when having a conversation with somebody and you know that they're disingenuous yes so he gave yes i was looking for yeah that's right okay i'll take it um well it depends what your goal is so in chapter two of the book we talk about the one of the most important things in a conversation is to figure out what your goal is and you'll find you know when you teach for many years you'll find that people will say something to you they'll ask a question not because they want to know the answer but for some other reason they want you to know that they know there's a hot girl or boy or whatever next to them and they want to date who knows why people could be asking any question right so you'll find if you get people one-on-one it might be very different but if there's an audience it's very difficult that reflection is very difficult do i have time for one more or no no okay thank you everyone i appreciate it thank you

Channel: Objective Standard Institute

Views: 4,746

Keywords: Peter Boghossian, life development, tedxtalks, difficult conversations, difficult conversation, having difficult conversations, how to have difficult conversations, how to have difficult conversations with confidence, avoiding difficult conversations, difficult conversations made easy, tough conversations, difficult conversations at work, how to have a difficult conversation, difficult conversations process, difficult conversations examples, handling difficult conversations

Id: RknbBopfIb8

Length: 61min 22sec (3682 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2022