House of Eratosthenes

In my third-of-a-century arguing with liberals on the Internet, I have occasionally used the phrase “think(ing) like a grown-up” and I’m sure it comes off looking like I’m hurling an insult. Some of those on the receiving end have come back and shown their understanding of logical fallacies, by accusing me of an “ad hom(inem) attack,” which is an elaborate way of demonstrating they’ve missed the point on multiple levels. Since I’m not completely socially inept and stupid, I do reserve use of this phrase for situations where I don’t care about the ensuing person-to-person relationship too much, but that’s different from an actual insult. As an insult, it wouldn’t work very well. We all start out life forming opinions like children, because we start forming them as children. But that doesn’t mean, in adulthood, we should still be doing it the same way.

Persons who think it is uncalled-for need to reconsider their view. We do live in an age in which people tend to be very proud of the conclusions they reach, but not proud at all of the way they got to them. And so they want to talk to excess of the former but not inspect the latter. They cause strife and contention, and then they blame others. But it is true that, in order for this to be a useful observation, I should take more & better responsibility for my definitions. What do I mean by this?

1. First and foremost, you have to release “it makes me feel bad” from its anchoring at center-stage. There are other things to consider. Respect reality. It doesn’t care about your feelings.

2. When you argue with people, do your arguing to discover & disseminate truth. Recognize you can “win” an argument, and be wrong. It logically follows that you can lose, and be right.

3. Use active voice. Word selection and sentence composition influence thinking. “Don’t leave your car unlocked, it will get broken into” encourages desultory thinking, obliterating the subject of the sentence, the vagrant who would be breaking into the car. If something is to be done, someone is doing it, and the root of the problem being discussed is there.

Your Opinion 4. Deal with specifics in your critiques. “Your response is full of logical fallacies” is not specific. It conveys your own disapproval, but nothing else, no justification for dismissal. You may discover, if you go looking for a specific objection, that when all’s said & done you don’t really have one.

5. Recognize cause and effect. This must necessarily mean distinguishing intent from ultimate outcome. “Straw man! I never said to throw the baby over the cliff, I just said to wheel the carriage up to the brink, and then give it a mighty shove.” There are other metaphors we could use. “I never said to blow up the truck, I just said to check the gas level with this cigarette lighter.” “I never said to eliminate jobs by making it hard to hire people, I just said to put the employer on the hook for all sorts of unfunded new expenses.” Your own ignorance of what-causes-what shouldn’t excuse you from the deleterious effects of the bad policies you support. Not unless hurting people is what we’re trying to do.

6. Think about the “lurker variable” when noticing correlations. If two changes seem to be connected with each other, there are four possibilities: A causes B; B causes A; there is an unseen C causing both B and A; or, it could be a coincidence. Four is a lot, so picking out just one of the four as “proof” of your thesis, without something to eliminate one or all of the other three logically, is child-like thinking.

7. Respect your enemies’ successes, talents and skills, and be careful about condemning others who do this. It is one of the thresholds of adult thinking. I don’t agree with Barack Obama on very much of anything, but I can respect His many talents. A general leading a charge against a resourceful and determined adversary, is more likely to prevail if he can appreciate the strengths of the other side even as he tries to make the most of their weaknesses.

8. You don’t get to play the “If this doesn’t convince you nothing ever will” card, if you haven’t yet brought a compelling “this.” People who apply this note of resignation, to terminate the discussion when they haven’t yet made their case, are arguing like children and almost certainly doing their thinking like children.

9. Since the argument is supposed to be about the true nature of things & what to do about it, not a duel to show who’s wonderful & who sucks — it doesn’t do achieve anything constructive to get lost in “Trivial Pursuit” games and show your opponent doesn’t know something. Even if the nugget of trivia he doesn’t know is strongly related to the topic, there’s a good chance he could still be supporting the right answer and you could be supporting the wrong one. So when the nugget is only weakly related this becomes even more of a likelihood. There’s nothing disgraceful about ignorance in & of itself. We’re all born ignorant.

10. In the same way it doesn’t ensure victory showing your opponent doesn’t know how many angels fit on the head of a pin, it also doesn’t ensure victory to highlight your own intransigence. It’s a common game on the Internet: “Nothing you can say will ever change my mind!” This actually works backwards. It shows your position is embraced by at least one person, and likely others, who can’t be told anything and thus are likely uninformed.

11. Recognize when & where your current problems developed from your past errors. If you want to go through life as a smug egotist, that’s okay, you don’t have to admit this to anyone. But it is necessary to at least acknowledge it for yourself, if you want to be credited with greater wisdom at, say, age 35 compared to what you had at age 25, because that’s what it takes to get it done. Without the ability to try things, fail at them, and recognize where you went wrong so you can improve, you don’t learn things from one year to the next. Part of thinking like an adult is anticipating how well your thinking is going to function for you, when you’re an older adult, and nobody wants to be an old fool.

12. Self-restrain. A lot of people rankle at the slippery-slope rebuttal, protesting “I don’t want to do this, I just want to do that.” They want to be given credit for stopping at some point. So, self-stop. If your argument is that a speed limit should be raised from 25 to 35, you should be the first to reckon with the consequences of raising it to 45 or 55. If you want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, you should be able to say why we’re not raising it to $30 — and why we won’t. Why should the line be drawn there? What’s to stop it from being moved?

It could be truthfully said that many, and perhaps all, of the above twelve have to do with preferring light over darkness; could be distilled into a simple “don’t conceal/obfuscate.” It really comes down to that. “I’ve decided this and that’s final” has become a popular structuring of the most passionate (Internet) arguments, in no small part because, as I said above, people are proud of the conclusions they reached but not proud of how they came to them. If that’s a problem, we would all do well to attack it directly, because as a problem it’s been getting bigger and bigger, for quite awhile now.

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Thinking Like a Grown-UpSunday, October 27th, 2019

Thinking Like a Grown-Up
Sunday, October 27th, 2019