How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently [0]
1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
If you think about your role in an argument as attempting to revise your counterparty's beliefs, steps 1-3 represent an agreed on prior, and step 4 represents introduction of new evidence which you hope to be persuasive. As well, a key piece of this Dennett process is demonstrating to your counterparty that you are listening and that you have heard them - so that there is a better chance that they will listen to you. The scientfic process creates a frame for this kind of dialog. A polarized political process annihilates the frame, so that whatever you say does not matter relative to what I think. Kindness begins and ends with the act of listening.
Throw in Bertrand Russell's Liberal Decalogue and we have a great foundation:
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Those rules seem oddly out of touch, written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, where the best answer to fanaticism seemed to be the atomic bomb. They look better suited to the faculty club of a university than to a world faced with violence, much less to a hostile Internet.
The subtitle of the piece you link to is "The essence of the liberal outlook is the belief that men should be free to question anything... if they can support their questioning by solid arguments". The ellipses are mine, because that "if" is such a big if. Much of the failure of discourse today is not just failure to craft solid arguments, but to question even what it means for an argument to be solid.
This thread is in the context of science and constructive criticism, and that should look more like the faculty club than the Internet. But very little of HN constitutes "constructive criticism of science": we're not in that faculty club room, and we're not experts in the domain intimately familiar with the state of the art as well as how we got there.
These are good maxims to hold when seeking the truth for ourselves. But I'm not so sure they'll apply to persuasion of others, especially in a hostile environment.
I'm not sure that you can persuade anybody in a hostile environment. They're going to perceive you as hostile, and therefore likely to be arguing in bad faith, and therefore someone to only be yelled at, not listened to. The only thing you can do in that environment is persuade a bystander that you can yell louder. And even then, most bystanders don't care, they just want both sides to stop yelling.
If possible, then, the best thing to do is to make the environment less hostile, so that an actual conversation can happen. Maybe ask an individual on the other side, one-on-one, to give you the five-minute version of what they think and why they think that, and then really listen. See if a dialog can happen. It may be that, if you engage in good faith, the other person also will.
I wonder how useful to society it would be if there was a website that had an implementation of this, so internet arguments could be moderated with some structure.
1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
[0] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...