A culture of persuasion is a big idea, and rhetoric is part of it!
Right now, we’re seriously contemplating a mission to Mars, yet lamenting our political gridlock and the seeming impossibility of changing the average person’s mind on almost anything. We have high technological capacity, but low persuasive capacity.
I wanted a concept handle to describe a better world: a place where people are rhetorically skilled, as you suggest, and also skilled at feeling out the right context for their persuasive conversations.
We already have guidance for how to grow support for an idea on the level of big, serious ideas: policies, business proposals, grant applications, editorials, and so on. And that’s definitely part of a culture of persuasion. I’d like to think that the world I imagine already exists, to some extent.
But from another point of view, I think there’s a sense that, even for the most serious-minded and capable segment of our society, persuasive capacity is pretty limited. Just as one example, the medical establishment doesn’t know how to overcome vaccine hesitancy—though they’re trying, an effort which I applaud and which is right in line with a culture of persuasion.
On a personal level, I am brim-full of ideas for policy changes I’d like to see in the world. But outside of posting about them on the internet, I find it very hard to talk about them. I feel like it’s an imposition on others to ask for their attention. I know that for a lot of these ideas, I need to gather other people’s perspectives, not just my own and those of my faction. And I also notice that I choose, over and over again, to talk with the people who are most convenient, rather than the communities where a conversation might make a real difference.
I also think what’s critical isn’t just the failure to change minds. It’s that the way people try to spread ideas often seems just deeply unpleasant and disrespectful. Why should it be that engaging in debate over the key issues of our day is pretty reliably a bad time?
Right now, we have a lot of discussion about these negative issues. With the phrase “culture of persuasion,” I wanted a way to describe the positive ideal that we’re going for, without trying to describe exactly what this would look like.
Why do you think that persuasive capacity is pretty limited these days?
In your example of overcoming vaccine hesitancy, it seems to me that the problem is actually that the anti-vaxxers are remarkably persuasive, considering the lack of evidence available. Likewise, most people I know tend to become quickly persuaded of the efficacy of new policy ideas introduced by politicians of their preferred political orientation, regardless of how feasible or effective these ideas may be.
I’m assuming that it is easier to be persuaded by people with whom one already agrees with than by people with whom one does not, meaning that people rarely switch between polar opposite opinions, but do still have their minds changed frequently. Do you see things differently, though?
John: “Did you read about Google solving the protein folding problem?”
Bill: “So cool!”
They’ll also share information they think others will find helpful.
Cindy: “Did you know that vaccines will turn your toddler into a mutant?”
Sheila: “Awesome, I’ll get him vaccinated right away!”
And of course, people will argue with those who disagree with them.
What I think is rare, and consider to be persuasion, involves:
Mutual enthusiasm and pleasure in the process of identifying disagreements, exploring them, and trying to come to a consensus.
Taking active steps to keep an open and reasonable mind, while asking for and appreciating the same from one’s conversational partner, and being kind when that is not possible.
A meta-conversation within relationships about how to maintain an ongoing state of open-minded, pleasurable dialog about disagreements, in a way that routinely results in small adjustments of behavior.
I realize this is a much more specific sense of the world persuasion than most people use. If we lived in a culture of persuasion, maybe we’d have 200 words for persuasion and I could choose one that is more apt and be understood!
What we’re doing here, both in this thread and on LW more generally, emphasizes the second part. I wish that we had more conversation about how to make our interactions more pleasurable. Some people may feel that way, but I often don’t, even though I do find value in participating here. I also often forget the importance of these aspects, and come across as chilly and critical when I don’t mean to be. Often, I fear that the work I put in to writing here and holding conversations isn’t actually making a difference to anyone, or building meaningful relationships.
Part of that is me, and part is the culture of the site, and part of it is just the nature of the internet. But I’d like to find ways to improve.
I’ve thought about those options. I mean, the real difficulty here is that a word with the precise connotations doesn’t exist!
For me personally, “discussion” doesn’t really capture the “productively coming to a consensus on a disagreement” aspect that I’m going for. It invokes an image of people gathering to talk, without necessarily having a disagreement to explore, or any goal of persuading each other of anything. I discuss things all the time with family and friends, but most of the time, the way this shakes out doesn’t have much in common with what I long for in a culture of persuasion.
“Changing your mind,” or “open-mindedness,” seems to puts the burden on the person listening to the argument to be open. Although in theory, perhaps “open-mindedness” could mean equally that progressives should be open-minded to conservatism, as well as the other way around, I think that the connotation is kind of one-sided. It’s a phrase that, for better or worse, seems already to have a fairly specific connotation in our culture.
The reason I like “persuasion” is that, like “argument,” it gets at the idea that we are trying to come to a consensus. But it implies that we are gaining adherents to an idea because they find an idea compelling. It also doesn’t have a connotation of belonging to any particular faction or perspective.
However, if you really think that one of these other terms is better, or have another idea, I would love to hear about it!
That’s also a good word! I think that we do need a variety of words. For me, truthseeking has a connotation that is mainly about an individual search for truth, especially an objective truth. It makes me think about solitary reading and research.
What I wanted to highlight was a social and activist aspect, one that’s about acknowledging subjective values differences, and the inseparability of what can and should be done from the social support that an idea has.
Here, we write a fair bit about why it’s so hard to change institutions and get out of bad equilibria. That’s a culture of truthseeking, and its a good thing.
A culture of persuasion is about spending our energy thinking about how to set an agenda and steer a conversation to escape those equilibria. It’s applied, it’s social, and it’s open-ended. It’s about not trying to pin things down too much, and instead about trying to provoke a rich conversation that is fact based and reasonable, but also is human and makes room for an organic working out process.
“Culture of persuasion” is meant as a complement to what I see as the culture of truthseeking we have here.
Personally, the reason I find “persuasion” somewhat off-putting is that I don’t want to be persuaded unless I end up with a more accurate or beneficial perspective than before. That said, if two open-minded people are not sure whose perspective is better, I think that there is a place for a non-combative discussion in which arguments are weighed against each other. I’m not sure what word describes that situation better than “discussion,” though.
I agree. There really isn’t a perfect term, unfortunately. It seems to pack together these ideas:
Rightness: “having a good idea worth spreading”
Activism: “trying to persuade”
Compellingness: “trying to be effective in persuasion”
Open-mindedness: “being receptive to persuasion”
Susceptibility: “being easier to persuade”
I think there are two contradictory models of what needs to be done in our society.
One model has it that we have too much persuasion and too much social learning. Most people need to learn how to think for themselves, as individuals, from the ground up. A “culture of persuasion” would be actively destructive. Too few people know how to reason at all. If they got better at persuading others, the effect on net would be to collectively worsen our capacity for reason.
My model has it that we have too little persuasion and social learning. Instead, what we have is a lot of mutually-imposed isolation, which chills individual thought, breeding a sense of futility and close-minded resentment. A “culture of persuasion” would be positive, because it would imply that people are earnestly trying to figure out what would be mutually convincing, rather than what would get other people to give in or shut up. Indeed, too few people know how to reason at all. But if they got better at persuading others, the net effect would be to collectively improve our capacity to reason because they’d have to be making efforts to understand other people, and to make themselves understood.
My guess is that differences of opinion about word choice are just a symptom of this more important difference in how people model the state of our social world and what would be good for it.
I agree, it does have that connotation, and it also has the implication of a peaceful conversation. A “culture of dialog” doesn’t sound bad. I guess that for me, “dialog” just doesn’t get my attention. I think that for an open-ended, evocative phrase to work, it has to be sort of vivid. Maybe that’s why I like “persuasion.”
Is “rhetoric” the discipline you’re looking for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
It used to be a standard part of a good liberal education, and I’d be happy to see it return, retooled for the media of the modern day.
A culture of persuasion is a big idea, and rhetoric is part of it!
Right now, we’re seriously contemplating a mission to Mars, yet lamenting our political gridlock and the seeming impossibility of changing the average person’s mind on almost anything. We have high technological capacity, but low persuasive capacity.
I wanted a concept handle to describe a better world: a place where people are rhetorically skilled, as you suggest, and also skilled at feeling out the right context for their persuasive conversations.
We already have guidance for how to grow support for an idea on the level of big, serious ideas: policies, business proposals, grant applications, editorials, and so on. And that’s definitely part of a culture of persuasion. I’d like to think that the world I imagine already exists, to some extent.
But from another point of view, I think there’s a sense that, even for the most serious-minded and capable segment of our society, persuasive capacity is pretty limited. Just as one example, the medical establishment doesn’t know how to overcome vaccine hesitancy—though they’re trying, an effort which I applaud and which is right in line with a culture of persuasion.
On a personal level, I am brim-full of ideas for policy changes I’d like to see in the world. But outside of posting about them on the internet, I find it very hard to talk about them. I feel like it’s an imposition on others to ask for their attention. I know that for a lot of these ideas, I need to gather other people’s perspectives, not just my own and those of my faction. And I also notice that I choose, over and over again, to talk with the people who are most convenient, rather than the communities where a conversation might make a real difference.
I also think what’s critical isn’t just the failure to change minds. It’s that the way people try to spread ideas often seems just deeply unpleasant and disrespectful. Why should it be that engaging in debate over the key issues of our day is pretty reliably a bad time?
Right now, we have a lot of discussion about these negative issues. With the phrase “culture of persuasion,” I wanted a way to describe the positive ideal that we’re going for, without trying to describe exactly what this would look like.
Why do you think that persuasive capacity is pretty limited these days?
In your example of overcoming vaccine hesitancy, it seems to me that the problem is actually that the anti-vaxxers are remarkably persuasive, considering the lack of evidence available. Likewise, most people I know tend to become quickly persuaded of the efficacy of new policy ideas introduced by politicians of their preferred political orientation, regardless of how feasible or effective these ideas may be.
I’m assuming that it is easier to be persuaded by people with whom one already agrees with than by people with whom one does not, meaning that people rarely switch between polar opposite opinions, but do still have their minds changed frequently. Do you see things differently, though?
People often air opinions with their friends.
They’ll also share information they think others will find helpful.
And of course, people will argue with those who disagree with them.
What I think is rare, and consider to be persuasion, involves:
Mutual enthusiasm and pleasure in the process of identifying disagreements, exploring them, and trying to come to a consensus.
Taking active steps to keep an open and reasonable mind, while asking for and appreciating the same from one’s conversational partner, and being kind when that is not possible.
A meta-conversation within relationships about how to maintain an ongoing state of open-minded, pleasurable dialog about disagreements, in a way that routinely results in small adjustments of behavior.
I realize this is a much more specific sense of the world persuasion than most people use. If we lived in a culture of persuasion, maybe we’d have 200 words for persuasion and I could choose one that is more apt and be understood!
What we’re doing here, both in this thread and on LW more generally, emphasizes the second part. I wish that we had more conversation about how to make our interactions more pleasurable. Some people may feel that way, but I often don’t, even though I do find value in participating here. I also often forget the importance of these aspects, and come across as chilly and critical when I don’t mean to be. Often, I fear that the work I put in to writing here and holding conversations isn’t actually making a difference to anyone, or building meaningful relationships.
Part of that is me, and part is the culture of the site, and part of it is just the nature of the internet. But I’d like to find ways to improve.
I think the thing you are pointing at feels pretty unrelated to the usual connotations I have with ‘persuasion’.
Yeah, I agree, I just needed a word to call it. Can you think of a better one? :)
Discussion? Changing your mind?
I’ve thought about those options. I mean, the real difficulty here is that a word with the precise connotations doesn’t exist!
For me personally, “discussion” doesn’t really capture the “productively coming to a consensus on a disagreement” aspect that I’m going for. It invokes an image of people gathering to talk, without necessarily having a disagreement to explore, or any goal of persuading each other of anything. I discuss things all the time with family and friends, but most of the time, the way this shakes out doesn’t have much in common with what I long for in a culture of persuasion.
“Changing your mind,” or “open-mindedness,” seems to puts the burden on the person listening to the argument to be open. Although in theory, perhaps “open-mindedness” could mean equally that progressives should be open-minded to conservatism, as well as the other way around, I think that the connotation is kind of one-sided. It’s a phrase that, for better or worse, seems already to have a fairly specific connotation in our culture.
The reason I like “persuasion” is that, like “argument,” it gets at the idea that we are trying to come to a consensus. But it implies that we are gaining adherents to an idea because they find an idea compelling. It also doesn’t have a connotation of belonging to any particular faction or perspective.
However, if you really think that one of these other terms is better, or have another idea, I would love to hear about it!
I mean, I think I just use the word ‘truthseeking’ to mean the thing you seem to mean
That’s also a good word! I think that we do need a variety of words. For me, truthseeking has a connotation that is mainly about an individual search for truth, especially an objective truth. It makes me think about solitary reading and research.
What I wanted to highlight was a social and activist aspect, one that’s about acknowledging subjective values differences, and the inseparability of what can and should be done from the social support that an idea has.
Here, we write a fair bit about why it’s so hard to change institutions and get out of bad equilibria. That’s a culture of truthseeking, and its a good thing.
A culture of persuasion is about spending our energy thinking about how to set an agenda and steer a conversation to escape those equilibria. It’s applied, it’s social, and it’s open-ended. It’s about not trying to pin things down too much, and instead about trying to provoke a rich conversation that is fact based and reasonable, but also is human and makes room for an organic working out process.
“Culture of persuasion” is meant as a complement to what I see as the culture of truthseeking we have here.
Personally, the reason I find “persuasion” somewhat off-putting is that I don’t want to be persuaded unless I end up with a more accurate or beneficial perspective than before. That said, if two open-minded people are not sure whose perspective is better, I think that there is a place for a non-combative discussion in which arguments are weighed against each other. I’m not sure what word describes that situation better than “discussion,” though.
I agree. There really isn’t a perfect term, unfortunately. It seems to pack together these ideas:
Rightness: “having a good idea worth spreading”
Activism: “trying to persuade”
Compellingness: “trying to be effective in persuasion”
Open-mindedness: “being receptive to persuasion”
Susceptibility: “being easier to persuade”
I think there are two contradictory models of what needs to be done in our society.
One model has it that we have too much persuasion and too much social learning. Most people need to learn how to think for themselves, as individuals, from the ground up. A “culture of persuasion” would be actively destructive. Too few people know how to reason at all. If they got better at persuading others, the effect on net would be to collectively worsen our capacity for reason.
My model has it that we have too little persuasion and social learning. Instead, what we have is a lot of mutually-imposed isolation, which chills individual thought, breeding a sense of futility and close-minded resentment. A “culture of persuasion” would be positive, because it would imply that people are earnestly trying to figure out what would be mutually convincing, rather than what would get other people to give in or shut up. Indeed, too few people know how to reason at all. But if they got better at persuading others, the net effect would be to collectively improve our capacity to reason because they’d have to be making efforts to understand other people, and to make themselves understood.
My guess is that differences of opinion about word choice are just a symptom of this more important difference in how people model the state of our social world and what would be good for it.
It seems to me the word “dialog” may be appropriate: to me it has the connotation of reaching out to people you may not normally interact with.
I agree, it does have that connotation, and it also has the implication of a peaceful conversation. A “culture of dialog” doesn’t sound bad. I guess that for me, “dialog” just doesn’t get my attention. I think that for an open-ended, evocative phrase to work, it has to be sort of vivid. Maybe that’s why I like “persuasion.”