It’s orthogonal to most of the Sequences, but I have found good results from “meta-teaming up” with my debate partner. That is, after a short debate long enough to expose both our views, I stop the other person and ask them to go meta and help me pick apart my argument. This usually earns enough goodwill to overcome “this guy’s my opponent” long enough for us to then team up and pick apart their argument. Where you focus this picking-apart is how the debate will succeed: if you focus on your areas of disagreements, you get mind-changing—if you focus on prior assumptions, you get a better picture of the person’s mental model—and so on.
I learned this from code duels: when two people disagree over the best way to write some function or program, they go off and both do it, then come back and compare notes. I was impressed by how they don’t simply run their code and point at faster response times, but actually work through the logic and see where their two solutions differ. This seemed obviously applicable to arguments, and it’s worked for me so far.
Caveat: I’ve only tried it a few times, there may be some “fails badly” moment I’m not aware of yet.
It’s orthogonal to most of the Sequences, but I have found good results from “meta-teaming up” with my debate partner. That is, after a short debate long enough to expose both our views, I stop the other person and ask them to go meta and help me pick apart my argument. This usually earns enough goodwill to overcome “this guy’s my opponent” long enough for us to then team up and pick apart their argument. Where you focus this picking-apart is how the debate will succeed: if you focus on your areas of disagreements, you get mind-changing—if you focus on prior assumptions, you get a better picture of the person’s mental model—and so on.
I learned this from code duels: when two people disagree over the best way to write some function or program, they go off and both do it, then come back and compare notes. I was impressed by how they don’t simply run their code and point at faster response times, but actually work through the logic and see where their two solutions differ. This seemed obviously applicable to arguments, and it’s worked for me so far.
Caveat: I’ve only tried it a few times, there may be some “fails badly” moment I’m not aware of yet.