Even now and then I meet someone who tries to argue that if I don’t agree with them this is because I’m not open mided enough. Is there a term for this?
Epistemically I’m not convinced buy this type of arugment, but socialy it feels like I’m beeing shamed, and I hate it.
I also find it hard to call out this type of behaviur when it happens, even when I can tell exactly what is going on. I think it I had a name for this behaviour it would be easier? Not sure though?
Edit to add:
I’ve now got some more time to figure out what I want and don’t want out of this thread. The early responses helped with this, so thanks!
What I’m most interested in is a name for this behaviour. Naming it helps in at least two ways. It makes it easier to call out in the moment (as mentioned above), but it also makes it easer for me to handle internaly. I can be like “ah, it’s this thing again” in my head, rather than being overwelmed.
What I’m not interested is in, is any advice/suggestions that continues the conversation. After a person have pulled one of these moves on me, I am both angry at them, and do not trust them to cooporate in a any form of good faith conversation.
If you have some ideas for how I can end the conversation that does not feel uterly humiliating to me, please tell me. Anything that is phrased like a question is out. I do not want to heare what they have to say, and asking quiestions that you don’t want answers to, is wrong and bad.
Seems like a subtype of Bulverism; not aware of a more specific term.
I also find it hard to call out this type of behaviur when it happens, even when I can tell exactly what is going on.
Assuming you have a LWer-typical level of atypicality, you could say “I literally do/believe [outlandish but politically-neutral activity/opinion], there’s no way closed-mindedness is my problem.” (If it were me, I’d use donating to Shrimp Welfare; apparently most people think that’s strange, for some reason.)
I feel like if I try to defend my openmindedness I loose. It just opens up more attac surfaces to someone who is hostile and doesn’t argues in good faith.
I think it’s much better to call out why calling someone close minded for not listening is just invalid in general, not just this time in particular. And I do believe it is.
If someone isn’t listening to you. Them being to close minded is so faaaaaar the list of most likely explanation that. Much less likely than:
I feel like if I try to defend my openmindedness I loose. It just opens up more attac surfaces to someone who is hostile and doesn’t argues in good faith.
Yeah. The opponent’s move is establishing “you can change your mind and adopt my opinion” as the criterion to measure your open-mindedness. If you can switch to their position, you are allowed to keep calling yourself open-minded; if you don’t, you lose that right.
(The rational answer would be: yes, you are capable of adopting any position, including theirs, when there is a good reason to do so. Open-mindedness does not mean adopting random positions for no good reason, or simply because someone calls you a chicken if you don’t.)
So the essence of the move is “I decide what is the true (costly) signal of the trait you claim to have”. And the choice of the signal is obviously self-serving. I mean, in theory, they could have asked you to demonstrate your open-mindedness by adoption a position they don’t agree with; that would be an equally valid proof of your ability to change your mind. But of course there is no incentive for them to do so. Which shows that evaluating your open-mindedness impartially was never the true goal here.
Another thing is that there is a difference between “being open-minded” and “signaling open-mindedness”. Just because you are capable of adopting various kinds of positions, doesn’t mean that you should. To consider options X, Y, Z, and afterwards decide to stay with the original X, can be perfectly open-minded, even if from outside it may be difficult to distinguish from “the person did not consider Y and Z at all”. (It’s like when a gifted child solves a mathematical problem too fast, and the teacher accuses them of merely guessing the answer. There is a difference between doing the work, and demonstrating to other people that you did the work.)
Shortly:
open-mindedness does not mean “doing what you want me to do”; that’s called social pressure
it is perfectly open-minded to consider a hypothesis… and then reject it
(...) Just as reasoning, to an irrational person, becomes rationalizing, and moral judgment becomes moralizing, so psychological theories become psychologizing. The common denominator is the corruption of a cognitive process to serve an ulterior motive.
Psychologizing consists in condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual evidence. (...)
(Lots more ranting about psychologizers. Schopenhauer energy.)
Under the belief vs. understanding distinction, open-mindedness is a virtue of understanding ideas you disbelieve (or purposes you don’t endorse). It’s not directly relevant to belief, but sometimes understanding is the bottleneck to belief, in which case more open-mindedness would help. When you already understand the idea, open-mindedness is no longer relevant.
More to the point, understanding an idea shouldn’t necessarily result in believing it, and high open-mindedness doesn’t increase the number of hours in a day. Learning any given piece of nonsense would still not be the best thing to focus on, but high open-mindedness should prevent you from actively avoiding low-hanging fruit of understanding when it’s ripe for the taking, just because it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing you are likely to believe or endorse.
Them: “I think you’re just disagreeing because you’d not open-minded enough”
You: “What makes you think that?”
Them: “I think it because Y”
What do they say for ‘Y’? That seems the part that actually constitutes their argument and which you will be able to call out if they’re making a mistake.
when I put myself in the shoes of one who would say that someone is not open-minded enough and fill in the Y I get “you responded so quickly that you must have been speaking from cache instead of computing an answer”
One thing you can maybe do is throw such accusations right back: “You say I’m being closed-minded to you, but aren’t you equally being closed-minded to me?”
It comes across as escalatory, and might be counterproductive, but I’ve also sometimes found it helpful. Depends a lot on the person and situation.
I don’t want to use this sugestion, not because it is escalatory, but because it’s a question, which invites them to have more opinions.
What I want is a way out, but that has the feeling of standing up for myself, rather then the feeling of humiliation and defeet.
If someone starts to accuse me of not beeing openminded to their opinion, it’s usually because I think their opinion is dumb. I rather not hurt their feelings if I can avoid it, but I’m also not going to worry too much about being polite to someone after they done this particular retorical move.
Usually the way out is to just leave. But last time this happened was at a small metup, and the only way out was to leave the event, which I did. I’m not happy about this and would like better options.
A lot depends on why you want to stay, and whether you are likely to have interesting/productive further discussions. I often just let them off the hook with a “I guess I am a bit closed on this particular topic—let’s discuss something else”.
In theory “agree to disagree” should be impossible among rational entities with compatible priors, but in practice humans often meet neither of those criteria. That’s OK, when you reach the point of no further updates in either direction, you move on.
“I guess I am a bit closed on this particular topic—let’s discuss something else”.
I wish I could say something like that and be ok. But to me it feels too humiliating. And also often factually wrong, I.e. I’d be open to good argument.
A reply I got in a similar situation, paraphrased: “well, it’s you who identifies as a rationalist, you hypocrite.”
In other words, as if by calling myself a rationalist (not in that specific debate, just generally something I said in a different context that my opponent knows about) means that I accept an asymmetrical burden.
Even now and then I meet someone who tries to argue that if I don’t agree with them this is because I’m not open mided enough. Is there a term for this?
Epistemically I’m not convinced buy this type of arugment, but socialy it feels like I’m beeing shamed, and I hate it.
I also find it hard to call out this type of behaviur when it happens, even when I can tell exactly what is going on. I think it I had a name for this behaviour it would be easier? Not sure though?
Edit to add:
I’ve now got some more time to figure out what I want and don’t want out of this thread. The early responses helped with this, so thanks!
What I’m most interested in is a name for this behaviour. Naming it helps in at least two ways. It makes it easier to call out in the moment (as mentioned above), but it also makes it easer for me to handle internaly. I can be like “ah, it’s this thing again” in my head, rather than being overwelmed.
What I’m not interested is in, is any advice/suggestions that continues the conversation. After a person have pulled one of these moves on me, I am both angry at them, and do not trust them to cooporate in a any form of good faith conversation.
If you have some ideas for how I can end the conversation that does not feel uterly humiliating to me, please tell me. Anything that is phrased like a question is out. I do not want to heare what they have to say, and asking quiestions that you don’t want answers to, is wrong and bad.
Seems like a subtype of Bulverism; not aware of a more specific term.
Assuming you have a LWer-typical level of atypicality, you could say “I literally do/believe [outlandish but politically-neutral activity/opinion], there’s no way closed-mindedness is my problem.” (If it were me, I’d use donating to Shrimp Welfare; apparently most people think that’s strange, for some reason.)
I feel like if I try to defend my openmindedness I loose. It just opens up more attac surfaces to someone who is hostile and doesn’t argues in good faith.
I think it’s much better to call out why calling someone close minded for not listening is just invalid in general, not just this time in particular. And I do believe it is.
If someone isn’t listening to you. Them being to close minded is so faaaaaar the list of most likely explanation that. Much less likely than:
Your argument are bad
Dissintrest in the topic
Other things they rather do right now
Yeah. The opponent’s move is establishing “you can change your mind and adopt my opinion” as the criterion to measure your open-mindedness. If you can switch to their position, you are allowed to keep calling yourself open-minded; if you don’t, you lose that right.
(The rational answer would be: yes, you are capable of adopting any position, including theirs, when there is a good reason to do so. Open-mindedness does not mean adopting random positions for no good reason, or simply because someone calls you a chicken if you don’t.)
So the essence of the move is “I decide what is the true (costly) signal of the trait you claim to have”. And the choice of the signal is obviously self-serving. I mean, in theory, they could have asked you to demonstrate your open-mindedness by adoption a position they don’t agree with; that would be an equally valid proof of your ability to change your mind. But of course there is no incentive for them to do so. Which shows that evaluating your open-mindedness impartially was never the true goal here.
Another thing is that there is a difference between “being open-minded” and “signaling open-mindedness”. Just because you are capable of adopting various kinds of positions, doesn’t mean that you should. To consider options X, Y, Z, and afterwards decide to stay with the original X, can be perfectly open-minded, even if from outside it may be difficult to distinguish from “the person did not consider Y and Z at all”. (It’s like when a gifted child solves a mathematical problem too fast, and the teacher accuses them of merely guessing the answer. There is a difference between doing the work, and demonstrating to other people that you did the work.)
Shortly:
open-mindedness does not mean “doing what you want me to do”; that’s called social pressure
it is perfectly open-minded to consider a hypothesis… and then reject it
Bulverism is a good term, thanks!
A more transparent term would be psychologizing:
See also Ayn Rand on this topic:
(Lots more ranting about psychologizers. Schopenhauer energy.)
Under the belief vs. understanding distinction, open-mindedness is a virtue of understanding ideas you disbelieve (or purposes you don’t endorse). It’s not directly relevant to belief, but sometimes understanding is the bottleneck to belief, in which case more open-mindedness would help. When you already understand the idea, open-mindedness is no longer relevant.
More to the point, understanding an idea shouldn’t necessarily result in believing it, and high open-mindedness doesn’t increase the number of hours in a day. Learning any given piece of nonsense would still not be the best thing to focus on, but high open-mindedness should prevent you from actively avoiding low-hanging fruit of understanding when it’s ripe for the taking, just because it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing you are likely to believe or endorse.
Them: “I think X”
You: “That’s wrong because Z”
Them: “I think you’re just disagreeing because you’d not open-minded enough”
You: “What makes you think that?”
Them: “I think it because Y”
What do they say for ‘Y’? That seems the part that actually constitutes their argument and which you will be able to call out if they’re making a mistake.
when I put myself in the shoes of one who would say that someone is not open-minded enough and fill in the Y I get “you responded so quickly that you must have been speaking from cache instead of computing an answer”
One thing you can maybe do is throw such accusations right back: “You say I’m being closed-minded to you, but aren’t you equally being closed-minded to me?”
It comes across as escalatory, and might be counterproductive, but I’ve also sometimes found it helpful. Depends a lot on the person and situation.
I don’t want to use this sugestion, not because it is escalatory, but because it’s a question, which invites them to have more opinions.
What I want is a way out, but that has the feeling of standing up for myself, rather then the feeling of humiliation and defeet.
If someone starts to accuse me of not beeing openminded to their opinion, it’s usually because I think their opinion is dumb. I rather not hurt their feelings if I can avoid it, but I’m also not going to worry too much about being polite to someone after they done this particular retorical move.
Usually the way out is to just leave. But last time this happened was at a small metup, and the only way out was to leave the event, which I did. I’m not happy about this and would like better options.
A lot depends on why you want to stay, and whether you are likely to have interesting/productive further discussions. I often just let them off the hook with a “I guess I am a bit closed on this particular topic—let’s discuss something else”.
In theory “agree to disagree” should be impossible among rational entities with compatible priors, but in practice humans often meet neither of those criteria. That’s OK, when you reach the point of no further updates in either direction, you move on.
I wish I could say something like that and be ok. But to me it feels too humiliating. And also often factually wrong, I.e. I’d be open to good argument.
A reply I got in a similar situation, paraphrased: “well, it’s you who identifies as a rationalist, you hypocrite.”
In other words, as if by calling myself a rationalist (not in that specific debate, just generally something I said in a different context that my opponent knows about) means that I accept an asymmetrical burden.