Here is one of the most valuable bettering mechanisms you can use in your professional and (to a some degree) personal life: think twice as hard about the position you don’t (currently, immediately) agree with.
I don’t recall where I learned about it, but I have been using it intuitively for a long time now, and it’s really such a Swiss army knife for progress. I’ll describe in a bit more details the mechanics and variants shortly, but let me start with practical examples.
Often times at work we have a misunderstanding with another person that we need to succeed. You think you are definitely correct, but for whatever reason they won’t budge. It’s stalemate. What do you do?
Well, the first step is to assume the best intentions. Chances are your counter party has the same goals as you, and it is really a case of misunderstanding and lacking context. Even if the other side is indeed malicious, you don’t win anything by assuming that from the beginning. Yes, you might save a bit of time, but at this point we have bigger problems anyway. So just assume the best intent, and most likely you’ll be correct.
Second step is to realize there are only two explanations for the lack of progress:
- You don’t understand something
- They don’t understand something
Alright. We don’t know which it is — how do we find out? Well, if you are in fact misunderstanding, it would be helpful to learn more, and sometimes it’s not easy, because the other party might just assume you have all the relevant context while you don’t. On the other hand, if they are misunderstanding, then it would help for you to explain your ideas better, and pin point where their understanding is faulty.
And now goes the kicker: most people are really bad at taking that extra step of figuring our where the disconnect happens. Yet it’s so easy to do! All you need is to try to understand the other side point of view better. One method is to state it back, as you see it. Make a list of logical steps that you believe make the other side think what they think. Share it with them and ask to point out where you are wrong. People love pointing out the mistakes! They will be happy to tell you where your understanding of their position is lacking. Once you deconstructed the argument to some atomic pieces, you can now either agree and change your mind, or point out the specific pieces that you think are incorrect. Arguing about small concrete pieces is much easier, and at this point you’ll have no problems convincing your counter party if you are truly sure you are correct, and you’ve done your part understanding the counter argument.
Alright, that was a long way to demonstrate why you should think harder about the opinions/positions that you don’t agree with. It will help both enrich your views, and, perhaps more everyday practically, to build the case for your argument and convince others to unblock progress in your professional encounters.
That far was my life experience. Just today however, one of my favorite podcasts, All In, were celebrating their 100th episode, and were discussing why people love the show. One of the things they mentioned is what is called an intellectual honesty. There are four people on the pod, and they come from the different backgrounds, so they naturally argue and disagree with each other on most of the topics, but what’s rather unique (unfortunately unique!) is that they really trying to understand the others’ points of views instead of just blindly dismissing it and accusing the other person of <fill in the blank with a popular accusatory word of the time>.
So what is intellectual honesty? It is upholding other people’s opinions/hypotheses to the same standards as yours. Don’t get your ideas a preferential treatment merely on the basis that you are your most favorite person!
A good illustration of this principle is the strawman vs steelman analogy. You might have heard the phrase “oh, this is a strawman argument”. What it means is that you make a very simplified representation of your opponent argument and attack that instead of the actual argument. This trick allows you to attack the weakest parts, sometimes perhaps irrelevant parts, of the otherwise more challenging argument. This quick and easy victory makes you look good in a short term, but it leaves a reasonable listener with an aftertaste of being tricked and manipulated.
What are some examples of a strawman argument? They are literally everywhere. Just open any newspaper and read through the article’s attack on something. Today it’s gotten so bad, that most of the articles just attack the strawman arguments, instead of the actual arguments. Nobody bothers anymore to go into the details, or giving the argument a credit where it’s due, even if disagreeing with some parts of it.
The opposite of a strawman argument is a steelman argument. Let’s say you have an opinion, maybe it’s about what we should do about the CO2 human induced global warming. Now you hear someone say something that conflicts with your opinion, maybe they say “we should decriminalize nuclear energy”, or “solar and wind generated power is unreliable and should not be compared to a traditional stable electricity without considering the costs that go into building backup generation capacity”. An (extreme) strawman argument would be something like “we all gonna die of nuclear waste, don’t you worry about our children, you idiot”, or “Climate change is getting so bad, we all are going to die, let’s just ban fossil fuels immediately”.
In contrast, a steelman approach would be to understand the idea better, and try attacking that instead. This holds true even if the presenter of the other idea is struggling to articulate it. Instead of taking advantage of that, an intellectually honest way to argue is to help your opponent build their argument, and attack the strongest version of it. Only then your victory can be honest and complete; or most likely you will find that the issue at hand is not that simple, and maybe there are parts where both sides are correct, or the truth can’t be known.
I hope these examples make it clear what intellectual honesty is, why it’s the right thing to do, and how it is useful in practical day to day situations in real life.