Argue smarter - debate coach Bo Seo

From: https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/argue-smarter-harvard-debate-coach-bo-seo/

Never split the difference - negotiating

Listening

Three components:

• Try to transcribe in as accurate, or detail what the other person is saying. Separate out your own perceptions of what this speech is versus the reality of it, you’ll find that it’s sometimes different.
• Reconstruct the argument that’s being presented in its most basic form. What is the real thrust of this argument? And can I put it down on the page and organize it in a way the other side would recognize as faithful to their argument?
• Build up that argument into even a stronger version. So what else could the opposition have said to further their argument, to improve their argument? And through this process, you are not only listening to the words that’s coming out, you’re trying to reconstruct the deeper meaning behind it and where it’s leading to

Disagreeing

RISA (real, important, specific, aligned) framework:

Before launching into a disagreement, or challenging a claim to ask four things:

• Whether the disagreement is in fact Real as opposed to an imagined slight or a misunderstanding.
• Whether it’s Important enough to you to justify the disagreement.
• Whether the question, or the topic of disagreement is Specific enough in order for you to make some progress.
• Whether you and the other person engaged in the disagreement are Aligned in your objectives for wanting to partake in that conversation.

You can’t guarantee that a conversation is going to go well, but you may be able to give it the best possible chance of doing so. One of the limitations of the RISA framework that I worry about is that it is increasingly difficult to find the right kind of alignment in people’s interests for wanting to engage in a disagreement.

Rhetoric

I think we’re living at a time of real distrust of rhetoric. And when we say something is rhetoric, we mean something like, “it’s mere rhetoric.” Those are just empty words or you’re trying to fool me in some way; you’re trying to manipulate me.

And in the book I take the opposite view, that it’s precisely because of our frailties, our capacity to be lazy, our capacity to be apathetic, that we need things that tug at our heartstrings and forces us to take some action. That because it takes an enormous amount of activation energy to change our minds at all, let alone to act on those changed beliefs, we need something greater than ourselves to pull us along. But as with so many things in debate, a conversation that doesn’t have these elements that make us human, is also a conversation diminished. It’s a conversation that is not lifelike and that lacks some of the vastness, some of the richness that a real human conversation can provide- and to do that I think you need rhetoric.

Three principles of rhetoric are proportionality, personality, panache:

• Proportionality - many of the abuses of rhetoric come when the kinds of claims that we’re making, or the words we’re using, or the gestures we’re making are out of sync with the content of the arguments; they exaggerate or they diminish, or they’re out of proportion.
• Personality - bringing ourselves into our arguments a little bit more. Remember what we’re trying to do is to make the audience undergo a kind of a change to end up somewhere, believing something they didn’t before. And in order to do that, they have to make a kind of a journey from where they were to where they’re going. And one way in which we might be able to help them undergo that journey, is by explaining how we went through that process ourselves.
• Panache - crafting the language, putting the right combination of words in sequence, using all the tools of voice and gesture to be able to most effectively sell that argument. Those moments of panache, or what we call in debate sometimes, are “applause lines” are important because, they signal to the listener that they are worthy of a certain kind of attention and work that we, with them in mind, put in all this time to try and make this sound as convincing as we possibly could.

Debate Bullies

Four common personas I came up with, were first ‘the dodger,’ second, ‘the twister,’ third, ‘the wrangler,’ and fourth, ‘the liar.’

Dodger wins by essentially changing the topic, and they usually do this by finding a pivot point. So you might say something like, we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels because climate change is getting out of hand. Then they might say, “On the topic of climate change, why do you drive a four-wheel drive, right?” Or, “Why do you have a gas guzzler in your garage?” And it is a kind of a response on the same topic, but not to the point that you had raised. And so, the way in which the dodger gets ahead is when you take the bait and you start talking about your car and making defenses for yourself. And so the response to the dodger is to stay the course and to keep bringing the discussion back to the original point and highlighting that they are trying to change what the disagreement is about.

Twister’s signature move is to misrepresent the point that you are making. So if you say, “I’m opposed to increasing taxes,” the twister might say, “Does that mean you have no concern for social security?” Or, “Are you so selfish that, you think there should be no limits on personal property?” And so this is a kind of a ‘straw man argument’ because it’s not the argument you are raising, it’s the one they’re thrusting on you, right? And so, to respond to the twister, it’s imperative to correct the record and say, “No, that’s not what I’m saying,” because once you get this kind of misrepresentation, you can often get into a position of arguing for something you don’t believe, or at least the conversation splitting, and you not being able to connect and talk about the same issue. It can often be difficult to respond to a personality like the twister because you get a sense that something is going wrong here, or clearly they’re pulling something on you but you’re not sure what it is. And so one of the reasons why we need to be able to recognize things like straw man, and just have the vocabulary to be able to say that’s what they’re doing, is so that we’re able to pause and diagnose what has gone wrong in the disagreement.

Wrangler is the person for whom nothing is ever good enough. They’re very good at coming up with critiques against just about everything that you’re saying, but they never offer an alternative of their own. And this is a problem because your solution, or the thing you’re arguing for probably isn’t perfect, but so long as it’s better than the alternative, which might be just doing whatever we’re doing now, it still probably is the preferable solution. And so the appropriate response to the wrangler is to say, “Well, what do you believe?” In other words, to pin them to a position, so that they too have to argue in favor of something rather than always saying no.

Liar usually doesn’t tell one lie, they tell many. So that it becomes overwhelming and their opponent either doesn’t know how to respond to this effluence of stuff coming out from the other side, or they waste all their time trying to respond. So the strategy against the liar, is to choose one or two representative lies that you think best exemplifies the approach that the liar is taking in a disagreement.