IWTL to defend myself in an argument.

Based on my quick overview, must posters seem to be giving you great advice on how to make an argument into a productive endeavor (e.g. trying to solve an underlying disagreement) or win an argument by discovering the more "true" line of attack (e.g. figuring out underlying principles or point out fallacies). The first, while good practice, has nothing to do with your question at hand of winning, and the second, while admirable, requires you have truth on your side, which probably happens significantly less than half the time (since both people are probably wrong in most situations). So here are my (former college debater with former national championship aspirations) suggestions (more dirty tricks) on how to win for the sake of winning.

 

Play Chicken: Most people's first mistake in any argument is taking a position. It's a hell of a lot easier to tear down someone else's argument than to come up with your own. After all, most stuff worth arguing about is in a grey area in terms of truth. Take the problem of drugs in America. Good luck trying to think of a position that's easily defensible. So instead wait for your opponent to take a position and smash them on it. Sometimes people will get an inkling of what you're doing and demand that you take a position ("so what's your solution?"). You have two options. Either continue to not stake out a position by saying something that sounds like a position but really doesn't actually mean anything (notice the difference between "I think that we should think about drugs as a public health problem" and "I think we should open up drug rehabilitation centers in all major cities to send drug offenders") or take a position that subsumes most of your opponents arguments, making them irrelevant ("well, I think most of what you're saying is true which is why I support legalizing most drugs, but methamphetamine is too easy to produce and there's too much incentive for employers to pressure workers into using it like caffeine"). A more theoretical way to think about this game of chicken is to think about ground. Taking a position stakes out some ground as yours to defend and leaves some for your opponent to attack you from. If you don't take any ground, you just get to attack. If you do stake out some ground, ideally you're also staking out most of your opponent's best ground, leaving the point of contention where your opponent is weakest.

 

Framing: This is the most powerful technique (just think about how many arguments Fox News has won), but in practice it can be hard to use to its full potential. As such, this is pretty wide ranging so I'll just point to a couple examples

  • Big versus Small Picture: When we do any activity, we tend to narrow our focus, particularly if we start to get emotional. In arguments, this translates into a tendency to get into simply negating what your opponent is saying. First of all, it's very important that you don't get do this. Try to see the forest through the trees by asking yourself questions like "is this responsive to my argument?" "does this contradict something said earlier?" rather just going with your gut and saying "nu-uh". After you watch for yourself doing this long enough, you'll start noticing when others do it, and you can take advantage of it to pigeonhole them into whatever you want to talk about because they'll just say the opposite of you.

  • Value: Many arguments boil down to value judgments between two different outcomes. Returning to drug legalization (and admittedly simplifying for brevity), one must weigh the short term and potential long term increase in drug usage and associated problems against the lives saved by not waging a war on drugs and by giving medical care/clean needles/whatever to addicts that previously were chilled from getting these services. If you want one of these sides to be more appealing, than diminish the value of the other side "drug addicts have made their choice". Sound like a weak example? I bet you seldom think about the effects of the drug war on people in Columbia or Russia when FARC and krokodil are probably two of the most horrifying results of it. The reason is that these impacts have been effectivly framed out of our perception.

  • Air Time: When you take the time to write something down,

/r/IWantToLearn Thread