Robin:

We've agreed to talk about fear of persuasion. A common phenomena whereby people aren't fully open to hearing arguments from other people because they're concerned that those arguments might be too persuasive. And I guess the most likely concern is that the person constructing and presenting the arguments is selecting them according to criteria you don't embrace. And therefore you will see a persuasive argument, but not see all the counter arguments or alternative arguments they might've made if they didn't have their agenda that you are suspicious of. And that would be a reason to be wary of arguments presented that are selected by a, you know, suspicious criteria.

Agnes:

Right. So that's, that's one profile for fear of persuasion. But I'm going to give you a different one. I feel fear of persuasion, unlike you. I don't think you feel it very well. So you probably don't, you probably don't have good intuitions about what it's like to have fear of persuasion, but I feel it in relation to you. And when I feel it in relation to you, it's not that I think you're suppressing certain arguments. That is, I don't think, I don't ascribe to you any diabolical intentions or any kind of strategy of trying to mislead me. So that's just to say you can feel fear of persuasion without attributing any bad moods to your interlocutor.

Robin

I agree, but there could just be a selection effect that because they happen to believe something you think is wrong, that has shaped the sort of arguments they've seen and constructed such that they are biased, even if they didn't intentionally mean that.

Agnes:

Right. Or you might think they're just blind to something. There's a set of phenomena that they just can't get very well into view. Like how I think you probably can't get peer-to-peer persuasion into view that well since you don't feel it, right? And they can't get those things into view, and because those things aren't in view for them, they're not seeing the countervailing considerations that would come out of those things. And you might not see them either. But maybe they're smarter than you, and so they're going to be better at seeing the considerations that show up for them, and then you may be misled into neglecting these other things that you think are out there.

Robin

Right. And this could be, in some sense, just a fear of being persuaded by your culture or your world. it will, on average, embody the sort of things it has seen, and once you become to suspect that your culture, your world, has been focused on the wrong things or has not seen certain things, that could be a reason just to be suspicious of education, newspapers, everything in your world could suffer that problem.

Agnes:

I agree, but I think fear of persuasion by people are more afraid of being persuaded by individuals than they are by their culture. Most people just are persuaded by their cultures. And so maybe you want to say people ought to have more fear of persuasion by their culture, but we should start where the phenomenon actually exists, which is... This could help us triangulate the sources here.

Robin

It might be that people are especially averse to being persuaded by a person because that would bring them dominance over them. People are actually, I think there's a very common phenomenon where people don't want to be controlled by other people and they will go to great lengths to resist being controlled or even having the appearance of being controlled. So for example, a manager will often reject good advice if it comes from a potential rival, because they need to seem to not be influenced by that potential rival. And so in various kinds of organizational political games, people will go out of their way to resist influence, even of coherent, reasonable arguments, just exactly to not seem to be controlled by someone.

Agnes:

Sure, but that's an explanation that would never be accepted by the person in question. So we should try to be reasoning.

Robin

Never. I often do accept these explanations, but they would be less likely to. I agree.

Agnes:

OK, I'm less likely to be accepted. And at least I experienced the fear of persuasion as coming from a love of the truth. That is, it's not because I want to look bad that I don't want to get persuaded out of things by you. It's because I want to believe things that are correct and I think you're going to mislead me. I don't want to be misled.

Robin

And then why do people think that particular people are more likely to mislead them than their culture or a whole discipline or a whole educational institution or media world?

Agnes:

How things are framed matters, and it may be that there's a lot of stuff that could mislead you that doesn't show up to you as being misleading. I think that with respect to another person, maybe part of it is that you have to, it's your job in a conversation to be providing pushback against what they say, right? And that's just more true of the way conversations work than, say, the way culture works. So I don't feel scared to read things you write. I'm fine to read your writing, and I don't feel, what if Robin misleads me? Because I know that I can just be like, well, sure, this seems like a good argument Robin just gave, but I'm just gonna set it aside or ignore it or whatever. But it's more scary for me to talk to you like one-on-one, because then if you say something and if I'm like, no Robin, that's dumb, I'm not going to believe it, you'll be like, but why? And now I have to provide you with a reason.

Robin

So what about if you watched a lecture or a recorded lecture, then would you, the theory of what I predict would similarly be less worrying about being persuaded? So then I think it sounds like it's more closely related to this norm that we have that if you're in a conversation, if someone gives a good argument, you should either have a counter argument or you should accept maybe the validity of their argument in the discussion.

Agnes:

Right. So I'm thinking of this as a general phenomenon. I get into many contexts where people in effect say to me, I'd like you to lecture to me rather than having a conversation with you. They don't say those words, but they telegraph that. And I think people have fear of persuasion in relation to me. That is, they see me as someone where they're like, I don't really agree with everything she says. She seems weird. She has a weird point of view she's engaged in. I like to listen to her, but I don't want to let her persuade me out of my common sense views, which are probably right into some of her crazy views. And I think that maybe it has something to do with the question of whether the other person feels that they have the right kind of standing in the conversation. Like, can they push back against you? This could either be because they think they're not as smart as you, they're not as educated as you, they could think like, you have more status, you're more aggressive, you're gonna shut them down. There could be all sorts of reasons why they don't feel like they're gonna have standing in the conversation.

Robin

So we could compare a conversation to two opposite alternatives. One is lectures or readings where there's less of a norm of either like have a response or accept. But there's also on the other extreme trolling or short little fiery comments. And so I think in some sense that also lets you avoid the fear of persuasion. in the sense that I think when people read things online, they do feel like they might like to have a conversation with this person, but then they might also fear the feel of persuasion. And then they can put that off by just having a hostile comment that rejects this person in their whole stance. And I feel like they think that substitutes for the sort of rebuttal they might need to have in a conversation, but it's the opposite sort of stance.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah. So I don't know whether I've confessed this before, but in our early, in our first few podcasts, I thought, I thought to myself as you were talking, the stuff that Raman is saying is crazy. And not sure how to respond to it, but surely our listeners are going to hear he's being crazy. And I'll just let them see for themselves or something like that. And I thought, I almost felt like you would say something and I'm like, well, that's just patently absurd. I don't even need to say it. It's almost like in my head I was the troll. I was like, haha, that's patently absurd. I was just saying it in my head. I'm too polite to say it to you. Then I was too polite to say it to you in real life. But it was like this trollish reaction where I was in effect anticipating the trollish reactions of our listeners who I don't in fact think would have had that reaction. But yeah, so I think often when we say, online there's something where you can just put something someone says forward and you can say, isn't that funny, right? Isn't that ridiculous or stupid or absurd? have a very fast reaction to it in that it's supposed to be... I mean, the thing about laughter is it cuts something off, right? You laugh and then it's over.

Robin

But I think if people feel it, it fulfills their obligation to have a response. So I think the key norm here is that in a conversation, if somebody makes a good point, you should either accept their point or have a response. I think that's the key norm we're going up against. that would make you wary of being in that situation, facing that norm, because if you can't think of a good response, you'll have to accept that you don't want to accept because you have a lot of reservations. But now in the modern world, I think we just have fewer conversations, honestly, because we're doing more reading and more trolling and less conversing.

Agnes:

Right. Right. That's a yes. So in a sense, now I realize what was happening is in place of me responding to your arguments, I was laughing at you in my head. And the laugh took substance.

Robin

Seems as an acceptable substitute.

Agnes:

I've handled this comment, Robbins, because I laughed in my head at it. And so we feel a need to react in some way. And so maybe this would explain a little bit why I think people who are very engaging elicit more trolling because people more feel that they need to have a response. That's what it is for you to be engaging, is that people want to have some kind of response to you, but they might feel like they need to have a response independently of whether they like you, agree with you, sort of want to be being drawn in by you. And so then you're going to get the trolls when you're both engaging, but you're not good at pulling people over to your side.

Robin

Right, so I guess the most interesting question here is, well, how often should we be having conversations? And should we have this norm, in fact, that you should have either a rebuttal or accept, a claim made in a conversation? Because we don't apply that norm, I guess, so much to reading, or even to trolling. You might ask, well, why don't we have the norm that when you read something, you should either have a rebuttal or accept? And I think maybe it's because nobody's watching. when you're reading, and you can get away with not. I mean, it's basically, this is a norm that would be enforced by observers, even the observer that the other person could report you to. And I think that's sort of enforcing the norm, that you should either have a rebuttal or accept the claim. And when we're reading again, nobody's watching, so we don't have to admit that we didn't do either of those two things. And then to the extent somebody might be, then trolling seems an acceptable response. We are having a response and therefore don't have to accept. But we could still ask the question, well, is this an appropriate norm? That is, do we think it makes sense to have this norm that you should either have a rebuttal or accept? And then again, should we try to apply it more strongly elsewhere to things you read, for example? Oh, if you read this, then what's your response to this thing?

Agnes:

That's interesting. It makes me think that one of the things that the move from paper reading to online reading has done is pull more of our reading under the aegis of that norm, right? Because when you read stuff online, especially if you post it or whatever- You could respond. It's not just you could, I think a lot of people feel like they should. That is, they feel like it's very different from if you're sitting here. If I get a magazine, nobody knows I ordered that magazine and nobody knows that I might have read it.

Robin

Although many people reading a book will write marginal comments. That's a traditional thing in history of a book you cared a lot about and you read carefully, you would write marginal comments on it. Some of them would be disagreeing. And I think, I do feel if I'm respecting a book more and paying more attention to it, I should have marginal comments along the way that express which things I'm accepting and which things I'm rebutting and how.

Agnes:

Right, so with a book, you have the option. I mean, I tend to not write marginal comments. I tend to underline in my books. And the underline is like, which are the things I wanna think more about or I wanna go back to? But I guess the difference is that with a book, And with like, you know, literary scholars and stuff are reading books and they're sort of integrating those books into a conversation, but they're doing so with a lot of reflection, which is very different from if you say something and I got to respond. Right, exactly.

Robin

So that seems to me the key issue here. That is, it seems like it is a reasonable norm that on any topic where you've seen an argument, you should eventually have a response, either accepting this argument or having a reason to reject it. But it does seem like you should be able to say, well, not yet. I'm still reading about this. I'm still thinking about it. I'm not ready to pick my response. And that's kind of hard to do in an open verbal conversation if there's a debate even, right? Where lots of people are listening. It seems a little harder to say, well, that sounds like a good point. I'm not ready to accept it yet. I'm going to think about it more. I mean, to an audience, that sounds like, yeah, you're accepting it. And there's a sense of what you are, sort of tentatively accepting it. You're saying, I don't see a counter-argument. And so I'm just going to let you let that sit as the status of an argument. I don't see it kind of argument for.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean. I'm not sure, like when I talk to you, not on not for our podcast versus the podcast, I think the podcast, like I'm more focused on staying on topic, but otherwise I don't actually think it's that different in terms of. Am I more inclined to say, no, wait, let me think about it off when other people can't see versus not? And so that doesn't, at least phenomenologically, that doesn't capture a difference in my experience. It's more like there's a kind of, I don't know, almost like a level of energy required, right? If I'm going, I feel like I have to be prepared to put up a fight when I'm in a talk to you. Right? And, you know, it's easy for me even to lose hold of what are the core intuitions behind my view or something like that. And I, if I'm gonna talk to you, I have to be like in good shape and be in tune with what those intuitions are. I have to be prepared to put up a good fight in defense of my views.

Robin

So let me highlight the example of a legal trial. So in a legal trial, there's this process of discovery by which each side is supposed to see all the evidence of the other side before the trial. And so this norm makes more sense in a trial whereby, you know, you've seen all the evidence, you're supposed to have prepared all your arguments. There is no sort of time to think about that at the trial. If there's an argument made and you don't have a counter for it, well, that's supposed to be it. You're not supposed to get another week to think about it. You're supposed to have prepared and at the trial, we want to hear the best you can come up with at the trial. And then you need to either have a counter argument or accept the claim. And you could see because the expectation is this is the final moment of decision, therefore we're not going to let you think about it longer.

Agnes:

Yeah, right. I feel like people all the time are like, oh, things I have to think about that more, and I feel like I never see the results of that or something.

Robin

Right. That's a reason to be suspicious of that move.

Agnes:

Yeah, I'm not suspicious of that move, and that's reluctant to make it, because I'm like, will I really think more about it later? My own theory that I argue for in my book, and that definitely applies to me, is that the time when I think about things is when I'm talking to people. So it's like, if I'm talking to you about it, this is my chance. This is when I'm doing the thinking. The minute you go away, I'm just going to forget about this. So I'll talk to somebody else about something else. Maybe I'll come back to this topic.

Robin

Right, but the fear of persuasion literally is, you made what sounds like a good argument. I'm stuck with either having to accept it or have a counter argument. I don't have a counter argument yet. This is the situation I'm afraid to get in. The way to rationalize this is I think, I don't have a counter argument now, but maybe I would if I thought about it longer.

Agnes:

Exactly, so it's because I see that as a rationalization that I'm not sure that that's such an easy way out of the norm of saying, oh, you have three options except reject or stall, because it's stalling.

Robin

Right.

Agnes:

And so it feels like, no, it feels like you're just under a kind of pressure to marshal your cognitive resources in that moment. And that's somehow scary because you could fail at it.

Robin

Right. So again, I'm going to offer the status explanation here that what we're afraid of is looking bad to ourselves, the other person in any audience.

Agnes:

But why would it look bad? The question is, the status, as we've discussed many times, I just think that the status explanation is like pushing the bump under the rug. There's a reason why it would be low status, and that's because it's somehow bad. And so the question is, why is that bad? Why is it bad to be persuaded by what someone else says, if they gave a good argument?

Robin

Well, clearly, In the world, there are people who have pre-existing positions that are tied to their jobs and their alliances and other sorts of things. And then when they discuss those with other people, the other people persuade them to change their mind about those things. That has consequences for a lot of other life choices and plausibly lowers their status, right?

Agnes:

Why? If they gave good reasons. Suppose that they couldn't be persuaded. Suppose, I don't know, you were on that yacht that just sank, and there was a storm coming, and all the local people are like, you should not have your boat out there, and you were very good at not being persuaded by them, so your boat sinks. That's not good for anyone. I mean, you should be good at being persuaded.

Robin

Right, so we discussed, say, STEM versus humanities once, right? And then if I happen to be arguing for STEM and you happen to be arguing for humanities, and if I persuade you that humanities isn't so good... you have a problem because now you have this lifetime commitment to the humanities. It's not so easy for you to just switch over to self.

Agnes:

It'd be a huge favor. I mean, if I had a lifetime commitment to something that was just a bunch of bullshit, and you saved me from having a full life of bullshit as opposed to only 48 years of bullshit. And then I could save other people.

Robin

I mean, the general point is just people often have a stake in various things they argue about, such that it's painful or costly to lose the argument. You know, so if it's two people arguing, you know, if I'm trying to, you're thinking of divorcing me and I'm trying to convince you to stay, right? We have a stake in this. I'm trying to convince you to hire me to a job. You know, I'm in a political party and I want you to vote on my side, but there's just all these cases in the world where we seem to have stakes and then people do seem to slant their analysis and arguments in the direction where they have a stake.

Agnes:

But like, um, um, Um, okay, say I'm thinking of divorcing you and you want me not to divorce you. We're having a conversation about that. And say, um, but say like, really, I should divorce you. And that's what's in fact, good. And then I can show you that I would have done you a favor, even if antecedently you had thought the opposite. In fact, the more you thought the opposite, the more of a favor I would have done you. And that's easy to see in a case where it's like, suppose that I just have incontrovertible proof that if we stay married, we're gonna murder each other. Like, somehow we'll both end up dead, right? You might be like, oh, please, let's get the divorce, right? And you'd be like, thank you, thank you for convincing me of this. Now, suppose it's not murder, but we just make each other miserable or something, right? Right. Also, it would be like, thank you. So, what is the scary situation in which I convince you that you're better off and now you end up doing the thing that makes you better off?

Robin

We've discussed this many times before. It seems to be a key difference of opinion. I think that people can just have different interests such that what's good for me isn't good for you and vice versa.

Agnes:

Okay, okay, so let's say that we have a conflict of interest where what's good for me is for us to get divorced, but it's better for you if we don't. Let's suppose that. And you, now let's go into what exactly is your fear of persuasion a fear of? Is it that you fear that I will deceive you into thinking that it's in your interest when it isn't? Is it that you fear that I will impose my interest on you irrespectively of the fact that that's not what's in your interest? What would the fear be here?

Robin

The fear would be I would accept a claim that a choice should be made that was less in my interest. Uh, because I couldn't find a good counter argument. Like you have an argument about why we should get divorced and on the surface, it's a good argument. And then I have this difficult situation. I either have to find a car agreement or accept it. But if I accept it, then I'm accepting this thing. That's less of my interest. So then I might be motivated to work harder to find counter arguments, even if they're not so good, because I don't want you, I don't want to accept this claim. That's not my interest.

Agnes:

I don't actually see how the fact that we may have a conflict of interest matters here. That is, it might not be in my interest either, but if I give you a good argument, you're in the same position. What difference does it make whether it's in my interest or not, whether our interests align or not?

Robin

Well, like for example, we could be discussing whether we like to do things together as a company, right? And you might say, we never like to do anything together. You like to do these kinds of things and I like to do those kinds of things. And if I accept that, then I'm accepting that we're not very well matched because we don't like to do the same things.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin

I want us to accept this claim that we shouldn't divorce. And so I want to argue for the claim that we do in fact do some things together that we like. And so I'm going to try to think of such things and find cases where we did things together that we liked in order to counter this claim. But I have an interest in that, right? I'm trying to convince you not to leave me. So I'm trying to search for arguments that would support that claim and then I have the fear of being persuaded by you that, in fact, we never like to do anything together.

Agnes:

But the reason why you think that we should stay together is presumably related to some thoughts about whether we like doing things together. Either that or you think, no, whether we stay together is independent of that, then you wouldn't accept my argument. Right. So, like, you think you have an interest in being with someone where you like to do some things together with that person. And so either I am such a person or not. And if I'm not, it turns out you were wrong about what was in your interest. You could be wrong about that, right? And I took it that that's what this conversation, this hypothetical divorce conversation was exploring, is like, is it in fact... I wasn't saying to you, look, it's in my interest that we divorce, and so screw you, we're going to divorce. What I'm saying to you is, I want to explain to you that it's actually in your interest, regardless of what's in my interest. And if I give you a decisive account of how it's actually in your interest, forget about my interest, then I'm doing you a favor one way or the other, whatever result you want.

Robin

So in almost all situations, there are common shared interests and then there are divergent conflicting interests. And yes, we tend to prefer to frame the conversation in terms of the common shared interest, because that's where we can have the, you know, shared basis for a discussion and a shared value in the discussion. But since we have also the conflicting interests, we are tempted to slant the discussion of shared interests in the direction of our personally conflicting interests. Maybe a better example is just a salesperson wants you to buy something, and they're going to want to describe the product in positive terms and not describe any negative aspects of the product.

Agnes:

Exactly not going to do the thing you just described. The salesman is not going to explain all the reasons why it's good for them if you buy this.

Robin

Not for them, for you, the customer.

Agnes:

They're helping you out, right? You might have noticed that your own sneakers that you walked into the store with have holes at the bottoms, and the salesman is like, look, your sneakers, oh, you need new sneakers. Look at these sneakers. They have really durable bottoms. They're not going to get holes in them. Similarly, if I'm trying to sell you on the divorce, I'll be like, look, forget about me. I'm going to tell you why this is going to be good for you.

Robin

I agree that people ... try to present their arguments in a pro-social way that's in the other person's interest, but we all tend to suspect that they will slant that in the direction of their personal interest via what they include or don't include in their arguments. That's the fear of persuasion by a salesperson. They won't mention the negatives for you. They will mention the positives because they are trying to get a sale.

Agnes:

Okay. But like, I think, um, I mean, I very much do feel that with salespeople. Um, uh, and for that reason, I don't even like it when salespeople talk to me because I'm so suspicious of them. So, so that seems right. But I think that, like, I don't generally think, for instance, that your ideas are somehow better for you and worse for me. I don't think you've chosen your ideas on the basis of the fact that you have kind of some kind of personal interest. I see how the STEM thing, you've kind of invested there. So maybe that seems like a counterexample, but it's not obvious to me that when you're afraid of being persuaded by someone, you think that somehow their personal interest, the personal conflict of interest is at play.

Robin

So we have this phenomena of people being wary of conversations where they might fear being persuaded. We have this one explanation available to us, which is a differing interest and fear of somebody differing interest influencing their persuasion, and you accept that for salespeople. Now the table is open for other explanations. I'm willing to listen and open to other explanations you can come up with. But this is one available explanation for us if we can't find others.

Agnes:

And one that we can't find others, then... That is, why aren't you afraid that I'm going to persuade you of some bad thing? Why don't you feel this fear?

Robin

Well, I don't know that I have a strong interest in interest being a problem. Per se. I mean, I do think interest is often a problem, but I'm not sure I would if it's a bigger problem versus a lesser problem here. Maybe I do, but I mean, I don't feel very much fear of persuasion. I guess I'm willing to say like, show me, show me some other reasons why you might be afraid of being persuaded. We talked earlier about just my biases in terms of my background and my history will just make me not see some things, and you're afraid that my arguments will neglect the things I don't see. But it's then somewhat puzzling why you're more afraid of that at an individual level than you are with our collective sources, because all the readings you might do your education, your culture will all also suffer that defect. So we have the interesting observation that you are more wary of being persuaded by an individual in front of you, you are having a conversation with.

Agnes:

Right, I think that, so the thing I said earlier that still seems right to me is that when you're having a conversation with an individual, then somehow you have to stand up for the entire space of truth that that person might not have access to. Like you're called into being their other half. And, um, at the very least that's going to happen if they're trying to persuade you of something. Um, and so you may think I'm not up to that task. Like, you could have a very different conversation with the person, right? You could just, most of the time, most people do not have this kind of conversation. They have the, oh, nice weather we're having or whatever, right? Bonding, something else kind of conversation where you're not called into battle in this way. But if you, if sort of, you know that in talking to this person, you're going to have to be the voice of all the truths and they might be missing, that that's somehow daunting in a way that if you're just like thinking about your culture or reading a book or whatever, there's a, you can just ignore things.

Robin

Isn't that a crazy high standard? I mean, why would we ever think you're responsible for all possible rebuttals to something one particular person says in one particular context? You don't demand that of yourself as a reader. I mean, you should in some sense.

Agnes:

I don't demand it as a reader. Um, it, I mean, my own feeling of it is something like almost everything in life is training. And the thing it's training for is responding to somebody who's trying to persuade you of something. And then when you're actually doing it, it's scary because everything was training for this. So that's why I'm very unsympathetic to the stalling response because this is the time when you figure it out. There isn't some other time.

Robin

Well, you might think that this is the most important behavior that everything else is training for. You should just be trying to do this as much as possible. You're just going to get better at it the more practice you do.

Agnes:

Totally. I think that, but that doesn't mean it's not scary. I'm not saying you should cave to fear persuasion. I obviously do not. In fact, this whole episode is obviously me angling for praise for my incredible courage in facing off against you again and again. So good job to me. I'm not saying that you should give into it, but I do feel it. And, um...

Robin

So that's just really the story of the fear of the big things, the things that matter. Fear of things that matter. It couldn't be a thing, right? You might just think, you know, for example, apparently, you know, many young men are very afraid to ask a young woman on a date or something. And many of them has just never done that and never had a date and In some sense, that's the important thing, which you can imagine in the moment of considering doing it, they're very afraid. Right. So they're afraid of the big thing, the big thing that matters.

Agnes:

But you just have to practice it and do it a bunch of times.

Robin

Well, that's what people do say to them, actually.

Agnes:

Right. Right. It's true. And because it's true. Right. But it's still scary. Right. Right. Right. OK. That makes sense to me. That makes sense to me, that it would be something like a fear of a thing that matters, where it's a little, so it's a little bit like this is a test. This is a test of how much you've learned and of whether or not you really hold your views and whether or not you have any reason.

Robin

In some sense, I mean, the word test we often use as a name for the practice things that don't matter as much.

Agnes:

Right, right, right.

Robin

The trial, the real.

Agnes:

The trial, right. So I like the trial analogy because the whole point of why we're impatient at the trial is that all the other times were the times when you had to prepare. Right. And where, you know, but this is like, um, uh, um, this is, this is not the rehearsal. This is the show. Performance. Yeah. This is the performance. Yeah. Um,

Robin

So now we're thinking really fear of performance, performance anxiety, they call it, right?

Agnes:

Yeah, fear of persuasion has fear of performance. Okay, good. I think that that is, that's definitely identified one thread. But maybe there's another thread if we go back to your thought about being persuaded by your culture, that is the people should be more afraid to be persuaded by their culture. I do think that some of it is just like, they think that they'll be, I mean, sorry, I was going to say, think they'll be influenced by you. If they were afraid of being influenced, you would think that they would then be afraid of reading as well, I guess, and of, you know, not just of conversation. So.

Robin

So there are a lot of interactions that we somewhat frame as a contest, a battle, right? And certainly in history, people would fight, they would joust, they would have sporting contests, they might even have a contest of who can recite a poem longest, right? There have just been lots of ways people had contests with each other. Children do this often, right? Just as a way to practice and see who's better. And I think we often do frame arguments in those terms. We often want to know who won the argument. And audiences are wondering who they're most impressed by in an argument. They will often say who won the argument.

Agnes:

OK, this is not directly responding, but I think I had I think I have a thought about why people are OK with the reading, not OK with speaking. I think that. Say somebody is reading an essay by me, say it's against travel, and say they're really into travel and they think travel is really important and it transforms who you are or whatever. They can read my essay and they can be like, oh, it's that, you know, annoying Agnes Callaghan person again, like, I'm not gonna listen to her. And they might even read it and find it entertaining and then just dismiss it. Let's say they were talking to me. And say I were to say to them, okay, what's your case for travel? Explain it. I think that that's the scary moment. The scary moment for them is seeing that nothing is coming out of their mouth. I'm not even sure it matters what I say next. They are not sure that the thing they have is up to snuff. And they're afraid of being shown that. And so that's why I think we're not that scared of reading or even of being influenced by our culture. What we're scared of is not being influenced. What we're scared of is being refuted, is realizing that the kind of theory that we had in our heads, the thing that we want to fall back on in resisting this person, that there isn't anything there.

Robin

And I think that fear is really quite justified. So I'm very struck by the fact that you often think about a subject and you just assume that you have a coherent set of views on the subject. And you think as if you had a coherent view, and then you like have a thing, oh, maybe I should think more in this direction, but you just treat yourself as if you were coherent. And then often we're just not coherent, but we don't see it until We are challenged in a very particular way to say very particular things that someone could challenge. That's the point where our incoherence will be revealed. And we are, in fact, quite often incoherent. So it's a very realistic fear.

Agnes:

Right. And so that would suggest that when I'm afraid of being persuaded by you, I'm not really afraid. What's scary to me is not being brought around to your set of crazy views. What's scary to me is being brought to see that my own set of non-crazy, sensible, obviously perfectly true views are not coherent, unjustified, maybe I don't even know what they are. That's the thing that the performance would expose. It feels like a fear of coming around to your views. But I think it doesn't make sense that I have that fear because really, I shouldn't be wantonly reading stuff you say. I'm so scared of coming out of your views, right? It's really that I fear speaking. It's a fear of speech. It's the fear of speaking and then being evaluated.

Robin

I mean, a fear that somebody will be looking for the holes, looking for the incoherences. They will focus their attention on those. They will highlight them exactly because they're trying to rebut your points of view and That's the fear of what, I mean, we talked about this initially, they say something and you either rebut it or accept it. Now you're in the position of looking for their incoherences, which in general, it shouldn't be that hard because pretty much everybody's incoherent about lots of stuff. And now you've been challenged to find their holes. You have a fear of not being able to do that. You have a fear of failing to find their holes. You know they're there. Everybody has them.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. The fear of not being able to be Socrates. Not being able to fill Socrates' shoes. And it occurs to me, I was recently in a conversation with somebody where they were saying sort of one incoherent thing after another. And I think they, and I would just ask like a little question every once in a while. And I think they realized that what they were saying was not that coherent, but only not fully consciously. The way it manifested was they just wouldn't stop talking.

Robin

Like they- One way to avoid the rebuttal.

Agnes:

Give me like a 20 minute answer to every little short question that I asked, where they would keep circling back and kind of covering it over. And right, so I think one way to deal with the fear of performance is actually to not stop performing, so as to stall the evaluative moment.

Robin

I think that's right. I think then, in some sense, it shows a special confidence, not only if you're willing to speak and be rebutted, but willing to speak and pause for a rebuttal. Those who speak but don't pause are, in some sense, showing less confidence in their ability.

Agnes:

With you, we don't have to. Pause, because you'll just interrupt me.

Robin

Okay, yes. We'll see. The service I'm providing, you're welcome.

Agnes:

Exactly, exactly. You can compensate for the other person's lack of confidence if you're interrupting.

Robin

But right, maybe that's, I mean, that's an interesting... Right, but notice just how rare, in fact, in our world, this supposedly prototypical scenario is. of two people talking on a topic they might disagree on and then being clear enough to potentially be rebutted and then giving space for the other one to rebut them, that's actually quite rare. So we must be pretty afraid of it since we don't allow it to show up very much, even as a risk, right?

Agnes:

I wrote an entire book about how this is what your life is supposed to be and I'm scared of it. So I can imagine that other people are so scared of it that they just don't like let it happen. And I was talking to someone about this, not the same person as the person who wouldn't stop talking. And she said to me, well, it's just very tiring. Like one doesn't always want to be doing that. You know, I mean, I get, I agree because I find talking to you quite tiring. So I know what she means. This feeling of the performance and being on your guard and you know, like that's, it's not the same thing as like just sitting back and watching a movie or something. But I do wonder, well, what's so tight? Why do we find conversation? tiring and trying to see why something's wrong. Why is that tiring? Why is your mind working tiring? And maybe it's only tiring because of having to fight this fear constantly. Maybe that's the tiring, because you don't find it tiring. So maybe that's why.

Robin

Somewhat, but I find it energizing too. But still, yeah, I think I think there's a truth about reality and yourself that most people don't see and don't, if they saw it better, they would be willing to be more philosophical and they'd want to read your book more and want to emulate you more and maybe me too. But I think the key truth to tell the world is that you are not nearly as coherent as you think. you have a bunch of different opinions you've said in your life and thoughts and things you've done, and they just don't add up that much to a coherent whole. If you actually want to be more coherent, then the way to do it is to expose yourself to rebuttal, and that's the thing that will force you to be more coherent, because somebody will point out a conflict and make you choose, and by choosing, you will become more coherent. Are you bothered? How bothered are you by the fact that you just are not coherent? You think you are, and you're just not.

Agnes:

I think that the thing that people don't want to accept, the difficult truth is not you're not coherent. Actually, people love that. They love saying it. They're like, yeah, that one's coherent. The self is a deep, bottomless pit of confusion and neurosis. People love saying that. They love admitting it. The thing they don't want to think is that I could be different. Like, you could actually be incoherent. That's on the table for you. You're just choosing. You're just choosing badness every day by making small talk, basically. The path of small talk is the path of staying, of choosing to stay as incoherent as you are. And the reason is only cowardice. That's the only reason why. It's because this thing is scary, because reality, because the real moment of performance. I was supposed to have a Zoom today, and it got cancelled in which I was going to explain Book 2 of Aristotle's Physics, a text I have taught many many times, but it's challenging for me. It's hard to teach. I really have to get my head into it. I was halfway into it. When I found out it was canceled, and I should've been annoyed, I should've said, ah, I started preparing for this, and now I'm gonna have to start, you know, prepare again. It was very solid, so I had to start from scratch. But I was so relieved, I was just flooded with relief at the fact that I wasn't going to have to do this performance. And that's just the weakness of the human soul, that feeling of relief. The feeling of just not having to step up to the plate of reality and getting to sink back into a non-evaluative place for a little bit longer.

Robin

So this moment that we were starting with as the key moment of anxiety where somebody said something and you are supposed to either rebut it or accept it. That whole moment is structured around the idea you should be avoiding incoherence. That's the whole force of that choice is don't you want to be coherent? Choose this coherence or that one. So it is somewhat puzzling that you would find that moment of choice of coherence. So anxiety producing and then somehow claim that you don't care about all the rest of your incoherence.

Agnes:

I think it's not because the The thing that you find anxiety producing is sort of the thought that you're supposed to change, that you're supposed to be responding to these pointings out of incoherence with attempts to then continue the conversation and move in a positive direction and There's another, there's a move that you would like to be able to make, which is just to sort of ironically dismiss it or something like, ha ha, aren't human beings incoherent? Who has a coherent view about anything? You want, if you can do that, There's a platonic dialogue called the Euthydemus, where Socrates talks to these two guys, Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus, who, at some point, he gets them to contradict themselves, and they're like, what, you think we think the thing we thought earlier? We don't keep our minds on the same thing for any amount of time. And basically, they're making refutation impossible by not having the goal of trying to arrive at the truth. And so I feel like what's seen as somehow a burden or something like that is putting that goal before someone, saying to them, you're supposed to be different than the way you are.

Robin

I think we often have people who, in that situation, make a witty or clever or ironic response.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin

And if it's done well enough, it's accepted as a substitute for the- Exactly.

Agnes:

That was like me laughing at you in my head.

Robin

Right.

Agnes:

But often in a social setting that- Yeah, in a social setting, I've got to create a better joke than that, right? Obviously, I have to make other people laugh, not just myself.

Robin

Right, but it's interesting that we would accept that as a substitute, and it might sort of speak to the actual goals involved, that that is often taken as an acceptable substitute.

Agnes:

I mean, I once did a word search for words involving laughter, humor. et cetera, in Greek, because they're all etymologically related to one basic root, so it's easy to search through the corpus for them. And I noticed, sorry, in Plato, and I noticed that Socrates is almost always representing humor as an enemy. He says things like, you know, oh, you find that funny? Do you think that's an argument? Like that he found something funny? Is that now an argument? And, you know, I don't know, the man who goes out from the cave, you know, who ascends from Plato's cave out into the land of the forest, and he comes back down, people laugh at him. So laughter is not presented as this beautiful social force of harmony or whatever. It's presented as this pseudo-argument that we use to derail us from being philosophical. But it may be it has the things that have that function also have the opposite function, we would find the sort of burdens of refutation and intellectual engagement to be just unbearably heavy if we didn't have any way to defuse them. And laughter gives us a way to defuse them.

Robin

I fear we may not be giving enough credit here, though, to the first argument we discussed about the first reason to be wary of persuasion, which was that, in fact, it might be biased. That is, the arguments that they have and the way they frame things may be distorted by their limited history and limited awareness, and that would be an actual real reason to be wary of being persuaded. And it's different from the reason of fear, performance, anxiety, or status conflict. We haven't given it that much credit here, but I think we should take a little time to ask, well, How often could it be true that, in fact, you have a good instinct that, in fact, you should not too easily be persuaded by this argument? Because arguments are, you know, selected from a space of possible arguments. You can't have considered them all. They won't be equally weighting all possible considerations. They will be picking some based on what they're aware of.

Agnes:

Right. So I think it's really the thought there is I may have true beliefs that are not knowledge. If they were knowledge, I can explain them to you. I could justify them, et cetera. So what I have are a little bit flimsier, a little bit lighter weight than knowledge, just a true belief, but it is true. And I'm afraid of being persuaded out of my true belief. I think that, I guess I think that Socrates does take this worry seriously. And, but the way that he does that is he says, you should just, you know, decide what are your four beliefs? What are the things that seem true to you? And then work out the implications of those and You know, if any of the implications don't work, consider other alternatives and don't question your fundamental assumptions wantonly. That is, be engaged in the project of working out the implications of your fundamental assumptions. which is sort of accepting that you are gonna have to have some fundamental assumptions, but that they may only get justified at the end of the day. He calls this the method of hypothesis.

Robin

I think about how I try to manage this, and I think that typically most arguments you're gonna be presented with literally only support relatively weak conclusions, But they're done in a context where the suggestion is, well, if you don't have a counter argument, you should at least be leaning this way for your overall conclusion. Almost always, sometimes we have just solid logical arguments that there's just no way around. If you accept this argument, you just have to accept the answer. There's no way out. But much more often, we're doing sort of all else equals sort of arguments. We're pointing out a factor that's relevant for something. And, you know, the proper conclusion of the argument is, yes, these considerations lean us in this direction on this topic. And, you know, the implication usually is, you know, I've given you an argument for, you know, why we should invade Israel or why we should raise taxes, right? There's, there's some sort of conclusion why you should divorce or why you shouldn't divorce. Usually there's, there's a conclusion that's at play, but then the argument offered is substantially weaker than being able to make a, you know, determinative answer on that conclusion, but it's going to offer a reason to lean one way more than another. And I feel like the proper response is to accept at least the appearance that on that consideration seems to lean that way. But you don't then have to accept the overall claim. You can say, but there are many other considerations here that we haven't gone into. And maybe that I'm not even aware of. So I, I'm going to remain uncertain about the general conclusion. I accept that your particular considerations lead you this way, but, uh, we're just not going to jump to the total conclusion. I feel like that's usually the right sort of honest response. And then it's perhaps puzzling that people feel reluctant to do that. Uh, even there, people are, are going to find that painful.

Agnes:

It feels like, um, what? Okay. I'm just, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to do a thing that you don't have a lot of patience for, which is I'm going to tell you a story. Okay. Um, when I would.

Robin

Clock's on, we're timing, we're timing this.

Agnes:

I know, I know you are. We're, uh, when I was in high school, um, my, um, I don't know, my 10th grade English teacher gave us this assignment, and as a result of how I did the assignment, she was convinced that I disliked her, which was true, I did dislike her, but I'm amazed that she read it off with this assignment. The assignment was something like, are you... I'm not sure what the scope of it was, but the restrictive version I took was something like, argue about why we should or shouldn't plant more trees or something. And what I did was I created these incredibly far-fetched reasons like, well, New York State is not a federal tree state. In order to become a federal tree state, we would have to plant, let's say, 10,000 more trees. If we did plant those trees, then we would be one, and then we would have to put up signs saying federal tree state. And so the cost of those signs is a consideration against planting more trees. Right. All the reasons were like that. They were like the thing I just said.

Robin

Right.

Agnes:

And she felt that this was a parody of the ... I was giving reasons, reasons why we shouldn't be giving the cost of those signs. Right. And I came up with like 50 reasons like that. And she felt that was a parody of the assignment, which it was a parody of the assignment. But my point is that in some way, the thing you just described, it's like all argument could be like the federal tree state thing, where everyone could be like, oh yeah, that's one consideration. Oh, that's one consideration. It feels like we wouldn't get anywhere. And that's why people don't quite want to frame it that way.

Robin

Right, but now we ask why. That is, like, either the arguments you're bringing up are strong and enough to sort of, you know, decide the question, or they are weak and only able to move you a little. That is an objective fact about whatever arguments you're bringing up, and we ought to be able to talk about that.

Agnes:

But then it seems like the thing you want to say is not, yeah, I moved a little, but that argument's too weak. Because the background, the context, the sociology, none of us are ever trying to make federal tree statements arguments and say it's not a thing anyone's ever trying to do. So if you're moved a tiny bit, then they fail. They didn't succeed.

Robin

Right. But I mean, I feel like I'm often in that situation where somebody makes an argument. I go, that's just crazy weak. Why are you even bothering? And they're somewhat offended because they feel like they did the job.

Agnes:

They went through and they found an argument that was on their side and they think they've supplied the... The thing we're just bad at is it's like we can find arguments in favor of our conclusions, but because we chose the conclusion first, we're not actually, what we're not actually finding are arguments that would move someone who didn't already believe that conclusion to come to believe it. Those are two different kinds of arguments.

Robin

So I feel like your thinking on the subject is a combination of some specific arguments and then more intuitive weighting of which things matter how much. in order to know where to actually productively argue about things, you need to be able to do this intuitive waiting. You need to have a sense for, you know, what are the likely scenarios, the unlikely scenarios, the big factors, the small factors, and that to be a useful arguer, you just need to have that. You can't actually productively argue if you have little idea of what's important and what matters and which things are at issue and which things, you know, are likely, et cetera. But I feel like there are people in the world who are just really good at doing the argument and they've just not invested at all in the, you know, what's important calculations. And they just don't know how to do that. And they figure like, no, I gave you an argument. And I do think some, a fair number of more often philosophers than other people are like this. They are just able to come, whatever claim you make, they are able to come up with some logical argument by which it might be wrong. And then they think they're done. and they don't feel like they need to argue how plausible that is, how often that case would show up, or things like that. They just don't do that sort of thing.

Agnes:

So it's interesting, because when you first described this problematic character who doesn't bother to go and investigate what's important and what we should actually care about, I was thinking, ah, you mean economists. They don't have a sense of what's valuable in life. They're busy doing their little narrow calculations, and so naturally their arguments are not gonna be as powerful. So I think we have to view this as a to-be-continued argument because we're not gonna resolve that dispute in the negative one minute that we have remaining to us. But also because I think you were right that maybe we gave short shrift to the original reason for fear of persuasion, which is fear of being persuaded on the truth.

Robin

Yeah, and I think basically you do have to accept that that's a real risk and that's a legitimate reason for being wary of at least trusting people's arguments. But I think we often just sort of have a neutral observer norm. maybe I feel this more strongly than you, that even if you personally have reservations, you should still publicly admit that they met some sort of public burden of having given a good enough argument that you should publicly accept that. I think I try to do that sometimes. I might say, You know, yes, you've made a good argument, but I have reservations because I think there are these factors that you haven't included in your analysis yet, but I accept that you, you know, with the factors that you discussed, you did your job. So, I mean, part of this is about sort of norms of discussion. And, you know, I think we have this norm that if somebody makes an argument, you should either rebut it or accept it to some degree. And I think it's only fair that if you can't rebut it, you should acknowledge that you can't rebut it. That doesn't mean you have to entirely embrace it. You can make these qualifications, as I mentioned, in terms of how many considerations it brought up and how important those things were. But I still think as a matter of fair play, you should acknowledge as best you can that they did, you know, make some points that you couldn't find those direct rebuttals to.

Agnes:

Yeah, I'm just, it's not that I exactly doubt you about what's your behavior publicly. It's that, as I think I've pointed out to you before, it's really very much the Norman philosophy when somebody else makes a good argument or whatever, that you say that, and you do it less than anyone I know. That is, if I make a good point, you just take the point on. It's like, now it's your idea, and now you just go running off with it, and you don't at all tend to make a little performance at that moment. So on some, at some interpersonal level, you're not doing this thing at all, but it may be that there's like a public version of it where, you know, if there's enough time delay or something, like, yeah, but we should stop.

Robin

Okay, I just have this image in mind. Say we're walking across a muddy, swampy area. We're trying to figure out where to step.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin

And we step somewhere and we dip from, dips out. We know that doesn't work. We stop somewhere else. Oh, there's some solid ground. We step there. Then you move on. I feel like if I see you step and then I walk behind you. I don't need to tell you good job for finding a path. You can see that I'm walking behind you and that's my praise of you. My praise is yes, I accept instead of stepping my feet somewhere else that might go swampy, I decided to follow your steps because yes, you found some solid ground to walk on.

Agnes:

that's a fine little system you have that you invented for yourself. I'm just saying that there are actual social norms, conversational norms, just like there's a conversational norm about not interrupting people. In philosophy, there are conversational norms where you don't do that. Instead of that, you just say a little thing. I'm not saying that it's good. I say given that it exists.

Robin

All right, I grant that I have not learned the social norms of philosophy, and maybe I would have been better off had I learned those norms. Anyway, nice talking today.

Agnes:

Bye.