Persuasion declutter thread: how to convince people?

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miniboes
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Persuasion declutter thread: how to convince people?

Post by miniboes »

As most of us here are veg*ns, atheists and/or ecomodernists, we find ourselves in a world where the vast majority of people disagree with us, and much is to be gained by persuading people to our cause. I think it's therefore a good idea to have a thread where we collect our knowledge, advice and resources on persuasion. You could call this a declutterthread; not only creating new forum content but organizing what we've discussed over many different threads. That does not mean we should not discuss new information here. On the contrary, we should try to get as much resources in here as we can as long as they're useful and not superfluous. Feel free to reply with anything that you think should be in here, and I'll include them in this post so it can serve as an overview.

(This is a work in progress; this idea just sprung into my head and I shouldn't even be spending time on it because I have an exam tomorrow)

(What do you think of the idea of having 'declutter threads' such as this one?)

Threads Lessons
  • Instead of debating somebody, most of the time it's better to ask them questions about how they arrived at their position. This is called socratic questioning.
  • We should strive to be as friendly as possible to everyone because evoking positive emotions makes it easier to persuade them (and it's a kind thing to do)
  • In order to stay calm and friendly, it is important to seperate people from their actions and beliefs. Rather than being evil, they are probably simply misguided, ignorant, unintelligent, stuck in a bad habit.
  • Often a good way to reduce somebody's confidence in their own beliefs is to expose how little they really know. Humans tend to wildly overestimate their understanding of any given topic. Therefore, simply ask them about their factual knowledge. For example, you could ask somebody that thinks nuclear power is a bad idea because of the waste problem how much nuclear waste we're talking about. More often than not they'll have no idea.
Resources
"I advocate infinite effort on behalf of very finite goals, for example correcting this guy's grammar."
- David Frum
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Persuasion declutter thread: how to convince people?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Great idea. Please make more of these.
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miniboes
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Re: Persuasion declutter thread: how to convince people?

Post by miniboes »

brimstoneSalad wrote:Great idea. Please make more of these.
I'm glad you like it. This probably does the job of my wiki idea, but without the complex maintenance. It will also help provide an easier way to get an understanding of the general positions of the people on this forum. It's not very easy as an 'outsider' to discover you think interest consequentialism is better than hedonic consequentialism (if i understand correctly) , for example, if the only place those terms pop up is a thread called 'Hello from Portugal' (http://philosophicalvegan.com/search.php?keywords=hedonic+consequentialism&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=posts&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search (not trying to criticize you or anything, this just happens to be a particularly telling an recent example).

Edit: do we have the option to make topics sticky? That would help the findability of these.
"I advocate infinite effort on behalf of very finite goals, for example correcting this guy's grammar."
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Persuasion declutter thread: how to convince people?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Sure, I'll sticky it once it's done. Or I can sticky and lock one topic and we can copy all of the different compilations there (since this one includes discussion too).
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