STOP Arguing Like a Politician (It's Making You Dumber!)
🔍 Key insights
Debates Prioritize Winning – Political debates often aim to persuade through charisma, emotion, and performance, rather than careful reasoning or truth-seeking.
Biases Undermine Objectivity – Appeal to emotion, argument from authority, and belief bias distort our perception of what’s actually true.
Philosophy Encourages Exploration – Philosophers value inquiry over victory, using techniques like radical doubt, steel-manning, and Socratic questioning to pursue deeper understanding.
📚 Go deeper
🎥 Related videos:
📖 Further reading:
Plato’s Republic – Offers a rich example of Socratic dialogue and the pursuit of justice through collaborative reasoning.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind – Offers insight into how our moral psychology biases our thinking and why understanding others requires more than just better arguments.
💡 Think for Yourself
Have you ever dismissed someone’s argument because of who they were, rather than what they said?
How would your conversations change if your goal was mutual understanding instead of being the most convincing?
☁️ Thought Experiment
Imagine you’re sick, and two people offer to treat you. One is a trained doctor who gives you bitter medicine and a strict regimen. The other is a charming candy seller offering sweets and comfort.
Socrates warned that in a democracy, we often choose the candy seller—the demagogue—because they say what we want to hear, not what we need to hear.
Now ask yourself: in conversations, politics, even media—are we drawn to what’s true, or simply to what’s pleasing?
Cheers,
Kevin