The Blind Men and the Elephant: Why We Need to Change How We Debate

When I see people having angry debates (or when I cool down after getting into one) it always strikes me that we need to reframe how we see the purpose of a debate.  People tend to approach a debate as a winner-take-all game that you either win or lose, instead of a way to collaboratively search for the real truth.  Most people have their point of view, which they take for granted to be correct, and they try to prove how it's better than their opponent's point of view.  Oftentimes, both sides lose their cool and start needling or insulting each other, trying to make the other side look stupid.  If each side represents an ideological group (say, American liberals and conservatives), each group is turned into a sinister caricature of itself by the other side--stupider, meaner, and more extreme than most of them really are.  There are a whole bunch of problems with this approach:

·         People are much too confident they are right.  Human understanding is pretty error-prone.  Our feeble senses pick up thin slices of a complex world, and we use our limited brains to try to put these slices together into an accurate picture, based on our past experience.  Our understanding at best limited and at worst flat wrong.  Nevertheless, we get emotionally attached to our grasp of reality.  So, the views that we get red-faced defending are quite likely to be inaccurate.

·         Insults, rants, needling, and caricatures only convince those who agree with them in the first place.  No self-respecting person is going to listen to someone tell them how stupid and wrong they are, and think "OK, I guess you're right".  The more measured and polite your argument is, the more likely it is to be convincing to someone who doesn't agree with it.  This may seem pretty obvious, but it's very hard to remember in the heat of debate.  It never seems to have occurred to some people at all.  The point is, even if your goal is to win a debate, then getting angry and insulting is a bad approach. Of course, this assumes that your idea of winning a debate is convincing your opponent.  If your idea of winning is to thoroughly insult and humiliate your opponent, it might work.  That's a common goal, but is it a worthy one?  I mean, Galileo was insulted and humiliated, but he was still right.

·         Most people are at least partly right.  We tend to treat people who disagree with us as if they were wrong...period.  Sometimes that's true, but oftentimes it's not.  If you're a conservative, and a liberal tells you it's easier to make money if you already have money--they're right.  If you're a liberal, and a conservative tells you there are freeloaders who leech off the system--they're right, too. 

·         Lots of people who don't agree with us turn out to be fairly intelligent and moral.  Even if someone has a belief you find repulsive and immoral, they are likely to be a decent person in other ways.  This seems obvious...if it's someone you know well.  "Well, Uncle George is racist, and that's disgusting, but he would do anything for his friends and family, and he's really smart about a lot of things".  That doesn't work if you don't know the person well.  "That George guy is a racist.  He's a complete maggot".  The problem with turning people into sinister, stupid, repulsive caricatures based on unsavory characteristics is: 1. It's inaccurate.  2. Deciding a person, or group of people, is bad through-and-through is the first step people take toward killing them.  Maybe that's a slippery slope argument, but that slope really can be slippery, because nasty arguments are self-reinforcing.  They have a tendency to escalate into even nastier arguments.  Push comes to shove.  When you hear someone talking about "idiot libtards" or "rethuglicans", it's not that hard to imagine them contemplating violence.

·         If it's common for people to be partly right, then the point of most debates should to compare notes, and try to work out the bigger picture each person is only partly seeing.  This is the point of great story Buddhists and Sufis like to tell:  A group of blind men, who have never heard of elephants, is given a chance to go and touch one for a few seconds.  One feels the trunk, and thinks an elephant must be a lot like a snake.  Another feels a leg, and decides it must be like a pillar.  One feels its tusks, and decides that it has horns, like a cow.  When the blind men start talking about the elephant, they immediately start arguing, each insisting that his impression is the right one.  Finally, they walk away from each other, muttering darkly about what idiots the others are.  What they should have done, clearly, is to be civil and compare notes.  If they had talked it over for a while, accepting that reality is bigger and more complicated than their simple impressions, they would have gotten a much better idea about elephants.  Let me be clear, though:  I'm not arguing for absolute "reality-is-socially-constructed" relativism here.  There really is an elephant, whether any blind men fondle it or not.  In real life, everyone isn't always partly right.  If someone tells you the earth is flat, they are wrong, period.  This is the blind man who never touches the elephant at all (perhaps because he's sure he knows what an elephant is).  People can certainly be plain wrong, but my point is that our intellectual opponents are partly right far more often than we give them credit for.  Reality is a big, weird elephant.  Nobody understands completely, but most people manage to touch it occasionally.

My point here is that we need to change how we see the goals of a debate.  It doesn't need to be a winner-take-all game.  Most debates can be win-win if we can be respectful, and if we can consider the possibility that we might be partly wrong, and our opponents partly right.  Even if we're completely right, we're more likely to convince our opponents if we're reasonable and polite.  Relating to people we don't agree with by vilifying and insulting them is, in a word, stupid. It's not just childish; it's actually irrational, because it's counterproductive.  If I decide I can't possibly be wrong, and that my opponents are all mean-spirited idiots who deserve nothing more than to be put in their place, I'm taking the lowest road I can find.  There are higher roads, and we need to make better use of them.

Timeline Site Gets a Facelift

 

I haven't been posting here much lately, because I've been working on updating one of my websites.  In an earlier post, I talked about how I had put my educational poster, Universal Heritage:  Timelines of the Universe, Life, and Humankind, online.  At first, I just made PDF's of all the timelines, and linked to those.  But all 16 of those were originally designed to fit on one poster, so they were a little, well, cramped looking.  I've expanded and updated them and turned them into actual webpages, and made the homepage a little more aesthetically pleasing and simple.  Since it isn't a poster anymore, I also moved from www.worldviewposters.com to a different domain: 

www.universetimelines.com

The whole thing is now full of hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles, so if you want to quickly find out more about something you see on one of the timelines, just click on it.  If you're wondering why I chose Wikipedia, I have a rather long-winded explanation here. 

Hope you enjoy looking at the new site, and if you have any questions or comments, please let me know at ross b mays at g mail dot com.

Dream Themes

I came home from work feeling like I'm getting a cold.  I crashed on the couch at 6:30, and then woke up at 11:30.  Since I was (and am) half-awake, I thought I would read a part of a book about dreams.  I just read a chapter about the common themes in dreams.  Apparently, being chased is one of the most common dream occurrences.  Being naked or underclothed in public is also extremely common, as is dreaming of being unprepared; such as having to take a test and realizing you haven't been going to class or doing homework.  Since I'm half-awake, I think now would be a good time to list some common themes in my dreams.  I'm going to minimally edit what follows, to preserve the loose-association style.  Not all blog posts have to be fully-baked, do they?

I am, in fact, often naked or just in underwear in dreams, although I don't recall these dreams very often when I'm awake.  When I do remember such a dream, then I remember that I have had a lot of dreams like this.  In the dreams, I'm walking around without nearly enough clothes on, but it's a more minor embarrassment than it would be in real life.  It's almost like an inconvencience:  "Here I am again in my underwear.  Sigh....".

I dream about towns a lot.  Interesting, quirky towns, with colorful houses, and steep streets.  These towns are hilly, with a very up-and-down, three-dimensional character.  The houses are stacked up the hillsides, and the streets are windy.

Occasionally I dream I have super-powers, often Spiderman-like (I'm a Spiderman fan from way back).  In these dreams I can usually jump very far, and I'm moving between closely-spaced buildings like Spiderman, not swinging on webs, but leaping, grabbing ledges and poles, swinging, and clinging to walls.  Once I dreamed that I was on top of a tall building, and I jumped off, and would drop several stories, grab a ledge to catch myself, and then drop again.  It was really fun.  Usually, I wake up from the superhero dreams very disappointed to find my superpowers gone.

I have related dreams where I have amazing abilities, but don't think of them as being "superpowers".  Once I had a dream where I was in a big field, with boulders scattered about a hundred feet apart.  I could jump from one to the other.  Once again, big fun.  I rarely have dreams where I can fly, although sometimes I have dreams where I can sort of swim through the air by moving my arms and legs. I had a dream once where I was in a hallway, and there were a several dogs leaping up at me.  I was able to swim-fly and stay above them, near the ceiling.

Quick listing of other themes:

Landscapes:  wide, western-type landscapes.  Sometimes very non-realistic, like looking at a map.

Mountains:  Steep, cone-shaped mountains, smaller than many real mountains, but still intimidating, because of their steepness.  Similar to Pinnacle Mountain in Arkansas, or Cuckold's Head in Newfoundland.  Just a few hundred feet tall, with rocky or grassy slopes.  Not many trees.

I've had a few dreams about the writer Annie Dillard, after reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (she's brilliant, and in the picture in the edition I had, quite attractive).  In one, she was a singer-songwriter, playing music I found really profound.

Sometimes I dream of reading, but I can't really read, because the words keep shifting and morphing on the page.  Sometimes I dream about finding a book or series of books that is exactly what I'm looking for.  I used to be fascinated by A.B. Guthrie's books about the west, especially the first one, The Big Sky.  Once I dreamed I had found a whole series of books about mountain men, very much like The Big Sky.

In some dreams I'm underground, in a labrinth-like space.  Sometimes I dream that these spaces are full of interesting things.  Sometimes I dream of vast junk-shops full of stuff I'm really interested in.  Sometimes these are normal stores, although with more rooms than usual.  Occasionally, they are underground.  Interesting that a lot of myths have underground regions, and subterranean races and characters.

This may be different from dreams, but sometimes as I'm going to sleep, I become aware of mental conversations I am having with myself.  I get the sense these were ongoing, and I simply started paying attention to them, perhaps because nothing else was distracting me.  Could it be that our minds really do have these internal conversations going on much of the time, but we only become aware of them as we're going to sleep?  I read a quote from Jung somewhere that said dreams are like the stars.  They are there all the time, but we can only perceive them at night, when the bright sunlight of daytime concerns fades away.  I need to find that quote.

A related thing is the crazy hypnogogic thoughts you have when you are falling asleep or waking up.  They are usually wildly illogical, but they may seem to make excellent sense at the time.  As I've gotten older, I've learned to recognize these as signs that I'm falling asleep.  I've recently noticed weird thoughts about my alarm clock (cell phone), as I'm waking up.  When I was thinking about buying a car, I was thinking about whether to hit snooze again wondering "Ten minutes.  Can I afford that interest rate?"  Lately, I've been really interested in language and linguistics.  I was sleeping late, and kept hitting snooze, and having weird, half-asleep thoughts each time.  I was thinking about the word "snooze", and getting it confused with the word "doze".  I was thinking of snooze have the past tense of "snoze", and thinking doze should have some other tense of "dooze".  All this seemed very important at the time.

Sometimes dreams, and the weird falling-asleep thoughts, can seem very meaningful, even if they turn out not to be in waking life.  Once I had a dream where I was thinking about the line in the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", that says "The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles".  I decided that he was talking about the Vandals, as in the marauding Germanic tribe.  And somehow that explained everything.

Sometimes a have dreams about St. John's, Newfoundland (I lived there for a couple of years).  It's one of those hilly towns I like to dream about.  It also has a harbor in the middle, and sometimes I dream that there are whales in the harbor.  I saw whales in Newfoundland, but never in the harbor.  Still, they are one of the most jaw-dropping sights I've ever seen; the way they emerge from the depths, and they are so huge that their back comes out of the water, and just keeps on moving past you.  Like a city bus suddenly surfaced and then dove again.  Somehow this seems to resonate with my idea of waking versus sleeping consciousness.  The unconscious is that mysterious, dark realm under the water.  Waking consciousness is whats above the water.  Sometimes huge, fantastic creatures emerge from the depths, and surface, and let you glimpse them before plunging into the depths again.  Could dark realms, such as underwater or underground, play a role in dreams because it is the way the mind sees its own more mysterious regions?

I also have the test anxiety dream.  In those dreams, it's the end of the semester, and I had forgotten that I was even supposed to be going to this particular class.  It's almost always a math class, because I hate math and am terrible at it.

Another anxiety dream I have, which evokes a vague sense of embarrassed despair, sort of like the "naked in public" dreams, is a dream that I have had to go back to high school.  I flunked out of college, and had to finish high school.  This is more relevant for me than for most people, because I actually did leave high school after my junior year, to go to college.  I didn't graduate high school, and a lot of people thought I would regret it.  I didn't.  But that gives it the extra layer of embarrassment, because in the dreams I'm back amongst all the high school people, and many of them have this "I told you so" attitude about it.  Horrifying.

Some things in waking life seem very dreamlike to me, whether or not I dream about them.  Subways seem incredibly dreamlike.  The way they move, much more soundlessly than you expect for something that big.  Also the way both ends look the same, so as they leave the terminal they look like they are going backwards, and the film in playing in reverse.  The way the air pressure changes in the terminal when they arrive and depart.  The way, when you're on a subway, that the lights and scenes you are passing flash on and off, alternating between light and dark.  Of course, subway terminals are underground, so that makes them resemble real dreams.  The way you descend into the depths, on escalators, which give you a dream-like sense of disconnected motion anyway.  One of the most dreamlike things I've ever experienced is taking an really long escalator (like 250 feet) into a deep underground subway terminal in Hungary.  There was a woman talking on the intercom in Hungarian, which sounded exotic and sort of Dracula-sinister to me (Yeah, I know Transylvania is in Romania, not Hungary, and Romanian is nothing like Hungarian).  Anyway, I don't think I've ever dreamed about a subway, that I can recall.  I just feel like I'm dreaming when I'm riding one or waiting for one.

The western United States, with its unbelievably wide, often freakish landscapes, also makes me feel like I'm dreaming, because it seems so much larger than life.  You're constantly half-thinking that it can't be real; it's too big.  But it is real.  It's just too much to wrap your head around.  Before I ever saw the west, I had dreams about steep hills, and dark valleys, like in Arkansas.  After I saw the west, I kept on dreaming about the hills and valleys, but I also started dreaming of vast western-type landscapes.

Of course, I often dream about interactions with other people.  But this opens a whole new realm, which I'm too tired to get into right now.

OK, now I'm more half-asleep than half-awake.  Which only makes sense if you are half-asleep.  So I'm going back to bed.  Maybe I'll post this in the morning, and ask people what they dream about.  How about it, tomorrow morning people?  What are some of your dream themes?