There are people worth listening to, but not worth arguing with. You know the type: the least disagreement provokes a response that the other person cannot admit a 1% chance they are 1% wrong; they cannot accept that you have any reasonable point or decent motivation; they resort quickly to childish insult. If challenged on this last, they usually double down and become even more sophomoric. I suspect they think this is actually a virtue - that they don't suffer fools gladly, that they can dispatch others quickly, that they have biting wit. (Well, biting, anyway.) Evidence of their great intelligence.
I have some tendency to this myself, I suppose, being more worth listening to than arguing with. I hope not to the extreme I am thinking of in another, though.
Our preferred narrative is that it is those who can listen, be civil, and fight fair are the smarter ones. They are the ones who are really knowledgeable, we tell ourselves. But is that actually so? In theory we say it should be, but is there actually a correlation? Of the five psychiatrists I have learned the most from, three were very able to listen and charming in their replies, one was intermittently good at it, but had a fairly narrow range of people he respected, and the last was frankly horrible to deal with. He was forever condescending and snide and cutting others off when he believed he understood their point (though he hadn't always). Yet he was worth listening to for all that.
Of those I read or hear, those I meet in a dozen live venues where brilliance might be shown, or those I knew in Prometheus, I can find examples of both types in all groups.
I would be interested what your personal experiences are with this.
I recognize some of those guys, except they were physicists.
ReplyDeleteThere was one fellow in particular who seemed to regard any meeting that lacked his correction as a failure, and seemed to be unable to notice when the other fellow was actually agreeing with him in different language. But you couldn't tune him out, because maybe a third of the time he'd lit on something important that everybody else had missed.
In an earlier collaboration, one scientist offered herself as candidate for spokesman, citing her experience raising children as an indication that she could deal with immature collaborators. (She didn't get the post.)
Hmm. It was a physicist who sparked this line of thought.
ReplyDeleteAs to the woman who offered the spokesperson reasoning - she was absolutely right, but no one would want to admit it. She should have known that.
She called them children (acting like children, specifically) and they didn't like that...
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me of a discussion of 40 years ago that was heating up to argument until I suddenly heard what he was saying--and he was agreeing with me.
ReplyDeleteAin't whatcha say, it's the way that ya say it...
ReplyDeleteI guess you mean me. I took a look at your comments about Iraq on this blog. I think that arguing with you would not be very fruitful, since we don't seem to using the same set of facts. I don't just mean that we're emphasizing different facts, although surely there's some of that - I mean that you think certain things happened and I'm pretty sure that different things happened. I could put it more strongly.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to be polite.
You were the occasion but not the entirety, and I intentionally did not name you for a couple of reasons.
ReplyDeleteI think some of your facts are true - and I have changed my mind about 20% from what you likely found in my earlier posts. some of what you say is indeed uncomfortable for a person in my position to try and answer.
My objection was the zero-truth-values assertions you made. It was necessary to your clever premise of relating the statements about the war to a Borges-style Garden of Forking Paths. But such things are awfully tough to support when it comes down to it.
Thank you for the compliment of the energy you put into looking up what I actually wrote, or some portion of it. Most folks don't. My overall point throughout the lead-up and execution was to separate the imagined moral questions from the practical ones. There was a lot of Just War rhetoric and reflexive antiwar commentary that dominated, and was not accurate. I thought the moral case was actually pretty easy to make, once the debris was cleared away. Nations treat each other badly, and a good case can be made that a lot of invasions might be justified. Whether they are a good idea is an entirely different matter. The question for me was always "Is this wise?", it being the Middle East, where good sense goes to die, after all. Good wars have terrible unexpected consequences and bad wars sometimes fix things better than we thought. It's never clean, and it's always a balancing act.
Thanks again.