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Unfortunately, complexifying arguments weakens your ability to invest in any one argument, and the reality is most people don't themselves invest time in any more than one. Look at the abortion debate. One side says the most important issue is women's bodily autonomy. The other side ignores this argument entirely and focuses on "abortion is murder", which is more than enough to catalyze their voting base into disregarding all other arguments.

I'm not saying it's not good to have a complex argument. I am questioning whether it's ultimately going to be the most effective strategy here.




So the complexity is for people in the know. The strategy is to pick the topic that matters most to your audience. That's why I said that if you dislike any singular one of the problems it is enough to be against the system. If you don't know your audience, don't pigeonhole your argument. That's all I'm saying here. Doesn't need to be complex, despite the issue being so. But also you're complexifying my argument.

I would also argue that part of the reason we've gotten to this point is because we try to hide complexity from people. People are both smarter and dumber than you think. But people don't like to be treated like they are dumb, so don't.


Audience-specific arguments are definitely a good way to compartmentalize complexity. So niche communities are covered more effectively, but which argument should CNN choose? MSNBC? Other mainstream news sources with large audiences?

> But also you're complexifying my argument.

Assume good faith, I'm not trying to argue against you, but reach a novel conclusion by discussing with you. This is why my reply began with "I don't know".

> But people don't like to be treated like they are dumb, so don't.

I don't assume a given individual is dumb, and I reject such a generalized classification. Very intelligent people can have extremely simple perspectives about issues outside of their expertise. Simplicity/complexity is not strictly related to intelligence. It's far more a function of time and available energy one has to spend learning about an issue. I'd prefer to dispense with the metric of intelligence altogether and focus on reduction of wasted complexity.


> but which argument should CNN choose? MSNBC? Other mainstream news sources with large audiences?

I would expect them to cover multiple points, not just one. The news's job is to distill complex topics to a wide audience. I fully expect them to talk about the major points: turnkey tyranny, nation state actors, and how this harms children. Assuming good faith. Covering a singular aspect is not in their cards as they are disseminating information to the masses.

> I'm not trying to argue against you, but reach a novel conclusion by discussing with you.

I misunderstood the sentiment, sorry. But I'm not trying to call you dumb or attack you.

> I'd prefer to dispense with the metric of intelligence altogether and focus on reduction of wasted complexity.

I'm totally fine doing this.

> It's far more a function of time and available energy one has to spend learning about an issue.

But this is also why I am advocating for this strategy. If the news isn't going to distill this information to the masses then it is our job as the tech literate crowd to do so. Since it specifically is a topic we are willing to spend more time and energy on to understand. Unfortunately that also means we need to spend more time and energy understanding our perspective audiences and take extra care to make arguments that are both informative and relevant to them. The advantage of our position, over the news, is that we have smaller audiences and so it is easier to be adaptive. But our disadvantage is our smaller audiences, lower reach.


Just playing devil's advocate, but you say the one side ignore women's autonomy in favor "murder" can also be flipped in saying that focusing on autonomy is ignoring the murder aspect.

In this day and age, everyone talks past each other, but nobody hears the other regardless of the topic.


You're absolutely correct. In my case, I was forced against my will to attend a March for Life event in Washington, DC 12 years ago. I refused to hold any signs or chant anything, but I got intimate experience with the rhetoric used in these protests.

I also have had an abortion so I have seen the protests from the other side as well. Almost got in a fist fight with a grown man who spit on my girlfriend, but opted to get a security guard to call the police instead.

My experience led to me oversimplifying the argument to make a point, but it's definitely more nuanced.


> My experience led to me oversimplifying the argument to make a point, but it's definitely more nuanced.

I'm finding that as information is becoming increasingly accessible that this seems to be becoming more common: oversimplification. Maybe this is through attempts to understand more about our world but not having enough time to learn the nuance. Maybe willful ignorance. Maybe the disseminators of knowledge are bad (quality) or bad actors. Probably all the above and more. But I do know that there are plenty who use these concepts to deceive us. It is easy to see that authoritarian powers love to overly simplify concepts and create hard boundaries: defining good and evil. I do think the cure to this is encouraging nuanced discussions. But the cure is much harder to take than the poison. So I'm not sure if there's a better solution.


You're right, but I would avoid the phrase "devil's advocate" because it often indicates something armchair "I want to argue just to argue" is coming next, not something more nuanced. I just mention this because at the root of what you're talking about is psychological priming and we should be aware of it when learning how to communicate better. I think people are ignoring the arguments of the other sides and frequently talking past one another because of this priming effect. Since communication has a substantial amount of implicit information being passed (a lot more than we give it credit for) this priming can make us make faulty assumptions about another's positions.

To bring up another very clear example of people talking past one another is whenever anyone discusses "capitalism" or "socialism", as the two main groups are typically using different definitions for each word. While one may recognize this, neither is willing to discuss with a more unified definition or listen to the other's arguments under the definition that they are using. Which breaks down communication.

After all, communication is in 3 parts: 1) what you intend to say (the idea in your head), 2) what you actually say (the thought embedded/encoded into language), 3) what is head (the language decoded into the listener's brain). The system is highly noisy at each step and assumptions are made by our minds in attempts to extract the signal from the noise. But this is probably just fancier language to explain the concept of good faith.


How about we just continue using well-known idioms?

I think you should avoid the phrase "avoid the phrase" because that indicates that you just don't want to talk about the phrase due to childhood issues.

But does it really?




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