Listening

What is Knowledge?

Toolbelt of Knowledge: Practices
Skepticism
Listening
Deconstruction
Rationality
Mindfulness
Steel Manning
Common Sense

One undervalued resource on the quest for understanding is learning from people with views different from our own. We usually spend our time around people who agree with us on most topics, and we avoid talking about what we disagree about. But this is not a productive way to live. When people who agree get together, they move toward more extreme versions of what they already believed, and when people who disagree get together, they mellow each other out and move toward the middle. Because of this, it is important to have uncomfortable conversations with people we disagree with.

Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, and Eric Weinstein, discussing free will, religion, and other topics on the Waking Up Podcast.

What makes these conversations so uncomfortable? It is because when we hear statements we disagree with, we feel disgust. Pay attention to what you are feeling when you read the following words: capitalism, socialism, climate change, abortion, gun rights. Chances are, you felt something uncomfortable stirring inside you from at least one of these things. Don’t worry, I won’t talk about any of them today. I just want to show you what I mean, so that when you feel it during a discussion, you can recognize it, put it aside, and focus on the logical points of the discussion rather than your discomfort.

On the flip side, we are delighted to hear ideas and opinions we agree with. It is like eating something delicious. These two emotions push us into confirmation bias, where we pay attention to evidence that supports ideas we agree with, and ignore and avoid evidence that supports ideas we disagree with. Confirmation bias is one of many cognitive biases, shortcomings in our brain that motivate us to believe things, or continue believing things we already believe, for bad or insufficient reasons.

Even if you train your mind to reason and recognize cognfirmation bias, you aren’t immune to it. There is only one inoculation, and that is to seek out people who think differently from you and listen to what they have to say. Your beliefs might seem airtight, but that might be because there is something you are overlooking, which somebody else knows. These beliefs might be anything—religious, political, scientific, philosophical, moral, practical, etc. As knowledge seekers, we wish to mold our beliefs to Reality, not try to will Reality to conform to our beliefs. To best do this, we need to practice listening in the right way, looking out for special signs, and remembering that our goal is to enrich ourselves, not to change somebody else’s mind.

The first thing to have in mind is that people assume that those they are talking to are on the same page. This is by no means true. Try talking to someone from a religion you don’t belong to, and it sounds like pure gibberish. When you converse, make sure to ask questions like, “what do you mean by this?” and “could you explain that in another way?” Not only will this help you understand the other person, but it may prompt them to think of their own beliefs in ways they never have before.

Dennis Prager of Prager U, Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report, and Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society discuss the relationship between God and morality.

If you want to explain your point of view to someone who disagrees with you, you want them to be open and willing to listen. The first way to do this is to treat them respectfully, showing that you value them as a person and don’t belittle them for their opinions. This is necessary if you want to get anywhere at all. After that, an extremely powerful tool is called the steel man argument. In contrast with the straw man fallacy, a steel man is where you explain someone else’s view in a way that they wholeheartedly agree with. Once you have done this, they will be more likely to be open to your counterarguments.

Many times, when we disagree with something the moment we hear it for the first time, it might be because if it were true, it would mean something else we believe is not true. Usually, we don’t consciously know which belief is being threatened, but have only a vague sense that something is wrong. This makes us uncomfortable, but instead of a mere distaste like we talked about earlier, we get a headache. Trying to hold two ideas in our head at once that contradict each other gives us physical pain. This phenomenon is called cognitive dissonance.

Though cognitive dissonance is painful, we should train ourselves to embrace it, because it is a beacon that points to a deeper knowledge of the Truth. If we follow it, we will find ourselves weighing the new things we learn against our deep convictions, and sometimes, if the evidence is strong enough and we’re humble enough, we allow our convictions to change.

Taking your deepest convictions from their sacred pedestal and opening them up to be tested and possibly falsified can be frightening. When I first questioned the foundation of all my knowledge, and it crumbled before my eyes, I almost shut down. What kept me going was the hope that even though I was wrong about everything, there was a Truth out there somewhere, and I could stumble my way toward it by building up a set of tools to lay a new foundation that could endure or adapt to anything that was thrown at it.

Professor of Psychology Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan Experience

It’s tempting to think to yourself, “I already know this, but this other person I know really needs to hear it.” But we all need to hear it, and we all need to keep practicing listening. You’ll find that if you are good at listening, it does not bother you as much if other people are not.

It is okay to let somebody else be wrong, even about facts. We have an inbuilt desire for everyone to accept what is true, especially if they are someone we respect and care about. However, we must remember that there is nothing magical about facts that make them believable by themselves. We need the broader context and critical thought to see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Sometimes our brains fail us, or we fall to biases, or we simply don’t have enough information to figure out the answer. The poet Alexander Pope once wrote, “To err is human.” Remember that you are talking to this person to learn from them, not to persuade them of your own beliefs.

The last important part of listening is knowing when not to listen. It may be uncomfortable to hear someone’s point of view if they disagree with you on certain issues, or if they are not good at having productive conversations, but these conversations are still worth having. But there will be times when someone is not interested in having an honest conversation with you, and their aim is to insult or to get you to spend money. When you sense this, there is nothing for you to learn from them, and you can walk away.