[hn_throwaway_99]

>> everyone argues from an emotional perspective.

> Certainly you'd agree that there's a scale? It's not black and white. I will edit this part to make that more clear.

Actually, not really. You seem to be missing my primary point, which is that thinking that things lie along a single scale where on one hand you have "pure, platonic ideal of reason" and on the other end you have "emotional hysterics". I don't think it works that way. I think the sibling commenter put it best:

>> everyone argues from an emotional perspective

> You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.

That is, I think step one is try to understand why you (and your debate partner) are emotionally incentivized to care about the topic in the first place.

[joe_the_user]

>> everyone argues from an emotional perspective

> You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.

The thing is, if you're talking about an average online debater, their emotional motivation is likely quite confused. The emotional distribution might be: 20% wanting to appear smart/reasonable, 30% wanting to insult their idea of bad people, 30% wanting to reinforce their lifestyle as valid, etc or whatever. With that, you could can could translate liamrosen's comment to say "if they're motivated 30% to appear smart, you can involve them in the framework" and once you involve the person, Cialdini's commitment and consistency can strong motivators to keep them there.

That said, I think this does raise the point that there are other good way to deal with the emotions behinds arguments that aren't mentioned in liamrosen's essay (the OP). One standard approach to determine the emotion behind a given irrational claim, acknowledge the emotion, sympathize with it and then go back and show that the original claim is unnecessary.

[cycomanic]

> > You kind of have to. If you were not emotionally invested in some way, you wouldn’t be arguing.

> That is, I think step one is try to understand why you (and your debate partner) are emotionally incentivized to care about the topic in the first place.

I think this is excellent advise. To add to this, I think often minor details, like the use of some word or terminology can trigger an immediate "emotional reject" response. It then becomes impossible to have a constructive debate because the person will reject all arguments based on that emotional reaction to the minor trigger. It then is very helpful to trace back to the source of the reaction and e.g. agree on different terminology.

[phobosanomaly]

Sometimes I use emotion in an argument to create ambiguity that the other party fills with some new point.

So, for example, I'm arguing something, I run out of good argument. I dodge by making a vague, emotional point. Then the other party will construct a new argument based on my vague emotional point. This lets me reset and construct a new argument.

It's a way to keep arguing when following a given point down the rabbit hole gets stale.

[croon]

Are you arguing to win or arguing to learn something/strengthen your argument? Because what you describe seems detrimental to the latter.

[phobosanomaly]

It's to learn, and to play with whatever point we're arguing from different angles.

When the point has been prodded to death by some argument, it lets your fellow arguer back-up and poke it from another side. Maybe my argument is wrong, but myself and the person I'm arguing with haven't figured out exactly why yet. This lets us keep circling looking for weak points.

Hopefully over the course of that we both come away with a deeper understanding of the idea itself.

I think of it like when E. coli run and tumble over the course of the hunt for food. Sometimes a random walk is a weirdly great way to discover the mechanism of how an idea works or doesn't work. I'm just occasionally flipping the switch on the 'tumble' circuit: https://www.mit.edu/~kardar/teaching/projects/chemotaxis(And...