How to communicate with people who think you're just uneducated on their position? - Religion, politics, social issues, fitness, it could be anything, but they think you just don't understand.

[greatUncleShitHeel]

If you actually managed to do that, you'd just realize that their core values are so far removed from yours, you will just end up unearthing more things they believe which you will find contemptuous. This is were violent conflict comes into the picture.

This is an astute and concise observation.

Anyways, controversial maybe but I have found in some situations, it pays to act "stupid" when you question them. That way they don't get defensive, but they will still have to think about how they answer you. Example, if talking about Muhammad, if they said he married a 6 year old girl, not slept with her when she was 9, I might say "Oh, I see. I wonder why an adult needs to marry a child though? That's kind of weird... What do you think they did as a married couple at that age?" Even if they can't come up with an answer, I know they're thinking about it and feeling uneasy because they can't come up with a response that squares up with their beliefs.

I take the same tact. I act stupid and simply imply I'm ignorant, lets people talk their way up shit creek.

 

[NoReturn]

If you actually managed to do that, you'd just realize that their core values are so far removed from yours, you will just end up unearthing more things they believe which you will find contemptuous. This is were violent conflict comes into the picture.

That concern is part of why I wanted to seek the opinions of others on the topic.

The only real way to do it is by deconstructing things all the way down to the fundamental disagreement, but usually if someone is arguing politics they aren't going to entertain that kind of talk to that conclusion, and even if they are it's often unwise if your fundamental disagreement is something like "I don't believe all humans are equal"

This is close to what I've been thinking about irl. One opinion I hold, for example, is that abortion is murder, but that also sometimes murder is acceptable. This seems like one of those fundamental "What is a life?" questions where I know I'm not going to convince people of my opinion on either of those two statements if they have a core belief that includes one or the other.

Well first off you really shouldn't expect that they would assume you know what they know. Nor should you just patently assume that you fully understand their position from the get-go.

You've got me on the second part, I guess. Is there any way to skip the first bit when the case may be the second one?
In the case of the OP, I don't want to have to sit through someone telling me that pedophiles are "just" sick in the head. I already understand their perspective that pedophilia is a "brain difference", but I don't accept that this then necessarily means we need to tolerate them living among us.

 

[A Very Big Fish]

Grunt and pound on your chest with your fists to assert dominance.

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

play dumb

 

[CoolFool]

In the case of the OP, I don't want to have to sit through someone telling me that pedophiles are "just" sick in the head. I already understand their perspective that pedophilia is a "brain difference", but I don't accept that this then necessarily means we need to tolerate them living among us.

Tbh topics about sexual stuff, especially fetishes and paraphilias, are really hard to talk about with average people because it requires having prior knowledge of how they actually function, which the average person simply does not have. In my SJW phase, I had zero knowledge about what those terms even were or how they worked. For example, I did not know that people have "kinks" or fetishes in clusters. Someone with a fetish for choking someone isn't going to stop there, they will also typically have other violent fetishes like hitting, spitting, cutting, etc. too. Even if you do manage to stop and realize that "Huh, isn't it weird how people who like choking also seem to really like hitting and spitting too?", you likely won't connect the dots as to why that is and why it should be a cause for concern.

This is the trouble I run into when I try to explain to your average person why it's concerning when a grown man wants to wear women's clothes and go into women's resterooms. They think, "What's wrong with a man wearing whatever makes him happy?" or "If they aren't doing anything weird in the bathroom, who cares?" They don't understand that these men have a sexual fetish for seeing themself as a "woman" or that they get aroused evading women's spaces and making women uncomfortable.

It's very frustrating. Especially when it comes to recent pedo discussions. A lot of people thinks pedos are just innocent people that can't help that they are attracted to kids. They don't understand that pedos are not normal people that were simply dealt a bad hand, they are sexual degenerates that are into a lot of gross stuff and into corrupting anything that is pure, including children.

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

Is there any way to skip the first bit when the case may be the second one?

That's where the "patience" part comes in. It's generally preferred that you just listen to the argument they're making if you expect them to listen to yours.
They don't necessarily know what arguments you have and have not been exposed to.

Now, sure, you could always sacrifice some civility for the sake of time. If they're in the middle of making a familiar argument and it's going to take more time than you have patience for them to finish, you could try to politely interject that you know where this is going and respond to the point they're making.
Sometimes an argument is mentioned, not because they don't think you've heard it, but because they want to know how you would respond to it.

 

[parsnip]

I just ask questions mostly. I figure if I ask the right ones maybe they'll question their ideas, and hell, maybe their answers will be so good I'll change my mind.
The only person I'll energetically debate with is my one daughter because she's so god damn smart I love listening to her argue her points.

 

[Otterly]

I have thought a lot about this. This will be long, sorry.
. Most people are not capable of having the kind of conversation you want to have, that goes ‘I believe x, you believe y, let’s discuss and I may change my mind.’ They have a set of opinions, and they will not change them until
1. Forced to
2. Genuinely walking to the conclusion themselves
3. Consensus changes

This rigidity of belief I think has worsened the last twenty years or so because of how social engineering makes social consensus. Which is basically this;

1. Set of opinions is put forth by authority, total control of mass media
2. All are made to put opinions in public
3. A group is empowered as untouchable and to enforce step 4
4. Dissenting opinions are identified and subjected to cancellation
5. Repeat until consensus, eventually changing what people are allowed to say in public changes how people think.

One of the key ways the above is done is by linking opinions to morals and group identity. If you hold the sanctioned opinions you are a good person. Any deviation, bad, to be outcast. —-> groupthink—-> burn the witch,

So now you have people completely entrenched in opinions in a way I don’t think we did so much before because now red team or blue isn’t simply who you vote for it’s who you ARE and that allows you to pitch opposing opinions as existential threats. You can see this in how people respond to disagreement. People not wanting the covid shots are plague rats who are going to kill grandma. People who do t think men magically turn into women when they put a frock in are evil transphobes ready to round people up and put them in camps. The rhetoric escalates, you see this hysterical camps/our very existence! stuff everywhere.

So, in that light how do you change people’s minds? Well, a lot of people are too far gone, they will not see the truth if it’s in front of them. Some of the rest can be reached but there are a few rules.

1. Never, ever insist the person is wrong. You cannot make 98% of people admit they fucked up they just can’t do it. You can make them admit they were lied to, or they didn’t realise, so that’s the approach you take. Here’s how I’ve done it with covid.

1. Start with a thing everyone can get behind. I used corruption because we all know people are corrupt. So i started with ‘Did you see that PPE contract they gave to their neighbour? Disgraceful isn’t it?’ Or ‘and they’ve locked us all down but they’re out shagging their mistress, one rule for the rich isn’t it and another for the rest of us’
They will agree, everyone knows politicians are corrupt and you’ve planted a seed. You then change the subject. And next time you pick another corruption story but with a thing that’ll just hint at it all being bullshit. And you chip and chip and you walk them there. At some point you’ll make a prediction, I said they’ll be using bloody phones to make us tracked everywhere. And you go away and they will see it come true. And you keeeeeep chipping away. And eventually, they’ll start connecting dots. At that point you can have a few direct examples of fuck ups, it helps if you have authority, what I do I think helped because people who know me know I’m not hysterical.

I’ve done this with the Troon thing too. You cannot dive in and show people the true horror. They can’t deal with it. You start small. ‘Oh no he’s still got his bits, they don’t often actually cut them off …. yes in the girls change rooms and he’s fully male…’ you go from there. They’ll see stuff in the paper and they’ll gradually start seeing it everywhere. I peak transfer an awful lot of people like this.

Anyway sorry that was ridiculously long.

 

[NoReturn]

Sometimes an argument is mentioned, not because they don't think you've heard it, but because they want to know how you would respond to it.

That's a really good point. That seems obvious in hindsight.
I feel autistic as shit for not realizing it. Thank you for helping me.

. Most people are not capable of having the kind of conversation you want to have, that goes ‘I believe x, you believe y, let’s discuss and I may change my mind.’ They have a set of opinions, and they will not change them until

One of the key ways the above is done is by linking opinions to morals and group identity. If you hold the sanctioned opinions you are a good person. Any deviation, bad, to be outcast. —-> groupthink—-> burn the witch,

So then, does this also tie into what @Penis Drager 2.0 was talking about above? That one of the "benefits" to getting people's reactions to listing their arguments (even if those arguments are tired as hell, or the sort of thing we both know is already all over the media, etc) is that they're trying to identify heretics?

 

[オプセック]

This is close to what I've been thinking about irl. One opinion I hold, for example, is that abortion is murder, but that also sometimes murder is acceptable. This seems like one of those fundamental "What is a life?" questions where I know I'm not going to convince people of my opinion on either of those two statements if they have a core belief that includes one or the other.

Oh, I hate that one. I actually believe you can only murder a person, but I don't know when person hood is acquired, so I don't know when snuffing a babe is still "cool" and likewise I don't really know when vegans are in the right - the sheer reeeing and outbursts these types of discussions can trigger in groups of more than 3 people - not even speaking of the jobs one can lose this way - are just not worth the hassle, so my moral framework remains half finished, unchecked and tethered to whatever the state defines as murder.

 

[Otterly]

that they're trying to identify heretics?

Yes. Which is why putting all the opinions online is encouraged. One thing I really notice about younger people at work is they cannot keep quiet about anything. The power level is just there in glorious Technicolor. They shout it all out, the pronouns and the pins and the Facebook/social media frames. You know what they think about everything.
It makes them very vulnerable.

 

[NoReturn]

Yes. Which is why putting all the opinions online is encouraged. One thing I really notice about younger people at work is they cannot keep quiet about anything. The power level is just there in glorious Technicolor. They shout it all out, the pronouns and the pins and the Facebook/social media frames. You know what they think about everything.
It makes them very vulnerable.

Flipping it around, this kind of implies they're using those pins to protect themselves, too.
When weebs in the 2000s put pins on their bags, it was to find other weebs. I think I've been seeing the genderpins similarly, but maybe they're not. Maybe they are also (or instead) a "Please don't hurt me" sign.
A pride flag pin signals they're "safe". A rainbow accessory or piece of equipment (like those lanyards people wear for work in the medical field) says "Hey, I'm on your side." to the people they interact with on a daily basis.

Reminds me of

 

[オプセック]

Tbh topics about sexual stuff, especially fetishes and paraphilias, are really hard to talk about with average people because it requires having prior knowledge of how they actually function, which the average person simply does not have. In my SJW phase, I had zero knowledge about what those terms even were or how they worked. For example, I did not know that people have "kinks" or fetishes in clusters. Someone with a fetish for choking someone isn't going to stop there, they will also typically have other violent fetishes like hitting, spitting, cutting, etc. too.

I don't want to fight you on this and you might even agree with me here, but that's not something you didn't know, you just unlearned that. Every child knows that behavior patterns cluster, that's survival instinct - you just unlearned a fundamental observation:
It's not that people aren't privy to the ins and outs of - in this example - sexuality and how it works, they are lying to your face about it, because everybody has a pony in the race and in your example it was saying the right thing to virtue signal (just taking you up on that SJW thing there).

Even if you do manage to stop and realize that "Huh, isn't it weird how people who like choking also seem to really like hitting and spitting too?", you likely won't connect the dots as to why that is and why it should be a cause for concern.

We don't know why, that's the problem.
We might discuss ideas as to why, but that naive observation alone is the point at which discussion often stops and the lies and self delusion begin, people will contest the observation - gas light everyone, before it even starts - they know what they are doing.
Going with that example, my guess:
Everyone who laughed at tom and jerry as a child has a working theory as to why.
Lay people know that someone who indulges his sadistic impulses at the cost of some "sucker" who takes it without resistance, will try and go further and further.
But we act as if we need to consult experts on the most simple things now.

It's not only the deference to authority, one often sees,
people aslo stopped discussing ideas about a shared perception of reality in favor of discussing the perception itself.
That's one key issue. Not only are moral axioms highly divergent, people become more and more isolated in their perception of reality, because they now can get turbo brainwormed in facebook boomer groups or online coordinated, interest filtered irl echo chambers. Same with dating apps.
The only shared values are money and vague 9-5 work ethic memes, the rest is diversified niche catering, placating people by isolating them into little, personalized mindscapes - the price is the ability to have fundamental meetings of minds.

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

So then, does this also tie into what @Penis Drager 2.0 was talking about above? That one of the "benefits" to getting people's reactions to listing their arguments (even if those arguments are tired as hell, or the sort of thing we both know is already all over the media, etc) is that they're trying to identify heretics?

Yes. Which is why putting all the opinions online is encouraged. One thing I really notice about younger people at work is they cannot keep quiet about anything. The power level is just there in glorious Technicolor. They shout it all out, the pronouns and the pins and the Facebook/social media frames. You know what they think about everything.
It makes them very vulnerable.

I wouldn't necessarily go that far with it. I, perhaps naively, would rather start from the assumption that the other person is arguing in good faith unless otherwise noted.

A big part of having a productive discussion is identifying exactly where the set of shared presuppositions end. Otherwise you just end up talking past each other without ever addressing the core of where the disagreement lies. And that's sort of what these canned responses are for.
It's mostly a formality where [statement A] gets responded to with [statement B] and so on until you get to some sort of branching point where you might argue [statement C_1] or [statement C_2]. And which of those two you employ might reveal which subgroup of dissident you happen to be. The script more or less continues until one party says something the other hasn't been handed a prewritten reply for. And that is the moment the real discussion begins.

It might sound gay and tedious. And that's because it is. But it's sort of the most natural way to go about it without doing the whole "debate club" thing where you both agree to make an opening statement and all that jazz.

 

[CoolFool]

I don't want to fight you on this and you might even agree with me here, but that's not something you didn't know, you just unlearned that. Every child knows that behavior patterns cluster, that's survival instinct

I don't disagree. The human brain is complex. Even if we have a gut feeling about something, we use logic and reasoning to talk ourselves out of it. For example, you see an ugly man and he instantly gives you the creeps. That's the knee jerk response. But then you reason to yourself why that may not be the case: He's not actually doing anything, he's just standing there minding his own business. He can't help how his face looks, it naturally looks ugly. He's probably harmless. Etc. There's a reason we do this, because sometimes our "gut instinct" is wrong and it makes sense to stop and think before reacting to every little thing that causes us alarm.

But there's also times where we ignore our instincts at our own peril. There is a good book called "The Gift of Fear" that explains this phenomenon, and how a lot of people have, as you said, unlearned a very useful survival skill. The book gives several real world examples where people ignored their gut feelings about someone and ended up hurt or dead because of it. I recommend this book, since it gives good advice on how to tell when you're being stupid and when you should listen. It was written in the 90s but it is still very relevant today, maybe even more so with all this troon nonsense that is being forced upon us.

We don't know why, that's the problem.

I think we're saying the same things. My point was that even if you notice a pattern (In this case, everyone with one type of fetish will also have related fetishes), it's unlikely that you will stop and think about why people have fetishes in groups rather than having one fetish by itself. Why can't Bob simply like choking but otherwise he is completely vanilla in the bedroom? As you mentioned, if you even make it to this point of questioning, you'll likely stop right there and come up with an excuse that's been told to you by other people: "Bob is just very sex positive, that's why he has so many kinks!" or "Yeah it's weird that every person I meet with these fetishes are weirdos but that's cis hetnormative thinking, I can't be judgemental!".

people aslo stopped discussing ideas about a shared perception of reality in favor of discussing the perception itself.
That's one key issue. Not only are moral axioms highly divergent, people become more and more isolated in their perception of reality, because they now can get turbo brainwormed in facebook boomer groups or online coordinated, interest filtered irl echo chambers.

Literally this:

 

[NoReturn]

It's mostly a formality where [statement A] gets responded to with [statement B] and so on until you get to some sort of branching point where you might argue [statement C_1] or [statement C_2]. And which of those two you employ might reveal which subgroup of dissident you happen to be. The script more or less continues until one party says something the other hasn't been handed a prewritten reply for. And that is the moment the real discussion begins.

But there's also times where we ignore our instincts at our own peril. There is a good book called "The Gift of Fear" that explains this phenomenon, and how a lot of people have, as you said, unlearned a very useful survival skill. The book gives several real world examples where people ignored their gut feelings about someone and ended up hurt or dead because of it. I recommend this book, since it gives good advice on how to tell when you're being stupid and when you should listen. It was written in the 90s but it is still very relevant today, maybe even more so with all this troon nonsense that is being forced upon us.

I'm glad you brought this up. I'm not sure if we've completely overcorrected, but I am certain that there are downsides to raising children to ignore those instincts and to "get comfortable being uncomfortable". It can be very dangerous and even debilitating later in life.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Use logic and reason to decimate them, and when they resort to logical fallacies point it out. It won't work but you'll be right, they'll know it, and so will any observers.

 

[Pedophobe]

The Steelman Argument is the opposite of the Strawman Argument. It involves developing, in your own words, the strongest, honestest, most comprehensive and most easily understandable version of their actual position and then presenting it to them in a way that emphasizes what you think is wrong with it. Be prepared with multiple version of the Steelman at ready for when they try to Move the Goalposts by Retreating to the Bailey so you can instantly adapt your arguments to their shifting positions.

Basically if you're well educated enough on their position you should be able to explain it to them better than they can themselves (coz you're really smart) while slipstreaming in all the reasons they're wrong as you go.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

The Steelman Argument is the opposite of the Strawman Argument. It involves developing, in your own words, the strongest, honestest, most comprehensive and most easily understandable version of their actual position and then presenting it to them in a way that emphasizes what you think is wrong with it. Be prepared with multiple version of the Steelman at ready for when they try to Move the Goalposts by Retreating to the Bailey so you can instantly adapt your arguments to their shifting positions.

Basically if you're well educated enough on their position you should be able to explain it to them better than they can themselves (coz you're really smart) while slipstreaming in all the reasons they're wrong as you go.

This is presuming that you do know things so much better. It's like the idea in self defense that you should subdue people without hurting them. It's true that you should if possible, but it is only realistic if there is a very significant skill/strength gap.

And if there is, there is some useful advice to give but not much, since it's already an assymetric position. You can mr. Miyagi the hell out of things when you're vastly superior. But when you're more evenly matched, things are likely to get more chaotic and you'll both get some scraps.

As for OP, how to deal with someone that thinks you don't understand? Ask some questions that both demonstrate your knowledge, and pushes at the boundary of theirs. For example I was on a date that had already gone off the rails as she steered into politics and I didn't care anymore and thought I'd just enjoy the useless discussion. She was talking about gay representation and I asked her how many people gay. Like what percentage? She answered 20%, which is understandable because it's what the average person thinks. I asked her if she would be surprised if it turns out it's between 0.5 and 2%. I could see the uncertainty in her eyes, but also the unwilligness to admit fault. Do I let it lay there with a "Would be interesting to look into, eh?"

If someone isn't willing to question themselves in a private discussion, they're not doing what you are, having productive intellectual discussions. They are instead rattling of the latest sermon they heard. If you question their sermon you're doing the opposite of what advertising and degenerate shows are doing: you're undermining their certainty, their world view, their security.

 

[Großmann]

Have you considered that you don’t actually understand the topic as well as you think you do?