Member-only story
Why It’s So Hard to Argue With Idiots
And how to get better at it
To explain why it’s so hard to argue with certain ignorant people, we first have to unpack what it is they’re lacking. This is someone who has either no capacity or no motivation for engaging in critical thinking and educating themselves.
Thus, their viewpoint is formed both without a solid logical foundation and without sufficient information. However, the fundamental problem is not even that they’re lacking in regards to these basic faculties. It is found in another character flaw: hubris and a lack of self-awareness.
If you have only a hazy idea on a subject, or you know you haven’t invested the time to really get informed on it, you shouldn’t feel the need to have a hard opinion at all. A conclusion one way or another, when appropriately formed, is the result of information processed in a logical way. If you are not correctly engaging in this processing, that’s fine, but then you would reasonably forego the right to an opinion — and certainly the right to act on that opinion, as the world is then being affected by your essentially random action.
Nonetheless, the person in question will bypass the necessary steps that lead to an opinion, have that opinion anyways, and then even act on it — sometimes, unfortunately, with a great deal of enthusiasm. It then…
