Me: seeking more interesting arguments
They’re not going away, might as well get better at them!
I’ve become officially obsessed with arguments. What makes them spiral out of control sometimes, while other times creating new friends and deepening existing relationships. Why do we argue well with some people and so poorly with others?
And why do we have so many great synonyms for them?
The last couple weeks, I’ve been asking people to tell me about their gnarly, twisty, recurring, never-ending arguments. The ones that they have with people over and over again across years — sometimes DECADES! Whether it be with significant others, family members, friends, or just random strangers on the internet. I’m especially interested in the ones that seem pretty trivial on the surface but keep coming back again because there’s something about them taps into deeper emotions and parts of our beliefs and identity. If you have an argument like that, and are willing to share it, anonymously or not, please do!
I’m starting with a fairly uncontroversial one, and it still took some interesting twists and turns! Thanks Sharon (and Ian, by proxy) McKellar, for offering your 10-year argument to be our first specimen!
Sharon: Does water go stale when it sits out too long? Going on about 10 years. Still don’t agree. PS Obviously, yes. It does.
So I posed this question to my friends on Facebook a couple days ago:
Question: If you find a glass of water on your bedside table that’s been sitting there 3 full days, are there good reasons NOT to drink it?
Opposers (aka willing to drink)
The opposers are A-OK drinking water that’s been in a glass for a few days. They believe that nothing health-threatening will happen to the water in that short of a time. They see something like this:
Totally fine. Drink it! It’d be wasteful not to. A few sample quotes from them:
“You’re all part of the reason we’re destroying the planet.”
“I’ve even been known (because I’m thirsty or because I hate wasting things) to drink bottled water that’s been opened, drank from (some times not by me, but by one of my kids), and left in my truck for a week. I’ll hesitate more the more uncertain I am of the timeline.”
“Water left out in a home or office just isn’t going to be dangerous or growing any bad bacteria (any more than would be growing on some fruit left on counter).”
Endorsers (aka not willing to drink)
The endorsers, on the other hand, recoiled at the idea of drinking water that that was more than a couple days old, because terrible things could have happened in that time. I am pretty sure this is closer to how they see a glass of water changing over those days:
Definitely don’t drink this water! Demand a new glass! A few sample quotes from them:
“No one can change my mind about it. If water has been sitting out overnight, I pour it out and get a fresh one. Every time.”
“I’d choke on all of the dust and particles that have settled in the open glass.”
“I can always get another one. There is a risk, admittedly very small of potentially getting sick, so why take the risk, when the act of getting a new glass of water is such a little use of effort.”
“I am so closed minded about this it isn’t even funny. That water is absolutely stagnant and will kill you within minutes.”
So where do YOU stand? This is the part where you can tweet or share this link on FB with your answer. 😂
How this usually unfolds…
So far this seems pretty typical of a Facebook conversation about anything mildly controversial or polarizing. We could be talking about any number of topics and have a similar reaction by people on different sides. We could be talking about whether Radiohead, or Taylor Swift, or Jay-Z make better music, or about which sleep-training technique is best for a newborn, or about whether or not calling senators does any good if you’re in a blue state, etc. What generally happens is that our brains immediately provide a preference somewhere on the scale between mild and strong, and once we put it out there we do so in the spirit of defending it TO THE DEATH.
And that, obviously, is the problem.
And here’s where my experiment starts.
The first twist: make it visual! 🖌 🎨
Like many, I’m a big advocate for “strong opinions, weakly held” general life philosophy, but I hadn’t really found a good way to put it into practice. So for this first experiment, I tested using a chart like this to help people identify where on the endorse vs oppose spectrum they were as well as where on the open-minded vs closed-minded spectrum they were on this particular topic:
People opted into the conversation by offering the coordinates of their own personal position. Of the 24 people who participated:
- 10 put themselves in the open-minded top half of the chart (39% open-minded)
- 14 put themselves bottom half of the chart (61% closed-minded)
- 15 people put themselves into the right side of the chart (65% endorsers)
- 9 in the left side (35% opposers)
It looked like this, which seems pretty well-distributed!
This is just a hunch at this point, but I think that there’s something about seeing your position mapped visually in space that rips the argument out of the dark fuzzy uncertain world of our heads, and gives us something tangible to actually talk about together. In a very real way, we are able to actually know where we each stand relative to one another, and know that the other people know where we stand too.
The second twist: build your steel man
Now that each person belongs to a group (either at the cell, quadrant, or hemisphere levels) the reasons and qualifications could also be grouped. This doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but it is! One of the reasons I feel like people often say “you just can’t have these kinds of conversations on social media” is because each person is having to maintain their own full argument at all times, and there’s no way to reference the collective full argument to add qualifications and make stronger over time.
By grouping people and arguments, I used a Dropbox Paper doc and pulled comments in from Facebook as they happened, I learned that one of the big concerns about drinking old water is the fear that your cat’s paws have gotten into it. I don’t have a cat, so never would have factored that in to the endorsement camp’s arguments. But it makes sense… cats aren’t that clean.
There was also a small side-camp on the endorsement side that was less about the fear of bacteria, and more a personal preference about taste. As you can see in the original question, Sharon referred to water tasting “stale” and there was some confusion around the different ways water changes over time, and if “stale” is the right word or not. All of the following things will change how the water tastes over the first few days:
- Just being warmer, because smells become stronger.
- Chlorine will off-gas after a day and some people probably have come to prefer that taste.
- Carbon dioxide will dissolve into the water, turning into an acid and lowering the pH of the water a tad.
- And finally algae and other micro-organisms may start growing in the water, and that also changes the taste.
“Stale” generally refers to bready thing, but I saw it used for water in many articles online… so I guess it works for water too? “Flat” only refers to the off-gassing part. And if you wanted, you could even call water “corked” if it started smelling and tasting musty from the algae, or just “gross” as many prefer.
In group discussions like this, each individual participant only presents a subset of the full argument. In many Facebook discussions, this ends up creating a never-ending bashing of strawmen on both sides, each side attacking the weakest points on the other side, even as the other side digs their heels in, and often re-hashing details that were part of a thread somewhere else. By pulling the argument off of the individual and building it collectively, a lot of that can be avoided.
Straw man vs Steel man
This practice of building stronger arguments is called building a steel man by some (here’s a great example of one from a few years ago). It’s the opposite of a straw man argument. It’s not my favorite word (does anyone have a better word for it?) but the concept is awesome: each side should help build the best version of their opponent’s argument, and each side should only present arguments that challenge that best version.
The third twist: demonstrate shared understanding
The best way to see if you’ve succeeded in building the best steel man on both sides is to then build a more specific version of the argument that factors them out. Here’s what I came up with:
For the opposers: If you have a glass of water that’s been out 3 days and you KNOW it has harmful bacteria in it for some reason and you’ll likely get sick, do you believe that’s a good reason to NOT drink it?
For the endorsers: If you have a glass of water that’s been out 3 days and you know DOESN’T have any bad bacteria or other harmful element in it (and it won’t hurt you in any way) and it doesn’t taste weird at all, would you be fine drinking it?
Everyone except for 1 person said they would flip sides with the new phrasing. Meaning, that, while we may be on different sides of the argument, we now know that it’s about our own idiosyncratic methods for identifying harmful water, and in a world where information isn’t always available, finding your own comfort level around how much risk you’re willing to take on.
The one exception was in the 4D strong-endorsement, closed-minded camp, and she said “I realize it’s 100% in my head and the water is fine… but I still would not drink it.” Which is fine, because… despite calling this an argument, the goal isn't to change anyone’s minds. Whaaaa? Hear me out!
The goal is to reveal the people behind the positions, and to collectively become smarter about each other and the world. If, through this process, minds move, that’s cool! If not, then you might have a better idea about why that is.
To that end, here are a few personal stories about how they each formed strong preferences on both sides of the opinion:
Opposer: “My parents were nurses and we have a lot of medical people in my extended family — I think I was raised with the idea that germs and bacteria aren’t all bad. Totally ate food off the floor if it fell, got in the dirt a lot, went camping and got dirty a lot, etc. I also don’t wear band-aids very much which I never thought was weird until someone pointed it out. Instead I clean a wound with a really strong antiseptic like Hibiclens and let the air take care of it. Maybe just a lot of faith in the body’s ability to take care of things? I do wash my hands often because I work with children and grew up watching my parents do it so thoroughly. That said, I’m definitely privileged in that I was blessed with a healthy body and immune system which is a big part of it. I also have been known to pick up a piece of random food on pretty much any table and pop it in my mouth to see what it is. So. Half of this reading audience is probably nauseated now.”
Endorser: “[My strong preference against old water] was formed as a young girl just based on taste. Later I formed an actual paranoid delusion about water based on my anxiety disorder. For a time I didn’t trust that water was safe to drink if it had been sitting out. When my anxiety got really bad I convinced myself that the water was actually poisoned and would kill me. Now that I’ve got the anxiety under check, it’s a little less nuts but I still dislike drinking water that’s been sitting out. It’s mostly taste related but also that I don’t want to drink water that has been exposed to dust, pets, and my own mouth bacteria.” (This was the person who remained an endorser even after updating it… and now it’s easier to understand, right?)
Another endorser: “I’m pretty sure for me it’s a simple combination of dust making it taste bad and being a Boy Scout and knowing that stagnant water can be dangerous. Rationally, I know it’s probably fine, but I can’t get over the hump. Also, I need my water ice ice ice cold. If faced with duress, I’m pretty sure I would do some serious looking around before I caved and drank counter aged water.”
These personal opinion histories are, in my opinion, much more valuable results from a conversation on this topic than a “changed mind”. Perhaps it’s time to get over trying to change minds, and go after this gold instead. (That would make a good meta-opinion discussion, actually.)
Take-aways
I feel victorious! Even though this was a tiny tiny argument compared to many of the larger issues that we dive head-first into nowadays, to me it gives me hope that there are tools out there that can help us engage people on heated and emotional topics and find a way to preserve our values while also bringing people together instead of pushing them apart.
As for where I stand in this debate, I think I’m a bit further on the oppose side (less afraid of the unknown monsters in the water) than I was when I started. So maybe a 1B. More than anything I’m curious to start paying more attention to the taste and smell of older water, to see if I can start picking up on the changes that are happening in it as it “develops”.
“The beginning of thought is in disagreement — not only with others but also with ourselves.” — Eric Hoffer
I’ll be testing this out on more intense topics in the future. If you have a suggestion for one, submit it here!
