Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day is not so much about the inspiring post as it is a meta analysis of the dynamic of commenting at Ethics Alarms generally. I loved the comment the second it appeared, and now seems a particularly propitious time to post it, in light of some recent threads
Here it is…
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There is something I think is missing in the dialogue between conservatives and liberals. Certainly one aspect of it is that new commenters come into the fray relatively fresh, by which I mean they haven’t (as far as I can tell) spent any time reviewing Jack’s enormous output on the blog. Before I ever dared to comment, I spent time reading through a chunk of Ethics Alarm’s history to see what Jack had already previously said on certain topics. I read the comment policy. I read through the rationalization list. And I still get blindsided every now and then by the fact that I haven’t fully imbibed what Jack has written here.
I do think just jumping into the fray and shouting “You’re wrong, here’s why!” even when there are good arguments to be made is foolhardy, because it ignores the layers and layers of nuance that have been developed on the blog over many years.
And this leads to the central observation I’m making. One way of describing how any of us looks at the world is through our biases, but biases are just one part of the entire paradigm each of us exist within. Every foundational belief, every bias, every opinion, every experience, every bit of accrued evidence builds up this paradigm. Convincing someone from a different paradigm of something that runs counter to that paradigm is difficult because it involves breaking down that entire paradigm. Sometimes that does happen; that’s why people convert from one religion to another, or stop supporting one economic model for a radically different one, or change political parties, or decide that string theory isn’t the grand unified theory it has been touted as. But in an initial engagement with someone, the likelihood of getting someone to shift his paradigm from a few simple exchanges is highly unlikely.
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