Train for any argument with Harvard’s former debate coach | Bo Seo
– Our public conversations
are in a state of crisis- they're stuck. It's people fully
convinced of their views, shouting at each other from a distance. One of the reasons why we
find it so difficult is, I believe, because the
skills of good argument have been atrophying for some time. We no longer view argument
as something to be worked at, rather we see it as something we jump into out
of instinct or defensiveness. The bad arguments that result decrease our confidence in what
disagreements can do for us- so the quality of the
conversation further degrades. I think we need to restore
confidence and faith in what disagreements can be, and to highlight its
potential as a source for good as well as a source for ill. My name is Bo Seo, I'm a
two-time world debate champion, a former coach of the Australian
and Harvard debate teams, and I am the author of "Good Arguments." For me, my love of debate
is inextricably tied to a life that I've led of
always moving countries.
I had to move from
South Korea to Australia as an eight-year-old without really speaking English. And I quickly found the hardest part of crossing language lines, of
cultural lines was disagreements where people tend to be more disruptive to interrupt, to speed up and slow down. In response to all that, I
resolved to be very agreeable in the way in which I presented at school, and to keep my thoughts to myself. The thing that changed that was I joined the debate
team off the strength of one promise, which was that in debate, when one person speaks, no one else does. And to someone who had been interrupted and spun out of conversation, that sounded to me like
a kind of salvation. If intelligence is the ability
to respond to any argument, wisdom lies in knowing which
arguments to respond to, and which parts of an
argument to respond to. Arguments are easy to
start and hard to end because there are any
number of differences between two people. And unless you are careful to say, "We're having this
disagreement at this moment and not all the other
disagreements we could be having," all of the differences between two people can start flooding in, and the argument becomes this unruly mass where any of the potential
sources of conflict can come to the fore, and you're not making
progress on any given one.
One of the frameworks that I developed in order to pick my fights more wisely is called the 'RISA Framework.' Before launching into a
disagreement or challenging a claim, ask four things: First, whether the
disagreement is in fact real as opposed to a misunderstanding. Second, is to ask whether
it's important enough to you to justify the disagreement. The third is to ask whether
the topic of disagreement is specific enough in order
for you to make some progress. And the fourth is to ask whether you and the other person
engaged in the disagreement are aligned in your objectives for wanting to partake
in that conversation. By checking off on these four lists, you can't guarantee that a
conversation is going to go well, but you may be able to give it the best possible chance of doing so. One of the limitations
of the RISA Framework that I worry about is that
it is increasingly difficult to find the right kind of alignment in people's interests
for wanting to engage in a disagreement.
So, if you have two sides that simply want to hurt
one another's feelings, that's some kind of alignment, but not the right kind that leads to productive conversations. So, one place where you
might be able to apply the RISA Framework is getting together with extended family for Thanksgiving or Christmas and knowing that some of the personal or
political disagreements are gonna bubble up to the surface. The RISA Framework provides two sources of help in that situation: The first is that every disagreement should start with a little bit of agreement, and that is often naming
exactly what it is that you disagree about so that it doesn't bubble up into all the different areas in
which you don't see eye-to-eye. First step is to name the
disagreement in front of you. The second thing is to check, well, why do you want to
engage in this disagreement, and can we come to an agreement about what it is that we're hoping to get out of this conversation? So, forcing the slightly
quarrelsome family member who just wants to be a
contrarian or to cause trouble to say, "Are you really in this, hoping to persuade me to change my mind?" That bit of negotiation of why it is that we're
in the conversation in the first instance can often allow our
conversations to go better than if we just jump
into the disagreements without much forethought.
It allows us to almost make a
contract with the other side: "This is what we're disagreeing about, and these are the reasons why we're engaging in that dispute." And one of the things that you can do with someone who tries to break those rules, to expand the debate into
something it wasn't about, to change the topic to
introduce new reasons for wanting to engage in the dispute, is just to remind ourselves
of the agreement that we made and to bring the conversation
back to those parameters. Just as any number of the
differences between two people can give rise to a disagreement, any number of things that
people say within an argument, can be contested.
'The success cases- these are the ones in
which the revolution works. Closing, I'll take you
if you have something.' And a part of the wisdom
one has to develop, as a debater, is to know which arguments to challenge,
and which to let go.' – 'A Marxist Revolution at
this point doesn't change that. – 'And will lead to a huge
period of economic instability, particularly with their livelihood.' – 'Apparently, their role, if we're to buy the premise
of their case at all.' – There are two questions
that we often ask to make that decision: The first is, is this disagreement between the two sides necessary to resolve in order to make progress in the argument? And if it's not, is us challenging it going to help us make progress
on the overall dispute? No matter how offensive or
wrong-seeming it may be, by asking whether it's
first necessary to challenge or even if it's not whether challenging, it would help us make
progress on the argument, you can be a little bit more judicious in how you disagree and
prevent our arguments from becoming this unruly
all-encompassing dispute.
One of the great lessons of debate is in order to be heard,
you have to first listen. We're used to thinking about listening as an essentially passive act- we sit back in our chairs,
and take it all in. Debaters know that it's a much more active process than that. There are two lessons
that we can take away from how debaters listen, and to try and apply it in our own lives: The first is, it is in your best interest to understand the opposition's argument as they would understand it.
It's not in your best interest to twist their meaning or to take it at its worst or to capture only a fraction of it because they won't feel as though they had been listened to and heard and ultimately responded to. The second thing is, it's
also in your best interest to respond to the strongest
version of the other side and sometimes to build
up the other side's case so that it's even better
than where they have it now. You know after you finish speaking, the opposition might have a 'light bulb' and come up with a better case, or someone on their side might say, "You've responded to the
weak version of this argument but here's something better." So, the further you can take it and the stronger the
version of the other side you can respond to, the more you challenge the
other side to go even further, and the better the conversation becomes.
So much of debate is an
exercise in certainty. It's about spending- sometimes weeks- researching your side of the case, coming up with the best
possible arguments that you can to sell the truth of your
side to the listener. But in the last moments before
a debater goes on stage, they know to take out
a new sheet of paper, and to put themselves in
their opponent's shoes and write the four best
arguments for the opposing side. They know also to look
over their case again, this time through the eyes of someone who fervently disagrees with them to identify all of the flaws and the criticisms that could
be leveled against them.
Debate is also known to imagine a world in which they lost the debate, and to come up with the
reasons why they did. Those exercises, which accord
the 'side-switch exercises,' puts a pause on that feeling of certainty. It makes us feel, for a moment, the subject of reasonableness
of other people's beliefs. It gives us that moment
where we get back on our toes and think maybe we missed something. It makes us imagine a
world in which we're wrong. And all of that creates wiggle room through which something like humility or empathy might arise. The sides which exercises,
and the kind of empathy that debate brings into the conversation, is not only applicable in
personal disagreements, but in my view, more
urgently needed than ever in our political disputes
and ideological commitments.
Each of us are bigger than
our political affiliations, than our religious commitments, than our ideological beliefs. It's in that setting that exercises like side-switch
become most effective. It expands the scope of what
we are able to talk about. It enlarges and improves
and strengthens our ability to talk about contentious
and difficult issues in humane, compassionate,
and productive ways. – Get smarter, faster with videos from the
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