Convincing ?
Try to think of times when someone has convinced you of something.
It is oddly hard. I think a key reason is that we change our minds when we are not thinking about an issue. I read decades ago the report by I don’t know who that he regularly noticed that his opinions on eg slippery slope arguments had changed, but that they never changed when he was thinking about the issue let alone discussing it.
I bring this up, because I was wondering if Charles Krauthammer has ever convinced anyone of anything.
Please report cases of being convinced in comments.
This is quite odd. One need only look at the comment stream from his articles to see that he has no problem convincing quite a large amount of people. He in fact convinces me. I don’t see any other interpretation of the recall vote in Wisconsin than that the democratic idealogy doesn’t appeal to voters there. Where exactly are you coming from on this?
Robert,
I think you mean persuade rather than convince. As Simon says (“Simon says,” haha) Krauthammer has no problem convincing people — presumably because those he convinces were already persuaded to his general point of view.
Right. Perhaps I am persuaded. I don’t really see an alternative analyses of the events in Wisconsin than what he said, especially considering campaign contributions were exactly equal between union based liberal groups and more conservative funding sources.
“union biases” vs “more conservative”
we can see how it is that Krauthammer convinces Simon.
by telling him what he already believes. which he believes because that’s what the paid media is paid to make him belive by a constant stream of…ah… “more conservative” stories.
Robert
I think that what you are describing is well understood by cognitive psychologists. it has everything to do with the way the brain functions.
or, as even physicists have observed, the science of physics progresses one funeral at a time.
I have been “persuaded” by arguments, but for some reason by the next day they have absolutely no effect on what i “believe.”
it takes a profound and life changing convergence of events for people to change any of their basic thinking… and even then not so much.
but if you mean have i changed my mind from mild support of Obama to something like complete contempt, yes. But not because anyone told me to.
Let’s see: two Republican strongholds (all six seats were won in the 2008 election) flip to a Democrat–one for the first time in decades–and a third almost does and that’s a sign of rejecting “union biases” in favor of “more conservative”?
Krauthammer convinced me long ago that he’s an idiot, but I do have to give him credit for constantly expanding the breadth of areas in which he would do better by being a true idiot.
I really don’t get the distinction. I believe that “to persuade” and “to convince” mean roughly the same thing. In any case, I certainly think that “to persuade” is a possible meaning of “to convince,” and that it was perfectly clear from context that this is what I meant. The post discusses changes in beliefs.
I wasn’t specifically asking about Krauthammer. I may have chosen the wrong verb, so I restate the question — when was the last time someone persuaded you of something. Someon, anyone Bueler ? Surely it happens. I’ve seen it happen (that is I have persuaded people).
I have also been persuaded.
1) minimum wage. I used to think that, not only was the EITC a much better approach but the minimum wage probably had bad effects on employment. Now I am convinced that any such effects are tiny due to the work of Card and Krueger.
2) Unemployment insurance. I was somewhat reluctant to believe that it caused detectable increased duration of unemployment. I am convinced by separate work by Bruce Meyers and Larry Katz.
3) trade and inequality. I guessed the effect of trade on US was important. I am convinced (by Katz) that it wasn’t in the 80s and 90s.
4) I am convinced by DeLong and Summers that equipment investment has higher social than private returns.
I don’t count Krugman convincing me of things, there are too many.
OK not so much by op-ed columnists, but something. Each a different opinion after reading an argument than before. That is persuasion.
Okay Robert
you are convincing me that you, at least, can be persuaded.
and still somehow i retain my belief that humans are nearly impossible to change.
how do i deal with such cognitive dissonance.
easy enough, tomorrow i will not remember that you can be persuaded.
andi will look around and see hundreds of examples of people who cannot change their minds when confronted with evidence against their basic beliefs, and will fail to notice examples of when they do.
maybe it’s that word “basic.”
i was persuaded once that increasing the resistance in a circuit caused it to draw less energy. it surprised me, but didn’t change the way i vote.
i was persuaded once that “free trade” did result in an increase in wealth for “both” sides. the math argument was cute and convincing. real world experience has led me to become unpersuaded.
and i used to vote for republicans. can’t quite tell you how i grew out of that. but Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with it.
[Latin convincere, to prove wrong : com-, intensive pref.; see com- + vincere, to conquer; see weik-3 in Indo-European roots.]
[Latin convincere, to prove wrong : com-, intensive pref.; see com- + vincere, to conquer; see weik-3 in Indo-European roots.]
A fascinating question, especially in seeing how commenters (including me) were taken aback and actually had to think about the question, when we are usually so glib and prepared with answers (cogent or not.)
I think one of our problems is that we use the word “convince” to mean several very different things.
1. Factual. You can convince me that a treatment is effective against leukemia by demonstrations over time. You can convince me that minimum wage is bad for business / employees by similar demonstrations or good aggregate data.
Convincing via facts works best in issues where there is no emotional or faith-based preconceptions.
2. Trust-based. You can convince me that you believe something is true if I already have general trust for you, or if the situation and your demeanor are emotionally authentic. “The young pickpocket’s story rang true.” I will probably still check my pockets.
3. Faith or doctrinal convincing. Out onto thin ice here. Religious doctrine can be (and often is) a good solid logical structure — but without that essential balloon string binding the construct to good old earthly truths. Faith structures, of course, are not all supernatural, but what they have in common is a built in impossibility of being disproved. Despite this, I think they are often useful.
4. Cpnvincing by way of threats, indoctrination, social approval or disapproval, peer pressure, etc. I love this definition of conversion: “You put your words in someone’s ears till they begin coming out of his mouth.”
5. Pure con artistry, construction of a convincing alternate world via words, “evidence,” a persuasive story, collaborators etc, inducing the mark to act in accordance with the wold view long enough to pick his pockets.
And finally — I see my samples have been getting more and more scurrilious, but here’s one I forgot which belongs near the top of the list: convincing via unspoken actions. Difficult to do effectively, but more deeply convincing than any of the others.
Noni
People tend to prescribe to the ideas of those with whom they already agree. Krauthammer, and all of Fox News and most of the WaPo for that matter, address a willing and attentive constituency. So is there any convincing going on? I would say that the ideas of those who log on are being reinforced. A lie or any other form of misinformation repeated often enough and by apparently different sources can be thought to be the truth by those who subscribe to the basic points to begin with.
Noni
would be fun to talk about all of those. but i’ll take the least fun.
faith has nothing to do with “believing” what can’t be “proven.”
faith is a matter of taking the next step in the direction you want to go. eventually you may get there, proving perhaps that taking a step in the direction you want to go is a better way of getting there than not.
as a matter of practical interest to me, i talk to people all the time about a couple of facts and their implications for strategy (i am trying not to hijack the thread here). i can usually … but by no means always … convince them of the facts, and they may even think they agree with me about the strategy… but the next day they are back to doing what they have always done… which is usually nothing.
or in the case of Social Security, talking about it as if it were welfare. which it is not.
I said Union “based” not union “biased.” Read my comment. I don’t understand the vitriol in response to my comment.
simon
entirely possible i misread based for biased. no telling what else i have misread. but i didn’t mean to be vitriolic. you still sound to me like someone who was “convinced” long before he read Krauthammer.
When Wikileaks firststarted releasing documents, I was angry at it, on the grounds that it would make the conduct of diplomay much more difficult. My roommate pointed out that Wikileaks is a media organization, so its job is to publicize relevant information that it acquires.
So I don’t have to love everything they did, or the impact of what they did, but I did come to accept that they were acting just as a news organization should act.
Robert,
I can point out two things that AB changed my mind about. I was “convinced”. They are:
1) Bruce and coberly convinced me that SS is on sound fiscal footing. Prior to that I basically thought is was going under. They also confirmed my belief that Medicare is unsustainable.
2) Mike and most of the economic posters, in tandum with reading and other blogs, convinced me that Economics was not even close to being a science and was more in line with Astrology. Prior to that I thought economics was a pretty scientific endevour.
So people can be convinced.
Islam will change
simon
you say (twice) “i don’t see any other…” and you apparently do see “vitriol” where none was intended.
i believe this indicates the nature of the problem. people almost never see anything they haven’t been taught to expect. you get rare moments of hard thinking… some of it honest, some of it not… but most of the time people just go around seeing what they expect and simply do not have the “next” thought. and this works whether you “don’t see” any other explanation, or you “do see” explanations (“vitriol”) that you expect.
not that i can’t get vitriolic, but mostly i am trying to persuade people of the limitations of their own… and my own… “logic.” if something is important to us, and we are honest, we need to try to think a lot harder about it than most people do. ever.
my reading “biased” for “based” is probably an example of perception bias.
buff
thanks for that. yes, i was thinking about you.. and even CoRev who was convinced at least for a while. but then it turns out that you think i am a stalinist, and CoRev keeps coming up with irrefutable proof of why Social Security is not sustainable… even after he saw the light about it costing an extra forty cents per week per year.
so i am not in a position to say that no one is convinced ever. but i think it’s pretty rare and hard to parlay into a real “attitude change.”
the persuasion that Robert describes in his own case looks to me like minor shifts in technical analysis that don’t affect any of his basic beliefs. i could be wrong about that.
i will add that my “conviction” about Social Security came from previously having no opinions on the subject whatsoever. A vague intuition about numbers and … basic physics … let me to question some scare talk i heard on NPR, and I did a little arithmetic that convinced met he scare talk was unjustified. Then I did a little research and convinced myself that the scare talk was deliberate… the Big LIe of our time.
And what I have found since is that “both sides” believe the Big LIe. That is, the bad guys pay a lot of money to non partisan experts to tell the lie. And the good guys argue on the basis that the Big Lie is true but we should “fix” Social Security to guarantee old age benefits to people by taxing the rich… that is, turn it into welfare…. on the assumption that it already is welfare.
And neither side can overcome that “framing.”
Whereas once you understand that Social Security is not welfare… the workers pay for it themselves…it has nothing to do with the deficit, it is not “government spending,”… and that the workers can continue to pay for it themselves at a cost they wouldn’t even notice… except that a new version of the Big Lie can be counted on to confuse them about the cost…. once people understood how the program works to protect them, their own money, the “debate” would be laughed out of court.
but i am not having a huge success in “convincing” anyone about this, or persuading them to change the terms of the argument.
Jack,
“A lie or any other form of misinformation repeated often enough and by apparently different sources can be thought to be the truth by those who subscribe to the basic points to begin with.”
What are the Lies and MIsinformation they have participated in?
Darren
practically everything you read is a lie. but the Big Lie for today is that Social Security contributes to the deficits. the Big Lie under Bush was that Social Security is broke. flat busted.
and it’s all based on the unstated lie that Social Security is welfare… that the government pays for it.
that you are paying for someone else’s granny.
Coberly,
“practically everything you read is a lie.”
If everything I read is a lie, because I read lots of different things…….then the law of averages claims that everything you read is a lie too.
In that case…..”The Big Lie’s” counter argument is an even Bigger Lie which makes you the larger of the Liar species.
Darren
I guess that passes for logic in your ward.
Most everything I read is a lie, too, but the difference between you and me is that i don’t believe everything i read.
Can’t imagine why you think the counter to the Big Lie must be a Bigger Lie. I suspect all the synapses in your brain just broke off and curled up into little balls rolling around in your head like one of those toys where you try to roll the little ball into the little hole but can’t.
Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin wall convinced me that the soviet threat was over. I grew up during the cold war surrounded by missle silos in the middle of wheat fields genuinely terrified of the coming nuclear WW 3.
The Obama administration has convinced me that the existing 2 party system is too corrupt to bother with any longer for working people. So I pledge to support the worst of the worst in hopes that the whole useless mess will be toppled faster. It’s about time the US got our own perestroika and glastnost. And since I don’t see a viable leader of Gorbachev’s vision on the horizon I’m supporting Bachmann 2012!!!
And of course I reserve the right to change my support in case this freak show becomes an actual ticket: http://www.971talk.com/palinbeck/
am soc
i knew people during the Vietnam era who hoped that supporting the worst of the worst would lead to toppling the whole useless mass faster.
instead it got worse.
depending on your perspective of course. being sent off to Vietnam was about as worse as it could get… of course that was just more of those selfish baby boomers who are going to get a higher return (maybe a whole tenth of a percent) on their Social Security investment than those poor crushed by the burden young who were never drafted and will have real incomes twice what the boomers had. and who will get their money back when they retire and live longer than the boomers.
wait. where did that come from?
oh, yes, poor Gorby
you see where having vision got him.
kind of like Lincoln, who freed the slaves
so Rick Perry can run for President.
which all proves you can persuade people, or even convince them, but at the end of the day they collapse into their former sodden selves.
coberly,
Well you convinced me about SS, and I convinced more than a few others – some of whom make me look like Lenin when it comes to politics.
I do believe your a statist (not Stalinist – that was a leftest mass murderer). You feel people need to be told what to do, where to do it and basically how to live. You’ve stated that more than enough times. You’re not really big on economic or personel freedom.
BUt people can be convinced.
Islam will change
as,
Just to keep you up-to-date. Those missile silos are still there and on alert (though there are fewer of them). Same with the ones in Russia. Even China has a few (around 100 last I heard). The US still keeps up SLBM sub patrols (going co-ed this year BTW), not sure about the Russians since their sub fleet rotted on the docks in the ’90s. Both sides keep bomber capable but no longer on alert.
As the saying goes its only 36 minutes Minot to Moscow…
Islam will change
Buff
actually i have said that is not true more than enough times. but you remain convinced of it. i am a passionate believer in “freedom.” But i do believe we need to pay taxes so the government can pay for things that we cannot pay for as individuals. And i do believe that government ought to be spending some of that money on ways to solve problems that don’t solve themselves, like poverty, both the temporary kind… unemployment… the predictable kind… old age… and the persistent kind… Formerly Anonymous’ relatives who need some help finding useful work. At no time do I advocate forcing anyone to do anything. Except forcing BMW owners to stop at red lights, and forcing Libertarians to pay taxes… just as they force me to pay taxes for the things they believe in.
Now, this being the tenth or more time I have tried to explain this to you, tell me why I cannot convince you. Note please that now we are talking about what I, I, I, believe… and I am an expert on that.
Meanwhile, keep up the good work. The truth about Social Security is more important than what I believe, or you think I believe about freedom.
In a throway post years ago he convinced me that the minimum wage was a good idea. Something about its easy enforcement (people know what they get paid).
DeLong commenter John Emerson convinced me (it took a couple of years) that populism (and not that phony election year John Edwards junk either) was what Democrats need and that technocrats are bad news.
Yeah isn’t it weird about resistance and energy consumption. Took me a while to get my head around that one too.
The free trade argument depends on the assumption that all markets clear. If there are good jobs at good wages and bad jobs with bad wages, then it is false. Larry Katz and Larry Summers explained this. Also imperfect competition in the goods market.
Of course one question is has anyone but Larry Katz convinced me.
I think a key part of your hypothesis is this bit about forgetting things one would like to forget. I am very very bad at that. I am still ashamed of something I said in 7th grade. I mean the stupidity still burns (if you want to know what I said, find a waterboard because I am not telling otherwise).
Well I was convinced about the minimum wage albeit the other way.
I guess I should have written “persuaded.”
My point, such as it is, is that columnists don’t have access to most of the means of persuasion. They can convince by pointing to evidence. They can convince people who trust them provided that their trusted statements are not all perfectly predictable and already believed by those who trust them. In theory logic can convince — reasoning without new evidence can amount to proof (eg in mathematics).
So columns that have convinced me tend to be written by Krugman.
He has pointed to facts which I didn’t know
He has made convincing arguments about macro which I should have thought of.
He has surprised me with eg his views on speculation and the price of Petroleum.
I conclude that he is not Charles Krauthammer in a costume beard.
Oh noooo don’t tell me that you thought economics was a science. I don’t know if I am horrified that you ever thought that or that we have lost one of the people who trusted us (one of about 10 in the world I’d guess).
fair enough, i think your right. thanks for your response!
I too have been convinced that populism is the way to win elections. I definitely was a junior technodude in college. I don’t know who did it (I know Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich tried). I think Gallup may have convinced me (polling on do the rich pay their fair share of taxes).
Importantly Greenberg Quinlan or Rosen convinced Clinton to propose higher taxes on the rich (polled higher taxes on the rich to pay for education spending — YES, to pay for military spending Yes, …, to pay for “more waste fraud and abuse” plurality yes. That did it. Also during a debate they had insta polling where people could press a yes button, a no button or neither. They had Bush Sr supporters, Clinton supporters and undecided voters. Clinton said “only rich people have been given tax cuts” and everyone pushed Yes. I think this was unprecedented (and hasn’t happened since).
I am now convinced that most of the US public wants to soak the rich. But I’d have to score this one to Brad reporting polling by GQR.
I am also convinced that the MSM is evil. I think this is Brad again (I had lunch with him once when he was deputy assistant secretary of the treasury for policy analysis and he said “working for the administration I find that I have turned into HR (Bob) Haldeman (he put the accent on the parentheses). Didn’t convince me, but he did later.
Putting the two together, I think the US public wants to soak the rich, but a soak the rich strategy doesn’t work as rich talking heads will convince the public that they (the public) are being soaked. But it is the country’s only hope so go with it (but do include a little tiny middle class tax cut this time).
Robert – I just thought it was more, shall we say, rigorous than it is. Since I’ve been commenting at AB (At least 5 years I think), I have had any illusions that economics was anything other than astrology or reading entrails pretty much dashed.
And the continued postings as we get closer to an election that will hopefully rid us of Obama will prove my point…
Islam will change
Robert
this isn’t quite fair or what you had in mind, but Democrats regularly assume the Big Lie about Social Security… that it is welfare, that it is going to cost the government a lot of money, that it is going broke.
Of course these are “Republican” lies, but almost all Democrats “assume” they are true whether they are proposing “fixes” that would cut SS benefits or raise taxes on the rich.
I can’t tell if they are in on the conspiracy or if they are just mindlessly stupid. Since Bill Clinton was not obvioulsly mindlessly stupid… except about Monica… and he said raising the retirement age was “the obvious solution” to the “Social Security problem” I have to guess he was in on the conspiracy.
Robert
you spoiled it with the last line, unless you were kidding.
i don’t care for “soak the rich” as an election slogan… in the first place, stated that baldly it won’t work. but the rich do need to pay their fair share of taxes… that is, enough to pay for what we already bought… and the rest of us need to pay a higher tax as well, so that the rich can’t complain that we are “soaking the rich.” in fact all of us could afford a tax increase of two or three percent without even noticing it, and that’s about what it would take to put the deficit hysteria behind us.
but i’d like to see a Patriotic Deficit Emergency Surtax of about 10% on all income above the SS cap. (while gradually raising the SS tax the 2% that will be needed if we all start living a lot longer,as predicted.) fortunately it can be VERY gradually… about one half of one tenth of one percent per year.
Robert
my “hypothesis” about the general nature of brains being hard to convince is…or was… pretty well established experimental “fact.” as it happens forgetting things you would like to forget is especially hard. i think it’s the way primates remind themselves of what it takes to be an accepted member of the gang. your secret is safe with me.
what i would need to do to justify my claim that not being convinced is the norm would be to explain those cases where we are convinced. i do think they tend to be cases that don’t affect our
core beliefs (i’m cheating here), or we are relatively high i.q. persons far more interested in “getting it right” than in “being right.”… and can take the time to think pretty hard about the issue in question.
but, y’know, even Einstein didn’t “get” quantum physics. (cheating here too).
my own belief, only casually related to stuff i may or may not have learned from the cognitive psychologists.. is that brains don’t have much to do with “logic.” even scientific brains. we work on the basis of “association.” when we are really careful we can arrange that the associations are almost logical… but there is so much leaping to conclusions across synapses that the logic is always less tight than we imagine. we are always fooled by “something i didn’t think of”… the brain happily filling the gaps without even telling us.
coberly,
Forgot who said this but its true:
“Never attribute to conspiracy what can easily be ascribed to incompetance.”
Cheers!
buff
the horrible thing is you might be right. i’d hate to think the whole attack on Social Security is the result of Peter Peterson playing with his pocket calculator and completely failing to do the rest of the arithmetic that would put his projections into perspective.
I can accelerate at about one g when i leap from the floor (white man’s disease).. now if i continued that rate of acceleration for 75 years I would be going 76,311,604,000 feet per second. Thats over 51 billion miles per hour or 3 million times as fast as the Space Shuttle.
Now if I could only get on Television to explain this to the people, because if the hundred million people who are going to leap from the floor the day they retire all do this at once there are going to be terrible traffic accidents and a huge burden on the young who will have to care for all the injured. Maybe I can get a President to tie everybody’s legs together so this won’t happen.
Washington State had an initiative last year to introduce a state income tax (we don’t have one). It started at $200k for singles and $400 for couples. Remember, this is a deep blue state (that Dukakis carried!) with a bunch of tech billionaires (Gates, Allen, Bezos, McCaw, Starbucks guy, sunglasses guy, a couple more Microsofties). It failed 35%-65%. I still believe in populism but it’s got to do better than that.