Stop Being Reasonable: six stories of how we really change our minds

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I'm not sure Stop Being Reasonable tells me a lot about my own situation, though I could no doubt think that through more carefully to get some insights. Either way, it's well-written, accessible, engaging and yet at the same time not at all dumbed down in how it presents its case, drawing on a seamless collection of contemporary and canonical philosophy, popular culture, journalism et al. What its argument boils down to is that conventional rationality is not sufficient (or even adequate) to explain why people change their minds, using a quite varied set of empirical case studies to support the argument. The people concerned have changed their minds in quite dramatic - but not conventionally rational - circumstances. This then has implications for how people can be persuaded to change their minds by others, and therefore it is significant to politics, public education campaigns etc. Inspiring, moving and perceptive,Stop Being Reasonable is a mind-changing exploration of the murky place where philosophy and real life meet.

The point here (which can be readinl seen in what passes for political debates across much of the Western world) is that not only is this presumption incorrect, it's not particularly helpful.

Christopher Parton is expected to graduate this year with a Ph.D. in musicology. He served as the Quin Morton ’36 Teaching Fellow in the Princeton Writing Program, teaching a writing seminar titled “Sound and the City” that examines what can be learned about a city’s history, community and ecology from listening to an urban environment. I will soon have to tell my wife that her mother texted, and that she has Alzheimer’s. Do I also have to tell her about the part with the letters? Or, for the sake of peace, can I skip that part? I don’t feel comfortable with it, but I don’t want my wife to be hurt again. It’s possible your mother in law did not mean or fully understand what she was saying, even with their history of conflict. Especially if you think she was talking about letters that don’t exist, it’s possible this was just a symptom, not genuine sentiment. In that case, she might not even remember saying it. Making your wife the only person in their relationship who does remember this insult might not help. The awardees are Eleanor Gordon-Smith from the Department of Philosophy, Nicolas Hommel from the Department of Economics, Hannah McLaughlin from the Department of Music, Evelyn Navarro Salazar from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Calvin Spolar from the Department of Chemistry, Aaron Su from the Department of Anthropology, William Wen from the Department of Politics, and Jessica Ye from the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

As she faces this difficult news and chapter in her life, there will be pain you can’t protect her from. But you can help make sure she doesn’t have to face it alone. Eleanor says: You’re in a particularly terrible version of a problem we all will face: what should you do with hurtful information that you didn’t mean to acquire? A secret gets lobbed into your lap and you have to decide whether to pass it on.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Unfortunately reasoned conversation or punitive cutting-off are only rarely tools of conversion. But here’s something you might be able to exploit: very often, people’s beliefs respond to the emotional experiences they have in everyday life. I wonder whether you could surreptitiously give him experiences that might work like counter-evidence to the ways he’s thinking. Can you get him into an all-gender sporting league, or into volunteering in a way that uses your hands: an environment with people of all ages, not split by gender, where people have to be hard-working and cooperative? Can you insist on modelling what it looks like to have female friends, so women aren’t just something imaginary to be generalised about with other men online? Gordon-Smith does not have all the answers. But she gives us the tools we need to examine our biases and choose how we approach the decisions we need to make. For those of us who suspect the time for being reasonable — and not getting emotional — has passed, this is the book we need.' — Astrid Edwards, The Saturday Paper Yazar geçtiğimiz yıllarda sokakta kadınlara laf atan erkeklerle ilgili bir haber çalışmasında sahada (sokakta) görev alıyor ve laf atan erkeklere laf anlatmaya çalışırken 'fikir değiştirmenin doğası'nı daha çok kurcalamaya başlıyor. Kitabın fikri de burada pişiyor.

I'll save some space on my first comments, since others say very similarly to my own initial impressions. I wanted to like this book more than I do, and there are parts in the middle that I find interesting. The interviews are certainly the more valuable and entertaining sections. Some of them are stories of revelation, like the moment when Susie discovered her husband had been telling a criminal lie since he was twelve years old and began to fear for herself and her young child, or when Peter opened his ailing mother’s mail for her and discovered she wasn’t who he’d thought she was, or when Dylan quit the strict apocalypse-heralding religious sect he’d been raised in after more than twenty years as a believer. Others are stories about not knowing what to believe, like the shifting cognitive sands Upper-Class English Gentleman Alex found himself in when he finished a stint on a reality TV program that had trained him as a London bouncer, only to realise he was no longer entirely sure which of those two identities he’d been faking. Or there’s the confusion former Navy pilot Nicole has spent years in after alleging as a six-year-old that her mother had abused her, then reading an exposé about her own case many years later that argued the abuse may never have occurred. Stop Being Reasonable. It’s a series of true stories about how we change our minds in high-stakes moments and how rarely that measures up to our ideal of rationality. Each chapter features interviews I conducted with someone about a moment in their life that they changed their mind in a really drastic way: a man who left a cult, a woman who questioned her own memory of being abused, a man who changed his mind about his entire personality after appearing on reality TV, someone who learned their family wasn’t really their family, and so on. Each story highlights a sometimes-maligned strategy for reasoning that many of us turn out to use all the time, especially when it really matters: believing other people, trusting our gut, thinking emotionally, and so on. The book is a plea for a more capacious ideal of rationality, such that these things ‘count’ as rational thinking as well as the emotionless first-principles reasoning we usually associate with that term. Let’s finish up close to home. What does ethics mean to you? Towards the end of this book, the author laments "turning on the TV and finding a climate of public argumentation that treats changing minds as combat or worse, entertainment – by trading on the lucrative fiction that being reasonable is just being really good at arguing" To me, this sounds a fair thing, particularly as at the start of the book she identifies herself as a debater in her oyuth. One way to get some emotional distance from people’s irritating choices is to see them as the upshots of slightly more sympathetic procedures. For instance, it sounds like your mother-in-law has a lot of identity wrapped up with her feelings about her own childhood. If you think of her returning to that well-worn topic as deliberately making a selfish and draining choice, of course it makes you angry. If you think of her as just enacting a habit, borne of feelings she hasn’t processed, the red-hot frustration might mellow to predictable disappointment. Reframing people’s annoying choices helps make them feel a little more bad weather – annoying and taxing, yes, but not personal or insulting.

Stop Being Reasonable

That’s what gets you to part two; finding equilibrium with the remainder. Even when we’ve put serious elbow grease into making a life we’re proud of, there will be moments of loneliness and grief and worry. They may even be frequent. It can be tempting then to abandon the changes we’ve made, thinking “why bother?” – as though the things we fill our life with have betrayed us if we still don’t feel full. Resist that temptation as much as you can. Pain is an inevitable part of living; by staying engaged with the world and other people we can come to see that feeling as a companion to joy instead of a threat. As a couple, then, you need to balance two very legitimate needs: your need to rebuild without the fear that you’ll be known for your worst, and her need to process her experience. The text comprises interviews after a researcher/journalist fashion, with relevant context and the ideas of a number of philosophers sprinkled around , provoking thought about how people become who they are, perhaps even change who they are (depending on definition), what they accept and reject and how that comes about. McLaughlin was lauded for her inventiveness in getting students engaged. “Finding creative ways to deliver historical material comes so naturally to Hannah, because creativity and originality are integral elements of her personality,” one student wrote. Evelyn Navarro Salazar Gordon-Smith's book is all about the limits of "reasonableness", on the limits of rational discourse and the fetishisation of rationality and calmness, and how we are so eager to discard emotion and human behaviour when searching for "truth". This is especially true when you get into online debates, where "rationality" and surface level civility are given preference over emotion-driven perspectives which are just as rational. This was a really interesting premise, and Gordon-Smith's case vignettes are incredibly interesting. The illusive sense of self and the importance we place on an inner coherent narrative with which to understand ourselves, the inability to truly know another person etc. are all interesting questions that Gordon-Smith raises.