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I think one of the issues with online arguing, from most takes on it, is that the main reason people have to argue is to spread an idea. Whether it’s by convincing the opposing part of the argument and making them change their mind, or by changing or reinforcing the mind of anonymous readers of the argument.

Most of the time this leads to one of two conclusions: If someone tries to change the other person’s mind they will, most likely, find themselves hitting a wall, which will lead to frustration, disinterest, or personal attacks once it’s seen that the other person will not change their mind. If they do not care about changing the other person’s mind and just want to make clear that their own position is the right one to have, then the argument becomes a game of winning and losing. This could be achieved by many ways, depending on the context, it could lead to insulting and trying to put group pressure (via downvotes for instance) to make the other person’s opinion seem as the “bad” one. Or via creating a game of rules, and play that game better to become a winner. Please excuse the small attack I’m about to make on this very space, but part of this second approach is the rules of debate, as in consider arguments without sources, emotional responses, or fallacies as losing points in the game of arguing. And often when the other part falls into one of this issues the goal quickly becomes to point out all this “faults” the other person made, so they are clearly shown as the loser. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to argue without fallacies, and to be able to prove any statements that one’s make. But I don’t think anyone gains anything when the argument becomes a match on who is able to ask for more sources, link more articles and identify more fallacies.

That being said I’m going to just link some literature that support the basis of this statements. Can Arguments Change Minds? . This article goes into great lengths to show something that’s easily seen when arguing online: People don’t change their minds from an argument. The process of changing someone’s mind is very complex. The article explains some study cases where people from extremist backgrounds changed their minds over time, in a context of discussion, but it’s stated that this change had a lot more going out that just a proper intellectual discussion.

Why bother then? In my opinion, the best thing we can get when arguing with someone whose opinion differs to our own is to understand them. To find out their way of seeing things, their motives, their reasoning. That’s a great value. And to get this often we need to let them talk the way they want to talk, this tend to lead to some undesirable things, like mentioned fallacies, unsupported claims or straight up bigotry and name-calling. But I think that it is still valuable knowing if that’s their only reasoning, or trying to push past those to see if there’s something more in depth about why they don’t agree with us. But, ultimately, focusing the discussion in getting a win, will often make us miss a lot of valuable information that we could have gotten if we just saw the argument as a way to understand the other person, and of course, to understand ourselves. And not only for us to understand them, but to them to understand us. Explaining our point of view in the clearer way possible, and focussing not on winning when we talk about our opinions, but on showing why we have those opinions. To be able to reach a point of “I don’t agree with you but I understand you”.

Of course the big elephant in the room here is that taking this approach to it’s logical conclusion would mean letting some people express ideas that we don’t want to be expressed. The obvious example here is hate speech. Should hate speech, or extremist arguments be allowed, and discussed? If allowed, what’s our goal when engaging into an argument with them, to convince, or to understand and make the other part to also understand us? This is where I’m more torn apart, as the logic of this reasoning leads me to believe that the best is the later, but it confronts with everything I’ve learn about how to deal with hate speech and dangerous ideologies until now. Thus why the (OPEN-ENDED) tag, and why I hope for anyone to jump and give their opinion on this.