In Defense of Tone Arguments

On convincing others to change their minds:

"[Alfred] Reynolds was in Army Intelligence during the war, and in 1945 was given the almost impossible task of ‘de-Nazifying’ young Nazi officers who had been captured. Reynolds has described how, when he first entered the room, there was an atmosphere of cold hostility. They stared at him, prepared - like [Dr Jerome] Bruner’s cat - to ‘cut out’ anything he had to say at the level of the ear-drum. To their surprise, there was no homily on the evils of Nazism. Instead, he asked them to explain to him what they understood by National Socialism. Once they were convinced he really wanted to know, they began to talk. He listened quietly, asked questions, and pointed out contradictions. Within a matter of days, there was not a Nazi left among them." - Colin Wilson, "A Criminal History of Mankind"

A similar technique worked on Ingo Hasselbach (described in his autobiography "Führer Ex"). A TV crew asked him to explain neo-nazi philosophy, and the more he saw himself in repeat on TV the less he believed himself.

A similar technique worked when I was employed at a homeless shelter. I'd ask aggravated clients what they wanted to have happen. Turns out, for many of them, no one had ever asked them that in their entire lives. That question usually stopped aggravation cold, even if what they wanted to have happen wasn't possible.

Does tone matter? You bet. Tone matters so much I question myself when I get answers that seem to work this well, to try and detect unknowingly adopting pretty / useful answers instead of truthful ones.

I used to be a young-earth creationist. I was convinced that young-earth creationism was wrong by old-earth creationists. I was convinced that old-earth creationism was wrong by theistic evolutionists. I was convinced that theistic evolution was wrong, not by Dawkins, but by equally bombastic atheists before the God Delusion was published. I was never convinced of anything by mealy-mouthed atheists pretending to think that religion was a reasonable position that they just didn't personally agree with.

There is a case to be made for "easing people into it", when it comes to advocating ideas. That doesn't mean atheists should advocate Intelligent Design in an attempt to lure in YECs, obviously. And I think it would be equally ill-advised for people like Dawkins to pretend they see religion as anything other than transparently stupid and evil. Better to have the people who actually hold moderate positions advocating those moderate positions.

I don't think criticisms of tone are necessarily fallacious. But I am suspicious whenever anyone says "stop advocating your position so stridently, or you'll only drive people further away from your position", because such claims are usually unfounded, and often associated with sinister ulterior motives.

I would like to see your data on Dawkins' actual effectiveness. You've made a strong claim there.

While diplomacy is certainly an important consideration in getting an argument across, it's very far from the whole story. I think you're confusing people's self-reporting on whether they like an argument with whether the argument is actually effective. These are very different things. I quote again David Colquhon on getting homeopathy out of UK universities, and Dawkins' tone:

Dr Baggini, among others, has claimed that the “new atheists” are too strident, and that they only antagonise moderate atheists (see The New Atheist Movement is destructive, though there is something of a recantation two years later in Religion’s truce with science can’t hold).

I disagree, for two reasons.

Firstly, people like Richard Dawkins are really not very strident. Dawkin’s book, The God Delusion, is quiet and scholarly. It takes each of the arguments put forward by religious people, and dissects them one by one. It’s true that, having done this, he sets forth his conclusions quite bluntly. That seems to me to be a good thing. If your conclusions are stifled by tortuous euphemisms, nobody takes much notice. Just as in science, simple plain words are best.

The second, and more important, reason that I like Dawkin’s approach is that I suspect it’s the only approach that has much effect. There is a direct analogy with my own efforts to stop universities giving BSc degrees in subjects that are not science. Worse, they are actively anti-science. Take for example, homeopathy, the medicine that contains no medicine. I started by writing polite letters to vice chancellors. Usually they didn’t even have the courtesy to reply. All efforts to tackle the problem through the “proper channels” failed. The only thing that has worked was public derision. A combination of internal moles and Freedom of Information Act requests unearthed what was being taught on these courses. Like Westminster’s assertion that “amethysts emit high Yin energy”. Disclosure of such nonsense and headlines like

“Professor Geoffrey Petts of the University of Westminster says they “are not teaching pseudo-science”. The facts show this is not true

are certainly somewhat strident. But they have worked. Forget the proper channels if you want results. Mock what deserves to be mocked.

Or, as H. L. Mencken put it nearly a century ago:

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

Making people feel comfortable and being effective are not necessarily linked.

The God Delusion utterly destroyed his effectiveness at convincing people against religion.

PZ Myers has been collecting anecdotes entitled "Why I am an atheist" from various folks. Several of them mention Dawkins, and at least two I've found with a casual search mention The God Delusion:

• http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/05/01/why-i-am-an-atheist-anonymous-5/
• http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/04/13/why-i-am-an-atheist-the-heretic-next-door/

Evidence to update on?

Talking about tone is not necessarily a bad thing. As the OP says, the tone in which arguments are presented can be an important thing. Discussions can often proceed more fruitfully if participants maintain a moderate tone, and strong arguments are often more persuasive when they are framed less antagonistically.

The problem is when a focus on tone takes the place of a focus on content. There is a large class of bad arguing which involve pretending to engage with someone's argument, while in fact ignoring it. One way to do that is to focus on their tone. When agreements break down into two sides, criticizing the other side's tone can be an easy and relatively content-free way to say "Yay us, boo them!" and suggest that the other side is not worth listening too. Or, if you want to portray yourself as a reasonable person who is not attached to either side, then criticizing the content of the views of one side and the tone of the other side can be a convenient way of portraying yourself as above the fray while barely engaging with the views of some of the main participants in the fray.

Focus on tone can also be a problem more broadly if, whenever you think about a topic, you habitually think about one side's tone rather than the actual content at stake. In many places, whenever the topic of atheism/vegetarianism/feminism/homsexuality comes up, people will complain about how proponents are too in-your-face about it. If that is someone's most accessible response to the topic then that is a warning sign.

The God Delusion utterly destroyed his effectiveness at convincing people against religion.

[citation needed], of course.

The problem with tone arguments, from a Bayesian standpoint, is that the arguer is declaring "I don't have to update on your evidence because I don't like the tone with which you present it." This is a form of rationalization for maintaining one's previous position against evidence to the contrary; as such, it is bad epistemic rationality.

(In some cases, it goes so far as "I don't have to update my view of humanity and human value on the evidence of the fact of your existence because I don't like the tone with which you present yourself." Which implies, "your tone in speaking to me is more significant to my values than your existence is.")

Maybe relevant?

I'd like to pool thoughts on what books we do recommend to get people out of religion.

I consider myself a Dawkins fan, but I personally wouldn't recommend The God Delusion to, say, a creationist. To a creationist, I'd recommend Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, along with Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True and the website TalkOrigins.org. The other Dawkins book I most frequently recommend is The Selfish Gene, but I'd recommend that mainly to people who aren't opposed to evolution but may need more help really understanding evolution.

I suspect The God Delusion would be of greatest help to someone on the fence about religion, but I'm not sure I'd necessarily recommend it over, say, Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. The main advantage of publishing The God Delusion, as I see it, is that Bertrand Russell wasn't going to make it back onto the bestseller list anytime soon.

I don't have many books I really strongly recommend to people with total confidence, but I do frequently give strong recommendations for Bart Ehrman's books, particularly Jesus, Interrupted.

Often what is called a "Tone argument" is someone who is saying "I have trouble considering your argument because of factors which are irrelevant to your content. If you wish to communicate with me, stop including things which impair communication."

It comes out more along the lines of "Did you really need to compare the comparing opinion to Stalinism to make your point? That's just rude.", or "You really should provide a warning when you are likely to trigger PTSD.", which can be rejected as tone arguments even though they identify specific failures of communication that could be remedied by the previous speaker.

You always want the tone to be effective, but just what constitutes effective is dependent on what you're trying to accomplish today. If it's not just to get people converted today, Mr. Nice Guy is not necessarily the best tactic.

Ridicule can be effective. Moral condemnation can be effective. Maybe both are not so effective at the moment of conversion, but a Bad Cop today can soften someone up for a Good Cop tomorrow.

Sam Harris had a wonderful smackdown of Christianity on moral grounds in a relatively recent debate with Craig. Comments like "evil", "morally reprehensible", "psychopathic", etc. And well executed. I thought it was about time.

Some groups are accustomed to thinking of themselves as moral paragons, and those who disagree with them as too morally weak to be good. They think everyone agrees with their moral premises of what is good, but that others just willfully shirk the good. I think it is helpful to enlighten them, and let them know that some may find their morality an abomination.

There's also just the theory of expanding the universe of discourse in your direction by taking your argument to even unjustified extremes, so that the less extreme versions can now look more "moderate".

And then sometimes the argument is being made to encourage the home team, instead of win over the visitors. People like seeing the enemy rhetorically horse whipped.

So the likely mistake one makes in criticizing tone is assuming you know what the speaker is trying to accomplish today.

I think there's an issue in that people read in differently from tone arguments depending on the source. The argument response "I don't like your tone" coming from someone you know agrees with you would likely be seen as a suggestion of phrasing the same point better, from someone you believe disagrees with you it is probably an attempt to avoid the substance of the argument.

I suspect with minimal information about the other person people will assume the latter and go on the defensive.

A rationalist who doesn't consider the effects of tone when attempting to effect a change in someone's thinking is not dealing in reality. There is a reason Becker's Rules have to be asked for and agreed to, even among rationalists- we are not built to automatically separate tone from content, and there are times when even the most thoughtful of us are personally vulnerable to a harsh tone. We tend to simplify to "two Beysians updating on evidence", but in reality, we have to consider the best way to transmit that message, as well as the outcome of that transmission. Human language is not tightly controlled code- when a change in tone is equivalent to a change in meaning, ignoring tone is the same as ignoring all parentheses in code.

I have stopped recommending Dawkin's work to people who are on the fence about religion.

Of course. Dawkins preaches to the converted. I doubt that he ever seriously put himself into the mindset of a devout person for the purpose of writing a convincing argument.

I have stopped recommending Dawkin's work to people who are on the fence about religion. The God Delusion utterly destroyed his effectiveness at convincing people against religion. (In a world in which they couldn't do an internet search on his name, it might not matter; we don't live in that world, and I assume other people are as likely to investigate somebody as I am.) It doesn't even matter whether his facts are right or not, the way he presents them will put most people on the intellectual defensive.

This has come up before in other discussions, but Richard Dawkins has converted a not insiginificant number of people. I'm sure that there are people who're put on the intellectual defensive by reading The God Delusion, but I also personally know people who were converted by it, and have heard testimony by people who had been exposed to atheist arguments on many prior occasions who found that The God Delusion effectively addressed their own positions and converted them where other arguments had not.

It's a simple fact that most arguments intended to divest people of their religious beliefs do not work on most believers. Some arguments, and I'm counting presentation as part of an argument, work on some believers, while different ones work on others, but all arguments do not work on most. If anyone had found a reliably effective way of arguing most believers out of their religion, it would almost certainly have been implemented on a mass scale already.

Richard Dawkins' attempts at arguing people out of their religions are mostly unsucessful, but so are everyone else's. I suspect you'd be hard pressed to name an individual who's personally responsible for a greater number of deconversions from religion. Different people respond to different approaches, but if you believe that he's chosen an approach to arguing people out of their religions that ranks low on the effectiveness scale, when compared to other approaches to arguing people out of religion, I think you're mistaken.

I see less Tone Argument with atheism than with the sense of 'Privilege' that was introduced in The Invisible Knapsack, including its variant forms.

Some people the notion of 'privilege' is aimed at 'get it', and some don't, but I've never seen it mentioned without a raft of people making obvious facile objections because the idea is presented aggressively. People who 'get it' and also note that this approach is not maximally efficient... catch a tremendous degree of flak, and that includes complaints against using 'Tone Arguments'.

We have quite a few atheist converts on LW. How about a poll?

I object to the tone of this post

Tone arguments are not necessarily logical errors

I think people's objections to tone arguments have often been misinterpreted because (ironically) the objections are often explained more emotively and less dispassionately.

As I understand it, the problem with "tone arguments" is NOT that they're inherently fallacious, but rather, than they're USUALLY (although not necessarily) rude and inflammatory.

I think a stereotypical exchange might be:

A says something inadvertently offensive to subgroup Beta B says "How dare you? Blah blah blah" A says "Don't get so emotional! Also, what you said is wrong because p, q and r" C says "Hey, no tone arguments, please"

A is correct that B's point might be more persuasive if it were less emotional and were well-crafted to be persuasive to people regardless whether they're already aware of the issues or not, and often correct about p, q and r (whether they're substansive rebuttals of the main point, or just quibbles) . But if B fails to put B's argument in the strongest possible form , it's A's responsibility to evaluate the stronger form of the argument, not just critique B for not doing so. And C pointed that out, just in a way that might unfortunately be opaque to A.

Or, in short, the categorical assessment of "Responding to Tone" as either a logical fallacy or a poor argument is incorrect

People actually do that? Those'd be crazy things for them to claim.

Tone arguments are not necessarily logical errors; they may be invoked by those who agree with the substance of an argument who nevertheless may feel that the argument, as posed, is counterproductive to its intended purpose.

Hmm, I guess I can still shrug off tone disagreements, because my arguments are rarely intended to convince someone. I mostly just try to exchange information. If people don't want my information, or give me noise instead of information, that's ok and I go talk to someone else. Sorry, this is not meant as a statement of superiority, but it seems to work pretty well for me.