by f33d5173 | 2025-04-15 20:05:01+00:00
If you're losing half your arguments then you're doing somthing wrong. That would imply you and your opponent are both picking your initial positions via a coin flip, so that you're both discovering which side is "correct" for the first time in the midst of the argument. Rather, the first time a person encounters a subject, they won't have an opinion on it, so instead of arguing over it they will usually do some research or listen to other people's perspectives. Only once they feel they have gathered enough information to form an opinion will they tend to get into arguments over it. At that point they should be about, say, 90% confident in their opinion, so they should lose arguments about 10% of the time.

But that's really an idealized view of opinion forming that has little to do with how people actually develop their beliefs. Usually people don't want to become part-time experts in every field under the sun prior to developing an opinion on a given subject. So they will take the shortcut of acknowledging some expert or authority whose opinion they have some reason to trust. When they get into an argument, they still argue their opinion in terms of object level facts, but their actual reason for holding that opinion is largely disconnected from those facts. If their interlocutor presented an extraordinrily strong case (usually alongside some reason to distrust experts) they might still change their view. Otherwise, they will exit the discussion either feeling more confident in their view owing to the impotence of their inquisitor, or they will leave feeling uncertain in their view due to the strong front put up by the opposition. Even in the latter case, they will seldom admit to having "lost" the argument. They will rather change tacts midway through the discussion - ceding what they discover to be an inadequate line of attack for one they deem more defensable. That will often come across to the opposition as a forfeiture, an admission of inadequacy. But since they were never strongly taken to a given reasoning for their view (beyond, as I said, trust in experts, but the expert opinion does not change midway through an argument), they are indifferent to whether a given line of reasoning bears out.

I should emphasize that this is all really unavoidable, and that this is grounds for us to argue that even non toddlers (in fact we might argue, especially non toddlers) should not admit to having "lost" an argument any more than a small fraction of the time. This reflects that the goal of an argument is not usually to change minds, but rather for both sides to develop their understanding of the subject and to become more aware of why others would disagree with them.

Since I assume that the present discussion is a propos recent US political issues, what has occurred there is that some portion of the population considers trump to be an "authority" (as I have used the term above). That is, they feel that trump must necessarily have good reason for believing what he does, and furthermore that whatever actions trump takes must have good reasons behind them; this jutifies to them their choice to believe the same things and to believe those actions are good. This is questionable in the first place because trump has done very little to establish himself as an authority on political matters. He is first of all lacking in political experience prior to his first term, and second of all demonstrated during that first term very little talent for statesmanship. So to say that the policies he is implementing now must be well thought out, owing to his history of thinking out policies prior to implementing them, is not concomitant with the evidence.

In the second place, there is a clear demonstrated disconnect between trump's beliefs and his actions. He tends to take actions by justifying them in one way, but will later change course by giving an unrelated justification for his prior action (none of this to say that either are really his true reason). If we defend some position on the grounds that trump agrees with it at one point in time, we are liable to end up arguing against that position some time later on the same grounds. If the likelihood of contradicting ourselves is so high, then we cannot reasonably assign a high probability to the correctness of whatever position we are initially defending. (Or in other words, whereas I previously stated "the expert opinion does not change midway through an argument", this is liable to be false when we take trump as the "expert")

We might attempt to persist in defending trump on grounds that we agree with his actions rather than his words. I would find that questionable as well, since he has never been reliable in acting in a single direction. His recent flip-flop on illegal immigration, which previously seemed like a core issue of his, seems like a good demonstration of this.

Given all this, we come to the conclusion that those defending trump are defending the personage of trump rather than any particular belief or policy. He has developed, in other words, a cult of personality under which his followers will agree with anything he says or does (with some very limited exceptions like vaccines), even if they previously argued in strong terms against those same actions or beliefs. Such a cult of personality is not necessarily toddlerish, but is nonetheless highly regrettable.