The most important thing on the journey of personal growth is that there should be progress. So long as you keep moving forward you will reach your destination; but if you stop moving you will never reach it. Not every change is an improvement — but every improvement is a change.
Specifically, your naïve realism limits your ability to learn from (a) experiences and (b) others.
In this essay, I’d like to share a few techniques I use to get better at (a) truth-seeking and (b) constructive disagreement.
1. Watch out for “surely”
In a nutshell, your mission for today is this. Your gut feelings want to make you believe that your impressions are the result of a neutral accounting of reality. You must learn to distrust these appraisals.
You deal with this by becoming conscious of it:
1.Make an effort to become aware of your line of reasoning.
2.Then immediately ring the alarm bells whenever you spot thoughts with the “surely…” structure.
3.Now go down to the assumption level and assume something is wrong there.
4.Fix it. Pull off the mask of one of your beliefs. What’s the thought you do not allow yourself to think?
And obviously, asking questions rather than making assumptions will pay off in your relationships.
2. Realize you‘re probably wrong
The second mental shift you need to make is to understand you often suck as truth-seeker. It’s not just that our viewpoints aren’t objective. They’re not likely to be accurate either.
Regularly, people’s opinions that result from their unique experiences and inclinations make sense when you consider them from their perspective.
They aren’t disagreeing with you because they’re obstinate, they’re disagreeing because the world feels different to them — even if the two of you are in fact embedded in the same reality.
If can you internalize this key insight, your discussions will skyrocket in terms of productiveness. And you search for truth can only really begin after you’ve accepted that the thinking machine inside your skull has biases.
3. See the other person as ‘coming from somewhere’
The third technique is related: recall how you actually ended up holding the theory you prefer, and then realize that someone else has a similar story to tell.
This, too, has weighty implications for how you should think about your and other people’s (clashing) opinions.
Unless you really want to defend the position that all these people Over There are plain stupid you have to learn to say “I think there are two sides to every story” and “I think you’ll find it’s a little more complicated than that.”
Here’s my golden tip. Next time you find yourself vehemently disagreeing with someone, say to yourself:
He seemed like such a normal dude. And he IS a normal guy, he is just what you’d expect a baseline person to be like if he had the life experience he’s had.
4. See your own beliefs as the result of a fluky process
The last trick is the most difficult one: it requires you to suck up your pride and combat some of your deepest intuitions.
Trying to see your own principles ‘from the outside’, makes you better at trick #3. It makes it easier for you to see someone who you think is wrong as a fellow human being on his own quest to make sense of it all — given the worldview he has been trained to have.
You should try and see both your own and the other person’s convictions as the result of such a history, rather than stemming from his pure evilness or immeasurable stupidity. (But don’t think you can get good information about a technical issue just by psychoanalyzing the personalities involved.)
In a nutshell, if you want to become better at constructive disagreements, it’s essential to learn to detach. Look at your own experience of objective reality from the outside. Categorize it as one way of looking at things that needn’t be standard even though it’s what you’ve been trained to see. And adjust your confidence accordingly.
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