How to Have Impossible Conversations
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- Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019)
Overview
A practical guide to talking with people who hold beliefs you find unreasonable, from religion to politics, arranged as a ladder of skill levels from "fundamentals" to "master". The techniques include building rapport before disagreeing, asking how confident the person is and what would change their mind, "outsourcing" by asking how they would persuade someone else, avoiding the word "but", stating the other side's view back to them before replying, and "altercasting", in which you describe the other person as the kind of reasonable person who would consider your point. The book borrows openly from hostage negotiation, motivational interviewing, and Daniel Dennett's version of Rapoport's rules, and its goal is that both parties leave the conversation less certain and still speaking.
Notes
A better book than the Manual, mainly because it has dropped the diagnosis and the target. The core advice is sound and I follow most of it: ask for a confidence level, ask what would change the person's mind, and restate their position until they agree you have it. That is Steelmanning as a procedure, and the "outsourcing" move is a clever way of getting someone to apply their own standards to their own belief.
The problems start with the ladder. The lower rungs are good manners written out as technique, which is fine. The higher rungs, altercasting and the "expert" and "master" sections, are tactics, and a tactic is something you do to a person. Once I am managing someone's self-image so that they will agree with me, I have stopped having a conversation and started running an operation, and the book never quite notices the line it has crossed. If a conversation is genuinely impossible, the fix is not a better technique for winning it.
The second problem is evidence. The book presents its methods as if they were established, but the support is anecdote, a handful of studies on motivational interviewing in clinical settings, and the authors' own experience. There is very little evidence that any of this changes minds about religion or politics at scale, and the book's own account of confirmation bias should have made the authors more cautious about generalising from the conversations they remember going well.
The third problem is the authors. A book on humility, calibration, and talking across difference is hard to read without noticing that James Lindsay has since spent his career doing none of those things in public, and that Boghossian's own conversations have grown steadily less curious. That is not a logical objection to the content, but when a method's inventors cannot be seen using it, the reader is entitled to wonder how much it does.
Read the first half for the habits; skip the ladder. The habits are in the Apology anyway, and Socrates had the decency not to call them a skill tree.