DANCING TO THE SAME BEAT
Since the audience started out favoring preschool subsidies, there was more
room for change in Harish’s direction—but he also had the more difficult
task of advocating for the unpopular position. He opened the audience’s
mind by taking a page out of the playbook of expert negotiators.
Harish started by emphasizing common ground. When he took the
stage for his rebuttal, he immediately drew attention to his and Debra’s
areas of agreement. “So,”
he began, “I think we disagree on far less than it
may seem.” He called out their alignment on the problem of poverty—and
on the validity of some of the studies—before objecting to subsidies as a
solution.
We won’t have much luck changing other people’s minds if we refuse
to change ours. We can demonstrate openness by acknowledging where we
agree with our critics and even what we’ve learned from them. Then, when
we ask what views they might be willing to revise, we’re not hypocrites.
Convincing other people to think again isn’t just about making a good
argument—it’s about establishing that we have the right motives in doing
so. When we concede that someone
else has made a good point, we signal
that we’re not preachers, prosecutors, or politicians trying to advance an
agenda. We’re scientists trying to get to the truth. “Arguments are often far
more combative and adversarial than they need to be,” Harish told me.
“You should be willing to listen to what someone else is saying and give
them a lot of credit for it. It makes you sound
like a reasonable person who
is taking everything into account.”
Being reasonable literally means that we can be reasoned with, that
we’re open to evolving our views in light of logic and data. So in the debate
with Harish, why did Debra neglect to do that—why did she overlook
common ground?
It’s not because Debra is eight years old. It’s because she isn’t human.
Debra Jo Prectet is an anagram I invented. Her official name is Project
Debater, and she’s a machine. More specifically, an artificial intelligence
developed by IBM to do for debate what Watson did for chess.
They first dreamed the idea up in 2011 and started working intensively
on it in 2014.
Just a few years later, Project Debater had developed the
remarkable ability to conduct an intelligent debate in public, complete with
facts, coherent sentences, and even counterarguments. Her knowledge
corpus consists of 400 million articles, largely from credible newspapers
and
magazines, and her claim detection engine is designed to locate key
arguments, identify their boundaries, and weigh the evidence. For any
debate topic, she can instantaneously search her knowledge graph for
relevant data points, mold them into a logical case, and deliver it clearly—
even entertainingly—in a female voice within the time constraints. Her first
words in the
preschool subsidy debate were, “Greetings, Harish. I’ve heard
you hold the world record in debate competition wins against humans, but I
suspect you’ve never debated a machine. Welcome to the future.”
Of course, it’s possible that Harish won because the audience was
biased against the computer and rooting for the human. It’s worth noting,
though, that Harish’s approach in that debate is the same one that he’s used
to defeat countless humans on international stages. What amazes me is that
the computer was able to master multiple complex capabilities while
completely missing this crucial one.
After studying 10 billion sentences, a computer was able to say
something funny—a skill that’s normally thought
to be confined to sentient
beings with high levels of social and emotional intelligence. The computer
had learned to make a logical argument and even anticipate the other side’s
counterargument. Yet it hadn’t learned to agree with elements of the other
side’s argument, apparently because that behavior was all too rarely
deployed across 400 million articles by humans. They were usually too
busy preaching their arguments, prosecuting their enemies, or politicking
for audience support to grant a valid point from the other side.
When I asked Harish how to improve
at finding common ground, he
offered a surprisingly practical tip. Most people immediately start with a
straw man, poking holes in the weakest version of the other side’s case. He
does the reverse: he considers the strongest version of their case, which is
known as the steel man. A politician might occasionally adopt that tactic to
pander or persuade, but like a good scientist, Harish does it to learn. Instead
of trying to dismantle the argument that
preschool is good for kids, Harish
accepted that the point was valid, which allowed him to relate to his
opponent’s perspective—and to the audience’s. Then it was perfectly fair
and balanced for him to express his concerns about whether a subsidy
would give the most underprivileged kids access to preschool.
Drawing attention to common ground and avoiding defend-attack
spirals weren’t the only ways in which Harish resembled expert negotiators.
He was also careful not to come on too strong.
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