The best way to win an argument

The wrong way is to sling “facts” at your opponent. He is under no obligation to accept them as facts, nor are you obliged to accept his. It goes nowhere.
The best way I have found is the Socratic method- asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking. Lead your opponent to a place where he realizes he’s wrong.

Extremism. What a miss-used word. I would posit that political extremism is the political norm for both mainstream LEFT and RIGHT paradigms. And this position is supported by the above articles. What luck for (radical) leaders that men don’t think.

Sorry, I don’t see how this has anything to do with the best way to win an argument.
People tend to not understand things as well as they think they do. When challenged to explain, they start to realize their lack of understanding. Fine. This is not new behavior.
“shows how people’s mistaken sense that they understand underlying causal processes can be used to improve the quality of their arguments and lead to more moderate attitudes.”
“People’s mistaken sense . . . can be used to improve the quality of their arguments.”
Nonsense.

son of mulder says:
“Those who can see the above site, what have you paid to fund it? I’d be very interested to know.”
My attention at/near advertisments.

‘Extremism’ is associated not with being right but not tolerating the right of others to disagree with you.
The Old Testament is very extremist by saying ‘Thou shalt have no other God but me’. Very dictatorial, isn’t it?? You’ll find similar statements in the Koran if I’m not mistaken……..
The grey areas emerge when someone accepts the facts you have presented to them which refute their argument but refuse to climb down from their position. I’ve seen this a lot with climate zealots.
Another grey area emerges when someone demands an equal vote using the line: ‘I haven’t got a clue, but these experts say so, so they must be right’, without spending enough time to determine whether you should believe what the experts tell you. It’s very frustrating that one, and you can see why people may descend toward extremism.
A third grey area involve those folks whose mode of argument always involves sneering, deriding, and lying whenever you try and engage in debate. There’s a temptation to descend to violence with these people, because they are the apotheosis of debating extremists and often they have held senior positions where people aren’t supposed to challenge their authority. They are some of the most dangerous people in fomenting extremism, because they combine power, influence and authority with wrong-headed, pig-headed ignorance allied to an unacceptably aggressive debating style.
So my position currently is that extremism in debate is fomented when an ignorant majority demand equal influence to those who have bothered to educate themselves as to the complexities of the matter, whilst not being financially dependent on the outcome of the argument.
Of course, it is also fomented by threats to people’s livelihoods, family security or personal welfare.

This is for all of us British who are denied access to this article, in spite of being forced to pay the annual BBC license fee.
Neurohacks | 21 May 2014
The best way to win an argument
How do you change someone’s mind if you think you are right and they are wrong? Psychology reveals the last thing to do is the tactic we usually resort to.
You are, I’m afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I’ll be more than happy to elaborate on the many, many reasons why I’m right and you are wrong. Are you feeling ready to be convinced?
Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It’s also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.
A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best. They called this phenomenon “the illusion of explanatory depth” [1]. They began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked, before asking them to explain what they understood and then answer questions on it. The effect they revealed was that, on average, people in the experiment rated their understanding as much worse after it had been put to the test.
What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Usually, nobody tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look. Psychologists call this idea that humans have a tendency to take mental short cuts when making decisions or assessments the “cognitive miser” theory [2].
Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.
It’s a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. Usually, it only takes the first moments when you start to rehearse what you’ll say to explain a topic, or worse, the first student question, for you to realise that you don’t truly understand it. All over the world, teachers say to each other “I didn’t really understand this until I had to teach it”. Or as researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped: “I find that no matter how badly I teach I still learn something” [3].
Explain yourself
Research published last year [4] on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Perhaps, they figured, people who have strong political opinions would be more open to other viewpoints, if asked to explain exactly how they thought the policy they were advocating would bring about the effects they claimed it would.
Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and then provide reasons for why they held that view. This group got the opportunity to put their side of the issue, in the same way anyone in an argument or debate has a chance to argue their case.
Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.
So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you’re trying to convince a friend [5] that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there’s a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.
[1] http://www.yale.edu/cogdevlab/aarticles/IOED%20proofs.pdf%201.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser
[3] http://www.changizi.com/
[4] http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/6/939.short
[5] https://www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-05/5319c4add63a707e780000cd

From the article:
>>>Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
[snip]
>>>Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues<<<
I believe that someone posting on these pages described his own approach to climate discussions as being quite similar to this. A lot of people might discover that they can't explain their beliefs in detail.

“We can’t view the BBC article from the UK because we Brits only fund the BBC.”
If you want to mask your country of origin, use a VPN and tunnel into the internet. ProXPN has a variety of VPN gateways around the world; their free service uses their gateway in Dallas, Texas, USA. I just verified that you can get access to the BBC website through this gateway. I’m actually not a paying customer; I only use their free service occasionally to deal with stupid policies of ISPs and websites.

McMulder: this is really off topic, but you are touching on a very sore point with me. As you (as someone that has lived outside the US) are aware, the US news and media it stitched up tight here, you only get to see what they want to feed you, news or general entertainment. Much better sources are just not aired.
I used to listen to short wave BBC WOrld Service broadcasts, then the BBC sold re-broadcast rights in the US to PRI and shut down all the SW relays to the US. The. BBC claims this was to allow better reception, and that programming was available on local radio channels. Of course, the satellite feeds are encrypted, and at least here in Oregon, if there is any BBC WS content available, it’s for half an hour at 4am.
The rest of the world gets BBC WS TV, but all available feeds in the US are now encrypted, because the BBC sold the name to The Discovery Channel, who call it BBC America, which has really little in common with the BBC other than showing some of their content, a lot of independent tv (ITV) programs and a bit of locally produced content.
The amount of locally produced stuff is likely to increase, because both BBC and ITV have sold a lot of their better programming to Acorn Media which is no longer re-selling to US distributors, having decided it can compete with. Netflix and Amazon in Internet distribution.
Since even if you were to send the BBC a check for a TV license you still wouldn’t be able to see the content, I take the same money and donate it to vpnuk.info.

Who knows what the article says, but the premise is odd, given the lengths the BBC goes NOT to call terrorists terrorists.
Instead we have
rebels
activists
militants
this even in the case of internationally acknowledged groups such as Hamas, who are regularly characterised by the BBC as “militants”.
Chuck out your TV – you really won’t miss it – and stop funding this arsehole of an institution.

The best way to win a scientific argument is this. I had it applied to me by a colleague, years ago. We could not resolve a difference of opinion, so he said, “as a scientist, you must accept the possibility that you are wrong”. I answered, Yes, I do. “Well I don’t, so I win.”

The ‘warmists’ are one step ahead of this one, which only works if both sides engage in ‘fact based reasoning’, or at least think they do. Global warming discussions don’t work that way, at least in my experience. They go something like this. Sceptic: “for 17 years, no warming”. Believer: its happening ‘because all the scientists say so’. Using the BBC method described, sceptic could ask “why do you think that?” The response is still ‘because all the scientists say so’. It doesn’t matter what the warmist is asked to explain, his answer is always ‘because all the scientists say so’. The ‘warmist’ have so thoroughly engendered this position, that it will take a massive glaciation to open a chink in the armor. This years record cold winter certainly made no dent.

A number of BBC current affairs journalists have been recently found expressing uninhibited adverse views on social media about a particular political party in the 22 May ballot. This is in clear breach of rules on impartiality, which is explicit in the BBC’s Charter. I wonder what techniques BBC managers used to persuade those journalists of the rightness of impartiality. I wonder what techniques BBC managers have instituted to effect reinforcement of those rules.

” it applies to you too!”
No it doesn’t.