There's something I've noticed about a lot of conversations I've had. I used to think that conversations were a clashing of the minds or the creation of ideas. However I have noticed that during many of conversations I simply use a bunch of preconceived statements. This is especially true for topics such as politics. For a lot of arguments, I already have a statements planned out to counter a variety of arguments. Here's one example:
person A: I can't believe they're cutting money for our troops overseas. They're crippling our military.
Me: The defense department and overseas contingency operations have a budget of 700 billion dollars. I doubt a few cuts would hurt them.
The core of my rebuttal was just a statistical chunk of info I dug up on wikipedia under “US 2012 budget”. I would have also used this to rebuttal arguments like “The government needs to stop wasting our money on [X cause] and give more to our boys to fight those terrorists.” These statements or arguments of mine are like cards and in an argument, all I do is sift through my deck and pick an appropriate one to use in response to the statement card someone else uses. Now that I've learned my logical fallacies, I have more of these cards to use in discussion. Of course not all conversations are like this, but it's hard to deny that for a lot of conversations, I just use my deck of preconceived statements.
In fact a lot of these journals are just organized sets of these “statement cards”. If I get in a conversation about one of the topics I've mentioned in these journals, I'll use the same statements that I put in the journals.
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12 years, 10 months ago
28 Dec 2012 23:47 CET
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