What is discussion all about?

I find intriguing, and to some degree disappointing, that so many people I know have such a hard time understanding what is a discussion about. The confrontation of ideas is more often than not perceived as a personal attack, directed at one's personal belief. People tend to misunderstand the meaning of Ad Hominen attacks, while their ideas are being confronted, in the two possible ways: they either think the confrontation is personal, or they use the ad hominen subterfuge to gain leverage in the discussion. This usually only leads to frustration (which leads to the dark side).

In this sense, I found this TEDTalk enlightening. Philosopher Daniel Cohen, explains what exactly is the kind of argument I'm ranting about, the conceptual metaphor called "Argument as War" (more on this here). In this metaphor, the debate is perceived as a combat between points of view (represented, of course, by the debaters).

To win the debate, is to reduce the opponent to either agreeing with your point of view, or making him/her doubt himself/herself enough to give up arguing against you. The alternative, of course, is losing the debate, in which case you are forced either to change your point of view, or agree that your argumentation is just not good enough to keep discussing.

The most valid point he makes is: what do we gain, cognitively, by winning? Nothing. Except, of course, for a short ego massage. The person that actually gains something is the one that loses the argument, in the sense that he/she learns enough of the subject to change his/her mind.

My only addition to this interpretation is that we also learn things about the subject during the debate, no matter what the outcome. Whenever we confront our ideas, perspectives and points of view with another's, we have the chance of learning whatever facts or impressions they have on the subject that led to their different conclusion.

I like to think I always learn something in a good discussion, no matter if someone wins, or it ties. This is what drives me, and why I love a good debate.

Positive negation, negative affirmation, or else?

It is easy to notice that our cognitive abilities have much less problem processing a positive than a negative assertion. That is, it is just plain easier to understand that something is right, than saying something is not wrong, specially in long discourses like a mathematical demonstration, a lecture, thesis or paper.

I think this is the reasoning behind most lists on how to fail at something: instead of saying "don't these otherwise you you fail", one says that "do these in order to fail", often in a satirical mood. Interesting examples include a book called How to Fail: The Self-Hurt Guide, and this quick guide to fail in biology fields.

Scientific fields don't fall short of this trend, though. For example, an article was published last year entitled How Not to be a Bioinformatician. Rob Hyndman, in his blog (which I recently discovered looking for some LaTeX examples), has the post How to fail a PhD.

To contradict this trend, he also compiled the straightforward guide called How to avoid annoying a referee (which anybody in the scientific business should read and follow), expanding from this post in stats.stackexchange.com (which, in turn, follows the mindset described so far).

Of course one does not necessarily need to write guidelines in a jocular manner. One such (must-read) example is 1990's article from Gopen and Swan called The Science of Scientific Writing, in which they convey that most of the effort in communicating a result lies on the writer, and should not be deferred to the reader.

I find myself amused by the positive "how to fail" guides, though. They can make the point they want to address, while using a lighter tone. Maybe these are better ways of planting the seed of understanding something important, without taking the change of being perceived as boring.

The prodigal wannabe returns

Pheew! It's been a while, and by that I mean my last post drafts are from 2009. The PhD wasn't a walk in the park, but hey... nobody said it would be easy, right?

Since I last tried to create a posting habit, I lost count of how many books and articles I've read (and for some of those articles, I lost count of how many times I read them) switched jobs, and started a Post-Doc Fellowship in another research focus, completely different from my doctorate focus. I guess changing is what I do best.