Hi, I'm Jennifer Hancock, founder of humanist learning systems and this is moral jujitsu Socratic Jiu Jitsu, the science and art of winning an argument without arguing. I like to think of this as Socratic or moral jujitsu Jiu Jitsu is an art and martial art that soft and yielding. It's not like a violent thing it well it's violent but it's often yielding, what you're going to do is you're going to use your opponent's force or strength against them. And you do this by yielding. The idea that you can yield and still win is a bit bizarre for most people. yielding is seen by a lot of people as a weakness except that it isn't.

I do Tai Chi, I it's, it's one of my my part of my exercise routine. And this is a photo of master john chumley. And he brought while you tie to America in the 1970s, and he happened to teach my my master Robert Saviour How to do it. Most people know Tai Chi, as an exercise that old people do in parks and it's actually a martial art in a pretty violent one as well. A martial art, it's a martial art where you're never the aggressor, but you win by not fighting. And that seems like really strange.

But that's the entire form of Tai Chi is, is to allow. You're not going to fight but you're still gonna win. Right? And there's very few images or videos of Tai Chi applied as a martial form. And the reason for this is the fights are over so quickly. I mean, they just they just happen.

They're done the person aggresses and they're dead on the ground. The Masters don't even break a sweat when they're doing it. They're just they're smiling like, Look, the other person is flying, like flying. Not fake flying. They're really flying. JOHN Lee would say that at my slightest touch I sent my opponents flying and if you ever watch a video of someone like him Master, you will see his opponent fly.

He doesn't use strength to do this. I mean, john Lee was a tiny guy, kind of fiery. What he did is he used physics, he is the momentum of the other person against them. And he directed that momentum where he wanted it to go. Right. So the other person's the aggressive, the other person's putting their energy into it, all he would do is push them where he wanted to go, and they would go on, he could do this.

And the other masters of Tai Chi can do this because they're the masters of yielding. They don't fight, they simply let the other person defeat themselves. Right. What they're doing is not fighting, it's disabling aggression. And you disable it, not by allowing the other person to attack you. But by allowing them to attempt to attack you and fail.

You get out of their way. Sometimes you direct them face first to the floor. But you do that with love and a smile on your face because you're not fighting always with a smile on your face. Your first hope is that you will de escalate so that there is no fight. But if there is you get out of their way, and you let them hit the floor, on their own, with you out of their way. So let's talk about how we use these principles to get out of the way and allow the other person to defeat themselves to the concept of winning moral arguments.

All right, what we're gonna do is we're going to yield and we're not going to fight, we're not going to debate, we're not going to try and convince our opponent that we're right and they're wrong. We're not going to try and try and convince them that our way is better that's fighting. We're not going to debate them. That's fighting. And we don't want to fight stupidity with more stupidity because that's what fighting is. If we fight them, they will dig in and they'll fight us back.

And they're gonna if they do that they're gonna refuse to accept our premise and we haven't won anything. We may be right. We may get a sense of moral self righteousness that we get what I'm hackles are raised, and we're ready to fight. But we didn't win the argument if we didn't convince them that we're right. So, in order to win, you have to actually get your opponent to agree with you. And I realized with a lot of people who debate on the internet, they think they won the debate because they made a better argument.

But if the other person didn't change their mind, they didn't do anything. All they did was, you know, make them felt self feel good by fighting. Alright, in order to win, you have to actually get your opponent to agree with you. All right. And to do this, we're going to focus on debating and not on being right, but on how to solve the problem that is at the heart of the debate. And we're going to help our opponent walk through them step by step until they reach our conclusion.

If our conclusion is good, if our conclusion is bad, we will find that out through this process. If you argue with someone, you're not doing that you're never going to get them to agree with you. You can only get them to see your point of view if you foster inquiry into their point of view and their reasoning for their point of view first. So let's talk about the technique of Socratic jujitsu. All right, there's verbal jujitsu as opposed to physical. And we're going to go into more detail on each of these individual elements as we go through this presentation.

But I want to give you a quick outline of what the technique is how we're going to win arguments by not arguing. First thing you do you concede their point, even if the other person's premise is absolute and complete nonsense, conditionally accepted. All right. You don't have to say I agree with you. You can say okay, let's assume you're correct. I haven't conceded their point.

I'm, I'm assuming for the moment for the sake of argument that they're right. All right. And we're going to go more into exactly what this means on the next slide. But basically, you're doing this not only to show respect, but to disarm them. You have signaled you're not going to fight. Right?

I'm going to respect you enough to consider your points as valid. All right. When you do that people lower their defenses and they allow a discussion to occur. All right, if you say, No, no, no, you're wrong, you're wrong. You're wrong. Wrong.

No conversation takes place, no learning takes place. Second, once we have yielded and gotten out of their way, we're going to frame their the conversation that takes place in the problem that they're trying to solve in moral terms that everyone can agree with, including us. Alright. Then we're going to use Socratic questioning, to help problem solve together. This is not an adversarial thing. We're not doing this to win.

We're doing it as a collaborative thing. Let's assume you're correct. Let's assume this is the problem you're trying to solve. And we can all agree on what we think a moral solution would be. Now let's see what your proposal does and whether it matches up with the frame. We've just agreed On what constitutes a moral and proper solution, our goal is to solve the problem, or rather to have them explain to us why their ideas would or would not solve the problem.

If their ideas are complete nonsense, they will figure that out as they try to explain them to us. All right. We don't have to challenge them as nonsense. All we have to do is ask questions to find out whether or not their ideas are nonsense or not. What we're doing is we're inviting them to convince us that they are right to explain their reasoning to us if they fail, that's on them. We've at least given them the chance to to prove their point.

And if they fail, they will see the flaws in their reasoning without us having to point them out. And yes, there is actually science to back up this method and I've got a link on your on your lecture notes to a website called mine hacks and it's called the best way to win an argument. Specifically, it has been known for decades that most people's understandings of most things is superficial at best. Most of us understand the world around us superficially. It's only when we're asked to explain how something works, that we realize how little we actually understood it. Right?

There's no better way to learn something than to be forced to teach it to someone else. And when you ask questions, you ask someone to explain to you their reasoning, they will figure out what's wrong with their reasoning on their own, and improve their thinking as a result. Now, recently, a guy named Philip Fern back at the University of Colorado tested to see whether helping people realize how superficial their knowledge really is. Whether that can help them change their minds by testing this on really conditioned content, contentious, contentious political issues, and the answer is yes, it does. You can use this technique to get people to change their minds on the really big debate about political issues of the day. And again, I have a link in the lecture notes to a scholarly article at Harvard, on political extremism, because that's what this was about.

Now, the final technique that we're going to use is agreement. Now, we may still agree to disagree at the end of this, but we'll probably have made more headway in encouraging our opponent to question their own beliefs, values and ideas than if we attack them and told them they were stupid. Alright, so ideally, at the end, we're going to agree on a problem, how we're going to solve the problem. But if we don't, even if we don't agree, we've probably made more headway in winning than if we just attack them without yielding at the start. So let's go into each of these. Each of these ideas individually, the First things first, the first thing that you have to do is you have to yield disarm your opponent.

All right, and in Tai Chi, we moved to get out of the way and simultaneously by yielding we're disarming and you know As I physically moved, because that's what my training is. Normally what happens is our opponent says something we disagree with, and we tell them, we disagree with them, and we start to explain to them why they're wrong. All right? What would happen if you didn't do that? All right, what would happen if you didn't argue with them? So kind of to see this, let's look at the framework of an argument and then kind of discuss what the alternatives are.

Now with an argument, you have premises and a conclusion, if the premises are true, and the logic is good, then you have a good probability of the conclusion being true, too. So I have an example here. One of the premises is that all flowers are animals. The second premise is that all animals can jump. So those are my two premises. And if I put them together all flowers can jump.

That's my conclusion. Right? Now, obviously, I've made some errors. My first premise isn't true. All flowers are not animals, in fact, no flowers. Right.

So my premise is not True. The second premises is not true either. Some animals can shop but not all animals can shop. But if my two premises were true, then my conclusion would be good. All right, the logic is good even if the conclusion is false. The conclusion is false because the premises are false.

Alright, so when you consider the logic of an argument, you need to understand premises can be false and conclusions may or may not follow, even if the premises are true. All right, so if all flowers for animals, all animals can job Therefore, all flowers conjunct? Well, that's not necessarily the case. Because even if we said all cats are animals, and all animals can shop and assuming all animals can jump would be true. That doesn't mean that a particular cat can shop because this cat might be lame and not might not have legs. There's any number of reasons why an individual cat couldn't chop the fall, even if all animals in general could shop.

Alright, so let's go back to our argument with our hypothetical person. When we have an argument with someone it's usually because we disagree with Their conclusion. And there are several ways we can argue with them, we can argue that their premises aren't true. Or we can argue that there's a problem with their logic. Usually, though, when we're arguing someone, we're arguing whether the premises are true or not, so that we can disregard their conclusion. Because if the premises are true, then the conclusion is bad, even if the logic was good.

So now, in case you're wondering whether arguing about premises works or not, the answer is no, it does not. Right. This this really works. Let me give you an example of really contentious one abortion. All right. What is the country stuck on?

In this debate? We are debating whether or not a fetus is a child. Because if it's not a child, then abortion isn't murder. If it is a child, then abortion is murder. That's what we're arguing. Right?

The conclusion? we're arguing the premise to get ourselves to that conclusion, and it doesn't work. We're stuck. They're all right. It doesn't matter what side of that debate you're on. You're not making headway with the other side period.

It's just not happening because we're arguing about the premise. Climate change, is it caused by humans or not? All right. Doesn't really matter. Okay, anyways, like, but we're stuck in, is it human cost? Or is it not human costs?

We're not debating whether or not it's really happening, and what the consequences of it really happening are, we're stuck on the premise. Because we think the premise matters to our conclusion, and the reality is, it might not. These argue, arguments go nowhere because we're arguing about the premise, not the conclusion. And usually in a moral argument, it's the conclusion that matters the most. The other reason arguing about premises doesn't work is because people aren't all that rational. We all like to think we are but the reality is we're not.

So instead of arguing premises, instead of doing that, we're gonna yield. We're gonna accept the premise. We're Gonna tentatively and conditionally accept their premise but not necessarily their conclusion, because the conclusion is where the morality is. Even if we think or we know that their premise is false, we're going to conditionally accept them. Let's assume that's true. I don't think it is.

But let's assume it is for the time being, you yield without conceding. What this does is it disarms the the opponent, there is no argument. We're not gonna argue with that with you. Not really. All right. And if they want to continue arguing with that, they're not going to meet an argument with you because you're not arguing argue with that you've accepted their premise.

They now have to convince you that their argument is valid. You're not going to try and convince them of anything, because you aren't going to do that. Because you're not they're going to be thrown off balance. Most people have no idea what to do when their premises are accepted. Because they haven't gotten past the premise. They spent all their time trying to prove that their premise is true.

They have no idea how to argue the rest. Their argument, all right, they were expecting a fight, it doesn't materialize. You're not forcing them to listen or consider to your argument. You're not even offering your opinions. You're simply giving them an opportunity to justify their position to you. And you're going to do this using Socratic questioning to see if they can convince you to change your mind.

And if they can't, that's on them. You don't do this to when you do this, because you really are willing to change your mind. At least I hope you are. You do have to be sincere about this or it's not gonna work. You have to be willing to learn that you were wrong. I'm a humanist.

I am willing to change my mind if you can prove to me that I am wrong. I'm willing to have my assumptions challenged. That's something I pride myself in so I'm willing to listen to you. argue your case. I'm not gonna argue back with you. But I'm willing to listen to your argument.

Now, I use these argument opportunities to have my assumptions challenged because I might learn something I might be wrong. I'm humble enough to admit I don't know everything, I could very well be long wrong. What I might learn from the conversation might just be how strangely people rationalize nonsense. But that's something worth learning. Most of the time. What you find when you do this, is that you find that their reasons aren't all that crazy as you thought and actually might really be pretty logical.

You just hadn't taken the time to listen before. wouldn't normally ends up happening is that you ask some questions to learn from them and you end up walking them through why even if their premises are valid, their argument still doesn't work. That's usually what happens. If your understanding of the problem is not shallow, but deep. If your understanding is shallow, you're going to find that out and you're gonna learn something but if it turns out you were deep and they were shallow, they will find that out. My point is that every time you can see the point conditionally conceived, you disarm your opponent and positively inclined them towards you as a rational person capable of being reasoned with.

And when you ask questions and challenge their assumptions in that framework, they will most likely reciprocate that respect. Because you're modeling the behavior you want them to exhibit, alright, and people do reciprocate that if you come at them full frontal, they're going to come at you from from if you say, Okay, well, you know, maybe you didn't know something I don't know. So explain this to me, because I don't understand what it is you're saying and why do you want to say this? You are creating a mind changing norm you are exhibiting and normalizing the value of changing your mind. They would look like idiots if they do not concede your point. After you can see that there's Okay.

Now sometimes what happens as people can't explain their reasoning and they give up and they just walk away and They get mad at you for trying to make them rationalize it. But that's fine. You at least gave them the respect even if they get frustrated by it if they're really bullheaded, and let them go because you wouldn't have been able to win the argument anyway. And you just you learn that without having butted heads and been a jerk about it. So we're going to heal to disarm them. They have to convince you that they're right.

You're not trying to convince them of anything. They have to convince you that they're right. You've conceded their point. Let them explain it to you.