QC

Probably worth articulating: I really dislike arguing. By the time we've gotten down to anything that feels remotely like arguing it feels to me like we've already lost our shot at making any real progress.

There's a particular kind of person, usually male, who wants to pretend that arguments are emotionally neutral decontextualized arenas for truth-seeking. This is not even remotely true. Arguments are for winning, and winning is about status, ego, identity, etc.

Much more fun than arguing with someone, although harder to pull off sincerely online, is getting curious; why did person X say thing Y that seems wrong to me? What life experiences etc. led to it? What kind of world must they live in for that to be a thing they'd say?

Harder to pull this off online because it really helps to be able to communicate sincere curiosity via tone of voice, body language, etc. And if you can't muster sincere curiosity that's itself interesting. What do you feel instead? Defensive? What's needing to be defended?

Defensiveness makes it impossible to really take in anything that another person is saying, at a level that would actually mean anything. There is no real learning that can take place from defensiveness. From here the fun move is investigating the defensiveness itself.

It's very rich to be in e.g. circling / authentic relating contexts which hold defensiveness as something that can be taken as object. Loads more fun moving to "I notice I get defensive when you talk about admiring Jordan Peterson" than arguing!

This is a real example. It turned out the person in question was afraid that Jordan Peterson might be right about some stuff that his friends and family disagreed about, and that if he believed that stuff they might all reject him.