Talking to the empirically wrong

I had planned to offer more advice in my blog today for dealing with "wrong" people, but I'm not to sure I have anything to add to today's column! So I'll leave this mostly as an open forum for your own comments.

I was thrilled to get today's letter. It feels, somehow, like a letter I've been waiting for for a long while. For one thing, ever since Sherri Shepherd said she didn't know whether the earth was round or flat, I've been wondering "at what point does the responsibility to civility and relationships end, and the responsibility to facts and common sense begin?" And Mind Over Manners, after all, is about dealing with people whose values, priorities, and experiences are different from our own. Obviously neither the pet owner nor the allergy sufferer, the parent nor the non-parent, the renter nor the homeowner, is "right." Not all values, priorities, and experiences differ because factual beliefs do. But how to deal with people who are flat-out wrong is, obviously, one end of that spectrum.

Also, dealing with wrong people is in the news these days thanks to one of our congressional Representatives, Barney Frank, who high-handedly and somewhat angrily dismissed a woman at a town hall meeting who referred to President Obama's health-care proposal as "Nazi" in character. "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table," Representative Frank notably said.

And, of course, I agree. The two major points I'd hoped to make in my answer was 1) you're not going to change people's minds, because minds don't change as a response to reasoned argument, and 2) treat wrong people differently in public than you do in private. So, no, you don't argue with the dining-room tables, and if necessary, you say something like, "I respect your right to believe as you do." (I've been using that dodge for years, and nobody actually notices that you haven't said you respect their beliefs, just the First Amendment-guaranteed freedom to express them. Try it!) But of course Mr. Frank wasn't at a dinner party, he was at a town hall meeting. How you deal with wrong people in public--that, of course, is a different question.

Was Mr. Frank right to dismiss the woman because her beliefs are ludicrous and almost certainly immune to evidence? (It's not ludicrous to object to the health-care plan, but to suggest that it is Nazi-like is, to put it mildly, wrong.) That's not an easy one for me to answer. I'm really torn, for example, on the question of whether or not scientists should debate creationists. On the one hand, I don't think they should be legitimizing creationism with debate, or wasting their time. (Because you know, if the scientists aren't debating creationists, they'll, like, totally be in their labs inventing stuff and curing cancer. They're not just going to spend that evening eating a frozen pizza and watching "Law & Order" reruns, nuh-uh, not scientists!) On the other hand, if there are intelligent but poorly-educated people who can be swayed, maybe public debates are worthwhile. I suppose the question of dealing with wrong people in the public sphere is, for me, more about tactics than about morality. What forms of persuasion work and which ones don't?

In the private sphere ... it is more difficult. As I thought about this blog post, it occurred to me that a really large percentage of my friends--good friends, I mean here, not "friends" in that modern sense of "people I met once"--have at least one belief that I think is based on unsound evidence or logic, and might even be dangerous if truly taken to its end. I don't think that my friends are 1) an unusually diverse group, ideologically, nor 2) crazier than any other cross-section of the population, both of which lead me to assume that most of us might be in a similar position, enjoying our friends on the common ground we share with them and knowing not to get Bob started about global warming, or Jane about Stalin's purges, or Chris about Islam.

One thing that is helpful to keep in mind is, do you want the other person to believe the right thing or do the right thing? What really matters--that they accept current scientific reasoning about the age of the earth, or that they recycle? Is it more important that the woman you're talking to identify as a feminist, or that she sign your petition for better day-care on campus? Some of us can get entirely too hung up on labels and purity of beliefs, and miss out on potential allies.

But aside from that piece of advice, the "I respect your right" dodge mentioned above, and a fervent plea to keep politics off of Facebook, I haven't got much more to share. I will, though--I'm reading a couple of books right now on the psychology and biology (!) of beliefs, and I'll keep you apprised of what I learn. In the meantime, what have your experiences been in dealing with wrong people? What's worked and what hasn't? Do you think Barney Frank handled the situation appropriately?