the easiest way to win an argument is by avoiding it the second easiest way to win an argument is by losing it the third easiest way to win an argument is by diffusing it the fourth easiest way is to use logical fallacies plus unethical tactics and at the bottom of the list the hardest way is to actually have good logic those are the five different ways you can approach an argument the reason I made this list is cuz if you ever Google how to win an argument pretty much every piece of advice Focus is on
the bottom two things and a lot of it is just mirror their body language or make more eye contact but sometimes I doubt how useful that stuff can actually be every method has its own problems these three are just easier they're easy to remember and they don't take that much effort and that is the kind of thing you are here for hopefully let's start with method number one avoiding the argument Mark Twain once said never argue with stupid people they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience now I like
this advice because it tells you to be willing to give up on an argument or to walk away from a potential argument even when you know you're right it's just not worth the frustration to argue with someone who just doesn't get it but while it's very very easy to walk away from arguments in real life in most arguments there's no way to know which one of you is the stupid one both of you each think that you are right and the other person is stupid imagine this you walk up to a debate and you say
one + 1 = 2 your opponent says well actually no 1 + 1 equal 1 you know that you are obviously right blue stick figure also thinks that they are obviously right but just keep in mind your opponent might not always be stupid they might just be misinformed you can Google 1+ one and then show them that it equals two but they're thinking Google what in the propaganda maybe you're the one that's brainwashed it's decent advice to walk away from arguments that aren't helping you but still if you avoid every single argument you'll end up
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of this is completely free just scroll down to the link in the description to give Opera a free download and you'll see what I'm talking about now on to the next method of winning an argument by losing the argument think about it in many situations the point of an argument is not to win it's not to prove that you're right it's to get what you want imagine you lived in a small apartment your roommate leaves out a cookie jar every week for the both of you to share but after the first first month they confront
you I put out 20 cookies for the both of us to share and you took 17 of them what is wrong with you now here it turns out you actually only took 16 they counted wrong either way you still obviously messed up and now your roommate probably wants to kick you out because you don't even pay your half of the rent and you don't clean up your spills and you ride around the apartment in a segue like it's 2016 and now you can't even share a cookie jar how are you going to argue your way
out of this well you can't use facts and evidence here cuz the fact facts and evidence here are against you instead ask yourself what do I actually want out of this argument do I really care about proving that I actually only took 16 not 17 do I really care about convincing them that I did nothing wrong is all that worth it no in fact all I really want is to get my roommate to stop being angry and to keep leaving out the cookies only focus on the outcome you want and nothing else don't think about
your pride or proving that you're right just think about the outcome you could say I took 17 cookies wow that's terrible they were so good I didn't even realize I'm sorry I promise I don't usually do that I won't do it again and if you really want I could even buy a separate jar just so it doesn't happen again of course you're never actually going to buy a separate jar but to your roommate this sounds like you really just made an honest mistake and you're even willing to go out of your way to make things
right in fact your apology was so good you just made them feel bad for confronting you this even applies to situations where you don't think you did anything wrong sometimes instead of trying to prove your innocence you can just apologize and win the argument by losing method number three diffuse the argument what I mean by this is make the argument nicer and calmer and actually try to understand the other person if you do this chances are you'll realize that you and your opponent are not so different and you can finish the argument and come to
an agreement pretty quickly and this method is more or less from a guy in history who's apparently really good at winning arguments and his name was Socrates Socrates argued with with people in public for a living and his big theory was that you should go into arguments with the intention of learning new things not with the intention of showing how smart you are in fact he's famously quoted as saying I only know one thing and that is I know nothing and that's a really good point most of the time the information we have we don't
know for sure that's 100% true we're just blindly trusting whatever Source we got our information from I don't even know if this is a real Socrates quote I got it from a Google image but if you take nothing else away from Socrates remember this don't misunderstand their argument and don't let them misunderstand yours but then once you understand someone's argument don't just flat out tell them they're wrong instead try to find little things that you both agree on one at a time and then build your way up to agreeing on the main point this is
how you actually convince people of things you start by agreeing on small things and then you work your way up to bigger things until eventually they change their mind however Socrates also had another more annoying method called Socratic questioning this is where you just ask an endless stream of questions to the opponent until they get frustrated and can't explain something and technically there is a right way to use this method but that doesn't really happen in real life situations instead most people who use it just end up flooding their opponent with random unrelated questions that
are meant to trip them up what do you mean why am I mad you took the last cookie from the jar why does it upset you if I took the last cookie I wanted it well is it it not true that I also wanted it yeah but that was your 18th cookie that's that's too many why exactly do you perceive that as too many you only let me have two I had two you had 18 would you have perhaps instead preferred if we partitioned the cookies equally yeah half and half but is it not true
that not all resources have to be partitioned equally does your boss give the same paycheck to everyone or do different people get different paychecks based on their job that's that's not the same thing thing can you explain to me why it is not the same thing this is an example of method number four which is using unethical tactics if you're willing to use unethical tactics like most people are Socratic questioning is absolutely perfect you just keep asking questions every time the opponent gives a nice sensible answer just brush past it and ask another question there
are a bunch of guides on the internet about how to win an argument unethically and they pretty much all require you to use fallacies AKA bad logic and then hope the opponent doesn't notice some other guides might tell you to just sit there and wait for your opponent to commit a fallacy so you can interject with my dude did you literally just use an ad homonym fallacy against me after enough times doing this you will eventually realize your opponent literally does not care that you can name every fallacy in Latin instead I like to take
the easy route and just base my arguments off of this old cartoon by Scott Meyer how to win an argument first and foremost pick your battles choose a topic nobody has Str opinions on or has given much thought make claims that are so outrageous that your opponent will be left sputtering in disbelief rather than refuting your claims make them prove their point Beyond any possible doubt when they can't take it as proof of your point later even if you lost the argument see that you won if you really want to get into the Advanced Techniques
Arthur schopenhauer once wrote a sarcastic essay exposing how most debates are actually won I'll go through all of these methods rapidly just in case you find any of them useful number one exaggerate your opponent argument to make it sound extreme number two take everything your opponent says and then generalize it so that's easier to attack number three ask your opponent a bunch of seemingly unrelated questions until you can get them to contradict themselves number four instead of proving something present it to your opponent as if it were already true number five make them angry or
attack your opponent's character to put them off their game number six ask questions in a random order and jump around from topic to topic to confuse your opponent number seven frame all of your questions in a way where the opponent has to answer with no which makes them look super negative number eight use random metaphors to make your argument look better than it actually is number nine even when you lose say that you were right about the stuff that actually mattered number 10 introduce an absurd situation to make your opponent's argument sound ridiculous number 11
when your argument is about to be proven wrong change it to something else number 12 frequently interrupt your opponent so that they can't get a word in number 13 when your opponent says something respond with so basically you're saying that and then make some ridiculous conclusion that they never actually talked about number 14 if you could provide just one counter example to your opponent's claim act like that means their claim is completely false number 15 if your opponent asks you to prove something is true ask them to prove that it's not true number 16 if
there's an audience try appealing to the audience's emotions by mentioning their families or their pets or or paychecks or stuff that directly affects them instead of just talking to your opponent number 17 whenever your opponent makes a strong point immediately change the subject number 18 make up quotes from authority figures or experts to support your argument number 19 avoid talking about any subject by just saying I'm not an expert number 20 associate your opponent's claim with something widely disliked even if it's not actually a fair connection to make number 21 when your opponent makes any
statement respond with all that works in theory but it would never work in real life number 22 if you find a weak point in your opponent's argument keep bringing it up and force them to keep talking about it number 23 just be really confident with your argument and pretend that it's really strong even if it's not number 24 use big complex words that your opponent can't understand number 25 if your opponent ever makes a small mistake pretend that their conclusion is now totally false after hearing all these methods you might ask is there any actually
logical way to win an argument and the answer is yes and you see them all the time and they're usually pretty boring if you've ever written an essay you probably have to have some structure like claim evidence reasoning basically you make a claim and then you provide evidence but you can't just leave it there you have to explain why the evidence actually supports your claim if you can't provide that reasoning chances are you either need to find better evidence or you need to adjust your claim or like many academics you can just give up and
elect to implement an excessively convoluted lexicon replete with labyrinthine phraseology thereby obsa the original intent to such an extent that decipher ability is rendered null alternatively one may acquest to the inexorable alert of poly slabic instructions and cesp aelan tendencies thereby engendering a cacophony of lexemic extravagance that transcends the cognitive grasp of the quotidian interlocutor ultimately achieving a state of semantic opacity so profound that the conceptual underpinning of the dialogue disappeared Ates into an abyss of intellectual perplexity anyway one subscribe provides one donation to fund the next video [Music]
