 I asked Sauron to help me move, but, I mean, just look at the way this box is packed. Hats, tools, games... I guess the Lord moves in mysterious ways. I know, this episode is ridiculously late, but as you'll see, I've been busy moving, and the two-hour drive you're about to see has been my daily commute for the past month of so, which is why my schedule is all screwed up. Please, be accommodating. As I hope to illustrate shortly, it's a good habit to develop. So, there's been another mass shooting, and the culture wars surrounding firearm legislation in the United States have flared the way they usually do, with the same arguments we've seen for decades trotted out yet again. The same debates and the same memes raging on Facebook walls and Twitter as they do every time this happens. Which is fairly frequently. Probably too frequently. You can likely guess why nobody really needs to develop new arguments to participate in this exchange. The vast majority of what we collectively posed about gun violence in the US isn't dispassionate analysis, unbiased research, or open-ended inquiry. It's rhetoric and signaling. A flag-waving exercise meant to rally our side's troops, cow or mock our opposition, and impress our audience with our witty repartee. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Rhetoric is a useful and important tool for shaping public opinion, and it can be a lot of fun to spar with a clever opponent. But as anyone who's used social media over the past few weeks can tell you, rhetoric doesn't build bridges or cultivate understanding. That's not what it's for. If you get into an adversarial, knock-down, drag-out Facebook argument with someone about gun control, in order to convince them that their position is wrong or misguided, you're almost certainly going to be unhappy with the result. Yet, sometimes, people do end up changing their minds after discussing the topic with someone who holds a different opinion. Note that I say discussing, a term which bears little resemblance to the flood of pithy one-liners and memes that are clogging your Facebook feed right now. In rare circumstances, two people with different opinions about issues like gun control can update their positions on the subject after talking it out, building on a substrate of good faith argumentation. We all have some idea of what an argument lacking good faith looks like. Trolling, snide comments, and snarky memes are clearly not meant to encourage serious dialogue. When someone interested dispute without good faith, they lack any sincere interest in anyone else's point of view or opinion, they simply want to win the argument, whatever that means. Riling their opponents, mocking them into silence, snubbing them for poorly reasoned points, basically asserting intellectual dominance by any possible means, usually for an audience. Needless to say, few people find themselves thoughtfully evaluating new ideas when confronted with tactics like these, but they're not supposed to. Arguments in good faith, on the other hand, have several noteworthy characteristics that don't seem to show up on Facebook so much. First and foremost is a sort of pervasive epistemic humility, a clear willingness to entertain the possibility that one's own opinions might be biased or incomplete, or based on flawed information and reasoning. This central principle is linked with several important elements of good faith arguments, a respect for and curiosity about different opinions, a willingness to point out weaknesses in one's own position, an accommodating leniency for poorly argued points that might have merit, and a cautious temperance toward universal or absolute claims. The good faith arguer spends nearly the same amount of time absorbing and clarifying their opponents' ideas as they do explaining their own. Their questions are tools of understanding, sincere in inviting further dialogue rather than rhetorical weapons, forcing their opponent into a corner or setting them up for a crushing counterargument, maintaining an attitude of legitimate open-minded consideration rather than lip service to it, is enormously taxing, especially in an atmosphere of ideological mudslinging. Worse still, faking good faith is a widespread method for trolling the opposition and burning through the reserves of goodwill and mental energy. It's exhausting enough to fight through the wicked urge to just rant at people you disagree with, and having that effort rewarded with harassment disguised as miscomprehension is enough to ruin anyone's day. It takes a lot of emotional resilience and bravery to willingly make yourself vulnerable like that. It's far easier to relax comfortably in blissful self-assurance to be soothed by the illusion that anyone who holds a differing opinion is either stupid or dishonest. Why take the time to understand deeply what's clearly insane? Why not simply make fun of it from the sidelines? Well, because it's important to make the effort. Without good faith defenses of other points of view, our only exposure to them is one-sided and cartoonishly biased, driving us to certainty that our ideas are the only reasonable ones, and preventing us from improving their accuracy. One of Wikipedia's core guidelines for its editors is to, wherever possible, assume good faith, a phrase used frequently enough to be abbreviated AGF. The tenant is based on the idea that most people who edit Wikipedia are trying to help improve it, even if their edits kind of suck, and that good faith dialogue is necessary to build the most objective and factual reference possible. They note, very aptly, I think, that without an assumption of good faith, the whole enterprise of Wikipedia would be doomed from the beginning, just as the whole enterprise of interacting with people of differing ideologies and beliefs would be a total waste of someone's time. Rhetoric is fine. Rhetoric is performance. It's an art unto itself and can vastly affect swaths of people. But if you're like me, you sometimes find yourself immensely frustrated that your superior arguments and masterful eloquence have failed to change a particular person's mind. The problem in these cases isn't stubbornness or denial. It's a simple recognition that for all the work I put into googling supporting evidence and writing walls of well-reasoned text, I clearly refuse to put in the effort of being receptive to other points of view, to signaling that I'm genuinely curious why someone would believe something different. For me, the takeaway from this idea is to consciously decide when I want to practice rhetoric and when I want to argue in good faith, and to never mistake one situation for the other. It's totally okay to make a punching bag of a seemingly ludicrous point of view, but it's foolish to believe that the one holding that view will suddenly want to be on your team. For that, you'll need a healthy dose of good faith.