The kitchen analogy was not too long as the people who need to read this didn't come into the article agreeing but need to be convinced; if anything I could see the article needing more analogies, but I felt this article struck a good enough balance that I could see recommending it to people who insist on "opinionated software" to seed an argument.
I actually enjoyed the extremely straight-to-the-point argument and how the article was clearly divided into small sections that each motivate the next.
If this was done by AI, I have to say AI may offer something better than human in terms of putting forward an argument than people, if not now, in the near future (this article may be just an early example?).
I hope that we see more of this "clearer argumentation" without fluff on many topics we care about... maybe we can see things we just couldn't before.
Then let's say the point of disagreement between me and the author is that I would prefer to abandon the analogy for something that lets me both reason and communicate more clearly, while the author appears to prefer to keep the analogy they have identified as flawed.
Actually, real debate is about responding to the other debaters arguments and countering them. Thus this IBM marketing show was not really a debate.
This was a demo that IBM could synthesize a plausible argument that supports or refutes a given assertion. That's interesting and a bit impressive (presuming its argument isn't simply a regurgitation of some position paper it found online). But without understanding cause and effect, its arguments will remain very superficial, probably driven by a small catalog of argument 'frames' (templates) that adaptively fill a handful of slots like [needs] [means] [goal] [conflicts] and [emotional hooks]. Using such simple recipes it can produce verbiage that plausibly sounds humanlike, but isn't actually reasoning. It's likely that the system couldn't even diagnose help desk problems using basic logic, e.g. backtracking to thise dependencies that might have caused the given outcome, thereby identifying only the possible and plausible causes.
I haven't gone beyond reading the page, but the intent matches my intuition that we need tools for better following (and agreeing upon?) good "geometries" for arguments.
To split hairs a bit, analogies can support arguments, but are not considered a conclusive form of evidence/argumentation in and of themselves in formal logic.
While the analogy may have been instrumental in helping change your mind, it likely did so by helping you understand the actual underlying argument.
I think the last paragraph in the article is key, the most interesting and tiring arguments are the ones where both parties believe the other is arguing from the gut and have retroactively reasoned while they are being perfectly rational. Being able to see when you might be doing this as well often makes the discussion much less adversarial.
Were those arguments valid? If you recommend X instead of Y, it seems reasonable to discuss not only the downsides of Y but also how X is better or worse in comparison to Y.
I'm presenting arguments based on what the author says, and you're presenting arguments based on the title and embedded quotes. All one has to do is read the piece. It's really not that hard!
It is just a nitpick, but opinionated argument about superiority of a solution that person just quickly architected is not a good thing. Opinionated argument about a solution that the person through out and really considered advantages/disadvantages is a good thing.
Opinionated argument about half through unprepared ideas are fun, but waste of time when done during meetings.
As an aside from the post's content, I really dig the use of counter arguments directly within the article. Not sure if this is a thing or not, but I'm going to start using it.
In other words - it's not about making an argument to convince anyone of anything; it's making an argument that will make people who already agree with you feel better about themselves.
Truthfully that takes a degree of skill and it even has utility but as you say - it's best to see it for what it is.
Regarding "most facts aren't convincing" - I think that the most productive thing to do, if two or more people strongly disagree about facts, is to drill down into the underlying definitions that provide context for the facts.
An analogy is, in effect, a definition. And a definition is not a fact, but which definitions people accept determine which facts they accept.
Good article. I thought it was well written and definitely on target about to disagree effectively.
Maybe in a follow up article you could provide some examples (either real or made-up) of ineffective and effective disagreement? Personally I learn best from examples.
I've repeatedly found that the ability to paraphrase and summarise the opposing positions in a way that the opposition can agree with, is a good indicator of whether someone is interested in, and able to have a meaningful discussion in a controversial subject.
It might be illuminating to compare this heuristic to the requirement of a decent scientific paper to summarise related work properly.
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