I was having a conversation in the car with my aunt and cousin and we were talking about science projects. My cousin mentioned that her friend did a science project about how she would talk different to plants and see which ones would grow the highest. She said that the end result was that the plants that she yelled at were the ones that grew the highest and then explained that it was because of more carbon dioxide. I laughed and sarcasticly said that it was definitely reason why the plants grew the highest, and not because there had to be one set of plants that grew the highest, and it coincidentally turned out to be the ones she yelled at. They got very angry at me. They said I was too argumentative and that I'm stupid because I never accept things and am too closed-minded. That got me really angry. How was I being argumentative? I thought it was pretty obvious that it was a coincidence, but they both really believed that it was because she gave those plants more carbon dioxide.
First, does anyone here actually believe that's true? I mean, it could be possible, but it really seemed illogical to me. But what really got me angry is how they immediately accused me of being closed-minded and argumentative just because I doubted something that really seemed untrue to me. It wasn't that they randomly called me argumentative, I do argue alot with their family. We've had arguments in the past about whether or not Dan Brown is a talented writet (I said he's not, they said he was a genius), about whether most pop music nowadays takes musical talent to write (I said it doesn't, my cousin thinks that Hilary Duff and other pop music stars are very talented ) and other things.
Admittedly, I am very quick to question things and I'm not afraid to take an unpopular view (their whole famiyl is rabid Bush haters, and I once tried to defend him by saying they were being too extreme and he wasn't the devil, a criminal, etc. even if he isn't the greatest president...that was a mistake). But is that really a bad characteristic to have? I always thought it's good that I like to question things, but all it ever does is get people mad at me and call me an idiot, and that's the one insult that bothers me. Is it worth it? Should I just learn to keep my mouth shut?
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
It sounds to me like it was more the way you said it, rather than what you said. Laughing and responding sarcastically are good ways to sound very dismissive, which you should expect to piss people off.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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it's almost always good to think outside of the 'proverbial' box. sometimes it's good to keep those thoughts to yourself, depending on your audience.
i say keep questioning...
Posts: 1355 | Registered: Jul 2006
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The reason I laughed and made a joke out of it was because I didn't think they actually believed that the science project was accurate. Am I crazy or does the explanation of "more carbon dioxide" seem really far-fetched?
posted
Keep questioning, Gaal, but remember that people's opinions and beliefs are a part of their identity. When you call into question what someone believes, you are questioning part of their sense of self-worth.
So when there is something you want to question, ask yourself how important the issue is.
Posts: 1515 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Just watch the average hatrack debate thread to get a pretty good idea of what methods of phrasing and questioning are generally considered friendly (or at least tolerable), and which ones people don't respond well to.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Gaal, I am with you on the substantive issue. It obviously wasn't the extra carbon dioxide.
And I understand how you thought they thought the same thing, so you didn't see the need for diplomacy. Sometimes, though, who is right doesn't count as much as how people make each other feel. When you laugh and are dismissive of things people think, you're saying to them "you are stupid". I understand that you didn't intend to be sending that message in this case, but that's why they got angry and defensive.
For a scientific disputation of the conclusion, you could have given figures for the percent CO2 in regular air, versus exhaled air. Also, how much mixing would occur from the exhalations of someone yelling from, say, 1 foot away, leaving even lower values of CO2 in the mixed airstream which impacts the plant. You might have pointed out that the yelling only was taking place for a few minutes a day, leaving the plants in identical conditions for the remaining 23 hours and 50 some odd minutes. All those things would tend to make one believe that any increase in CO2 that the plants got would be negligible. However, if you said this in a smug or superior or condescending tone of voice, you're still sending the message of "you guys are stupid to believe this way." That's the thing you want to avoid.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Thanks Tatiana. I like that advice alot. The thing is, it was hard to try to scientifically explain anything when they immediately started attacking me and saying I was close-minded and all of that before I even got a chance to explain why I thought it was wrong. I don't have a good enough temper yet to be able to ignore all of that and explain my point of view calmly and rationally. I'm going to try though. I really want people to respect my opinions, but I know people won't do that unless I explain mine rationally and respect theirs also.
I did try to explain it sort of scientifically though after a little bit of fighting. I asked how many plants did her friend test of each kind of talking. She said she wasn't exactly sure, but that there were sections of plants that she talked to differently. I said that if she only talked to one plant each way that there has to be one plant that grows the highest and that it was just a coincidence (not exact words, but something like that). She then said, "Well I don't know, there was like 6 plants in each section." in a way that I could tell she pulled the numbers out of her head. Then my aunt and my cousin both stated proudly that I was proven wrong and that they were right.
That got me even more annoyed. I said that I would've had to see the results myself before I said anything, since I could tell that she just made up the number 6 just to prove me wrong. She then said, "Oh, so you're the only person in the world smart enough to verify it? Is that it?"
At that point, I just kind of gave up and quietly fumed to myself for the rest of the car ride.
(I'm still kind of venting here. I understand what you guys are all saying and I understand what I did wrong. I just needed to get this off my chest. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of Tatiana's much more intelligent responses at the time. I wish I would've.)
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
I second Tatiana's approach. Assuming you judge the issue important, approach with a scientific mindset.
Control your tone, word choice, and body language. I've found that listening to someone, and asking simple, pointed questions, usually yields the opportunity to present counterpoints or skepticism. Asking questions will also clear up potential misunderstandings and tell you if debate is even worthwhile.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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cmc, I'm just a general science nerd. My degree is in engineering.
Gaal, it's hard to react on the spur of the moment the way you wish you had when you think back over things. Tstorm's idea of listening and asking a few questions to direct people's minds to the actual science involved sounds like a great approach.
I tend to do what you did, too, far too often. I'm focusing on the truth or falsity of the ideas, rather than the feelings of the people I'm discussing it with, and end up hurting people's feelings when there was no need. Most of the time, the issue of science isn't all that important, and as you found, people will not believe you anyway, if you approach it undiplomatically.
In the end, they still might not believe you. But you will have done all you can do. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
And technically, if their complaint is that you question too much, then you are not close-minded, you are too open-minded. But I dont believe anyone can be too open-minded.
Posts: 457 | Registered: Jun 2005
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I was trying to explain to a really nice lady on another board why it's nonsense to believe badguys are controlling hurricanes to attack us. I showed her pictures of the strings of tropical storms on Jupiter and Saturn, and explained how conditions on rotating spheres that are warmed more at the equator than the poles just give rise to these patterns. I explained how the energy in a hurricane is many times more than that in a nuclear bomb, how a hurricane is like detonating a nuclear bomb every minute for hours on end. I explained about chaos theory and the butterfly effect, and how no matter what forces humans would try to impose on the storm, the sheer random complexity of all the minute variations in temperature, wind, moisture, ocean currents, and sunshine would totally swamp any human inputs, leaving the storm to its own path and evolution. Also how we couldn't even predict whether a given input (pretending it could make the slightest difference to begin with) would produce the desired result or the opposite of the desired result. I told her that she need not be confused about whom to believe. She could look for herself and understand the evidence and draw her own conclusions. She still seemed very unsure. I don't think she believed me.
Reasoning from the physical facts isn't how most people go about understanding reality, I think. They are more socially oriented than that. They care about credentials more. Who says it is more important to most people (I think) than what is said. Probably because the science itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense to them, so they quit listening a few sentences into the discussion.
I'm the same way when it comes to things like the tax code or the various ways of doing business accounting. It's so mind-numbingly boring to me that I just want someone to tell me what I have to do and spare me the theory behind it.
So this means that you might just have to give up trying to explain or convince some people. Asking a few questions about why they have drawn the conclusions they drew, and answering, if asked, what you think really happened and why, is maybe the best you can do with them.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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It's a good idea to question everything, but it is a bad idea to lose faith in everything you find yourself able to question. I think that's an important distinction.
However, it doesn't sound like you were questioning anything here. It sounds like you were assuming their belief was false, and only asking the question to sarcasticly point out how wrong it was. I think you aren't really questioning something if you have already decided the answer to the question before you ask it.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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I believe the MythBusters had a show on the relative affects of talking nicely to plants vs. yelling at them vs. playing classical music to them vs. playing heavy metal to them, all compared to a control group which got no vocal interaction from humans at all. They used vocal recordings so that all of the plants hearing sound could hear it 24/7.
I believe they did get statistically significant results that the plants that "heard" noises do grow faster than those that don't, altho I'm not sure which of the sounds resulted in the best growth.
If a science experiment of this type is done properly, with a large enough sample size and proper controls, then you can draw conclusions from it, and know, within a certain level of doubt, whether the differing results are just due to luck, or whether the differeing growing conditions affeced the plants in some ways.
That being said, I think the CO2 hypothesis is pretty weak, and I have no idea whether this budding scientist set up the experiment properly or not. But neither did you, when you first started to argue against the experiment. Like Tres said, it's better to question with and open mind than a closed one.
Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
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Someone doing a science project ought to learn the valuable lessons that science experiments often don't turn out the way one hopes they will, and that the first answer you stumble upon often isn't the right one.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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Tres and Jhai, the idea that the CO2 could be the difference really has absolutely no scientific merit. Gaal is exactly right in that regard. There is only a slightly elevated percentage of CO2 in people's exhalations to begin with, which is why mouth to mouth resuscitation works. If you were exhaling nearly pure CO2 into someone's lungs, you'd just suffocate them instead of rescuing them.
Then when you take into account the mixing with ambient air that a turbulent stream of yelled breath would experience before arriving at the plant's leaves, and finally, when you realize that even the most diligent high school researcher is only going to shout at her plants for a few minutes a day, say 15 minutes, which is 1/96th of the time, you are drawn inevitably to the conclusion that the difference in conditions with regards to ambient CO2 has to be negligible.
Does that make sense?
It's good to question things, but there are certainly times when there is only one reasonable conclusion to draw. Devil's advocates notwithstanding. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Learn all you need to know about being too skeptical v.s. not skeptical enough on issues ranging from creationism to ghosts.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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You might have suggested some further experiments that would prove (or disprove) the hypothesis.
Often things like "science projects" are very difficult for people. They aren't used to thinking that way, and they work really hard to do something that won't just be laughable. It feels a lot like work to them.
And encouragement is appropriate even if the project is fatally flawed. If people come to view science as a logical process that they can at least understand, we will have a major improvement in this country in terms of attacking the gullibility and consequence nonsense that gets perpetrated in the name of "science."
My advice, in general, is to try to do your laughing in private, unless it's a shared joke.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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In the Mythbusters experiment, the "angry" and "heavy metal" plants did significantly better than the "nice" plants, though the "talked-to" plants as a whole did better than the silent control group. Obviously it wasn't due to carbon dioxide, since they were playing recordings, but still, there's something there.
And yeah, laughing and sarcastically mocking your cousin's intelligence with no regard for how it would make her feel totally lined you up for that "attack" of theirs. Think before you open your mouth next time. Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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I did an experiment like that and found that talking to a plant does make it grow better. I did this 2 times.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Zeugma, I'm sure Gaal didn't mean to mock his cousin's intelligence. At first he didn't realize they even believed it. His laughter was, I'm sure, just an involuntary reaction to the outlandishness of the idea.
People who are fascinated by science, and are curious about arriving at the actual truth, tend to zero in on the ideas themselves, and get tunnel vision when it comes to people's feelings. To them, this is a scientific interaction, and the truth is IMPORTANT, so their attention isn't drawn to any hurt feelings they may inadvertantly cause until it's too late.
While to some other people, everything is primarily a social interaction, and matters of objective truth .... they really don't seem to recognize that they exist or are important. To them, the interaction has been mainly a slap in their face, if their reasoning is flawed and their conclusions are faulty.
It's not either side's fault. It's simply a misunderstanding that arises from the differences in the way different people's brains work. We need both kinds of people for a happy world. Each side could benefit from understanding and taking into account the other side's viewpoint.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I deal on the jobsite with a certain number of people who don't really care about the objective truth, or see that it matters one way or another. To them, the negotiations and interactions in the course of designing, constructing, and bringing machinery into operation are all a matter of who has power, whose face needs to be saved, who can dominate discussions with their deep voices, or other social considerations.
The problem with that, is that it's crucially important that matters of objective truth be paramount for any technology to be successful. The Challenger accident, the Chernobyl disaster, and many other catastrophes, were directly caused by the fact that social considerations took precedence over scientific ones. We can put whatever spin we want on things, but Mother Nature still can't be fooled.
I work in the Nuclear Power Industry now, and we have tried (after Chernobyl) to build a system that doesn't let these social and institutional factors creep in. It's really hard to do that, when you have human beings in all the positions . One thing that brings me great comfort is that the highest level of management at my company must all come up through operations. They all have logged many hours actually operating the plants, and have had intense ongoing training on the simulator. They've had years of classes on all the various systems, and they must understand what every single thing in the plant is for, and how it works. That helps tremendously, since the attitudes and working conditions at a company always seem to be driven by those at the very top levels of management.
posted
AK, I agree that it doesn't sound like he intended to hurt her feelings, just that he didn't THINK about her feelings before he laughed and mocked the idea. Something I've been guilty of myself countless times, especially as a gifted, arrogant teenager. It's something he can learn to be more careful about, particularly the use of mocking sarcasm, if he wants to become more considerate and kind with people whose opinions and beliefs he disagrees. With. Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
Oh, Zeugma, I totally agree. Phrasing something diplomatically, and a concerned and loving attitude towards others, is quite often the difference between your ideas being accepted or rejected. In this case, it's probably not crucially important that the truth win out. But in other circumstances it may well be.
As a purly secondary consideration , it's also a lot better way of handling interpersonal relations.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Yes, when it comes to hard science, objective truth is of the utmost importance. However, which scientist will have more success in their field: one who clearly respects the intelligence and opinions of the people who manage the money and projects, or one who clearly doesn't?
Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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I should correct myself. It's not that they don't CARE about the objective truth, it's that they don't even BELIEVE in it. They think the truth is whatever spin they put on things. That their truth is as good as anyone else's. Or that truth bends to their will. Or something like that. So many bosses I have had over the years were firmly convinced that yelling at technical problems would eventually solve them, or that if one technical person told them an answer they didn't like, they could just fire them and hire someone who told them "yes", and the technical problems would disappear.
This has been true in industry after industry. Most people don't understand that there's nothing at all inevitable about our technological civilization, and that our very lives absolutely depend on thousands of technical things working successfully. It's amazing, given the circumstances, that our systems and technologies work as well as they do. It totally keeps me up at night, when I think about it. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Tatiana, I wasn't trying to suggest that the CO2 hypothesis was correct - just that the experiment could in fact be showing true results, as the Myth Busters experiment showed.
Claiming that one group of plants had to grow the highest, and thus that it was all a coincidence is just not correct, from either a scientific or statistical view. If Gaal wants to deride others for their scientific knowledge, he should make sure he's correct in the principles he's debating.
Gaal, to answer the main question of you post - no, I don't think that there's anything *edit* wrong with arguing about, well, anything. I'm a philosophy major, for heaven's sake - all we do is argue in class, and I love it. However, in philosophy class, at least the ones I've been in, it's well-known that if you present a view, you better be ready for it to be attacked, criticized, and ultimately deemed wrong if it's a bad argument.
Normal relations with others don't have this sort of norm - most people don't expect that everything they say will be held to that level of analysis. Until you're sure that both parties are willing to engage in that kind of dialogue, you may want to avoid it to save your relationship with that person.
For example: my brother and I both enjoy arguing, and thus are completely open to arguing anything under the sun. My mother really dislikes it, and thus, though she'll say a lot of things I think are false or don't logically follow, I don't often disagree with her. I save my disagreeing for the times when it really matters - like if she were to behave in a racist manner (not that she would) or if she was going to vote one way on a proposition because of bad reasoning.
posted
What do you think about this (as a response to the original post):
quote:Of course there IS such a thing as too argumentative. It makes me laugh that you can’t see that. When one person asserts an opinion, without arguments, but insisting over and over that it is obvious, there is a sure sigh of arguing just for the sake of arguing (and obviously shows the close-minded view of that person). It is so obvious that it makes me want to smack in the face all those that cannot see this simple truth. Plus, there are times when the person arguing, feels so superior that even laughs at the implied stupidity of the “opponent(s)”. Or even worse, it sometimes comes to expressing the desire to physically punish the ones that don’t agree. Don’t you see it is obvious in those cases that there is a limit being crossed? This topic is so laughable that makes my belly hurt. It makes me want to forcibly feed the obvious and painful truth to those that cannot see the utterly obvious reality.
Disclaimer: This is an artificially constructed “argument”, for the sake of illustrating a point. I like to believe that people (myself included) avoid using argumentative stances like the one above. I think that questioning is good, but questioning just for the sake of questioning might lead to unpleasant extremes.
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