"With all due respect" so often precedes a mark of disrespect that it's already a small example of the kind of rhetoric that gets people's backs up before you even get to your point. I don't think it's generally deliberate, but it's a pretty good sign of talking at someone instead of genuinely trying to get closer to a common understanding. If I notice those words about to come out, I try to step back and remind myself we're both human -- prone to being wrong about practically everything. My career is all about being wrong dozens of times a day sometimes, about really obvious stuff once it's pointed out by the helpful little computer. Do I really know the bigger picture so well I can just lay down the law to this disagreeable fellow human?

I don't even expect either of our beliefs to change much here, but conversations do add up to something over the decades. And some people are much better at this than others. I know, your side of the culture war compared to them, oh Lord. I don't know if Dunning-Kruger applies to open-mindedness -- are there studies?

Ha! - point extremely well taken, in much the same vein as "I'm not racist, BUT...".

I did feel awkward writing it - in this case it was actually meant sincerely. I really wasn't sure if I'd misunderstood. It seemed too ironic in a discussion on open minded-ness to basically say "I immediately stopped listening after I heard something I didn't like" (although maybe this is a reasonable approach? I'd strongly argue it's not, but that's certainly a discussion we can have). I'll do my best to catch myself in the future. I should say that I did read your comment as a touch condescending, just FYI.

WRT to Dunning-Kruger for open-mindedness (which is a very interesting idea) some quick searches didn't reveal anything obvious, but I may be using the wrong keywords - social psychology isn't exactly my strong suit! Sort of intuitively you'd think a similar kind of relationship might exist ("Of course I'm open minded, but I _know_ that X is X and Y is Y, but those are truths not debatable ideas!") - although maybe now I'm conflating open mindedness with the ability to think critically...

> I did read your comment as a touch condescending, just FYI.

Sigh, yeah, I need to watch that. Good of you to let me know.

My take on the not-listening thing -- of course I'm not Aron -- is that if you've heard a faction hector you a lot, and you don't think they're listening to you except maybe to match some of your words into their standard bingo cards, then it's natural to tune someone out the moment they say one of that faction's shibboleths. From this POV, telling the speaker how their rhetoric failed is actually reaching out to them a little. That's not the POV I aspire to: I try to consider more words that piss me off than I really feel like, because I meta-want to be less biased. Sometimes I do, and sometimes they even get through.

Re: social psychology, I'm just starting on Haidt's The Righteous Mind in hopes of learning some basics.

(Since many more people might read this, I guess I want to make it completely clear that I didn't say what brand of words piss me off.)

>My take on the not-listening thing -- of course I'm not Aron -- is that if you've heard a faction hector you a lot, and you don't think they're listening to you except maybe to match some of your words into their standard bingo cards, then it's natural to tune someone out the moment they say one of that faction's shibboleths.

Ah - this is very good point, thanks for following up on this!

You're welcome -- glad we could talk!