Imagine if Donald Trump wrote a book advising you on how to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Or if Antonio Brown wrote a book advising you on how to keep your job as a professional athlete. You might feel an initial rush of puzzlement — you might even feel a little resentment at their gall, their presumptuousness. You might ask yourself: “What do they take us for? Don’t they know that we know who they are?” These are the sorts of thoughts that might cross your mind.

Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, New Atheism alums and “Conceptual Penis” hoaxers (the relative success of “Sokal Squared” is, I suspect, due largely to their collaborator, Areo editor Helen Pluckrose), have written a book advising you on how to have conversations with people you disagree with.

In a previous book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, Boghossian counseled atheist readers on how to deal with religious people tactically, with the goal of converting them to atheism rather than engaging with their beliefs. The blurb for Lindsay’s previous book, Everybody is Wrong about God, begins like this:

With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Thus, engaging in interminable debate with religious believers about the existence of God has become exactly the wrong way for nonbelievers to try to deal with misguided — and often dangerous — belief in a higher power. The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in “God,” they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet.

Lindsay wrote an article for Quillette arguing that it is pointless to read feminist theory. On several occasions, he put this belief into practice on Twitter, arguing to Cornell professor Kate Manne that he had no responsibility to read her books or articles before opining on their content or quality.

Rhetoric, tactics, diagnosis, dismissal, parody, hoax, intentional non-engagement: these are the methods Boghossian and Lindsay have spent years substituting for honest disagreement. I thus went into How to Have Impossible Conversations with a certain amount of skepticism about their ability to advise me on this topic. They are, at best, neophytes at engaging in reasonable disagreement that takes the opposing side seriously.

But what about their advice? Does it make sense? Will it help readers disagree productively if they put it into practice? Unlike Lindsay, I decided I had to actually read the book to find out.

After a brief introduction, in which Boghossian and Lindsay admirably cop to having been “assholes” in conversations for most of their lives up until writing this book, How to Have Impossible Conversations goes into training mode.

It kicks off with a chapter on “the seven fundamentals of good conversations,” which mostly consist of pickup artist-style advice about how to come off as friendly and avoid thoroughly alienating everyone you speak to. Then it goes on to cover the “beginner level: nine ways to start changing minds,” the “intermediate level: seven ways to improve your interventions,” the “five advanced skills for contentious conversations,” and the “six expert skills to engage the close-minded.” (Surely it’s “closed-minded” — i.e., to describe those whose minds are “closed”?) Finally, they cover the “master level: two keys to conversing with ideologues.” One imagines a montage of punching and kicking at the most socially awkward dojo in history.

Why the gamification, the sense of leveling up? Why the numbered “ways” and “skills” and “keys”? The mildew of self-help banality seems to have spored every page of the tract.

If in form Boghossian and Lindsay have produced a Little Miss Sunshine-style self-help book, in content they are following in the footsteps of the pickup artists. Their “seven fundamentals” chapter begins like this: “Everything is based in fundamentals. Everything…” That just seems like a definition of the word “fundamentals” to me. In it, they give the following sort of guidance: “If you do not know someone, here are a few obvious initial questions to begin the rapport-building process: ‘Hi. My name is X. How are you?’ ‘Nice to meet you, I’m X. What’s your name?’ ‘This is my first time here. How did you find out about this place?’”

Is this scintillating, heterodox stuff the sort you expect from a pair of shoot-from-the-hip free-thinkers? Well, no. But it is deeply reminiscent of the “openers” used in pickup artistry and in dating-app conversations. Those conversations, too, are goal-oriented. And the openers, while sometimes intuitively strange or counterproductive (the infamous “neg” comes to mind), mostly serve to ground the party doing the “approach” and to provide a script which they can use if they are overwhelmed by nervousness. A common response to claims about the alleged misogyny of pickup artistry is that it can be a good way for would-be pick-uppers to manage social anxiety and the effects of autism-spectrum disorders. This chapter, with lots of details about whether you should let yourself be distracted by something in your vicinity, whether it is maximally persuasive to check your phone while talking to someone, and so on, is very obviously in the same vein.

There is some more great advice in this section, such as: “Breathe. Literally. Breathe.” I unfortunately cannot do it all justice here.

Things start to get a little stranger over the next few chapters (and then they get truly odd in the “expert level” chapter, on which more later).

The first technique in the third chapter is “modeling.” This is exemplified by a case in which Boghossian is conversing with someone who won’t give him a straight answer to a question. Boghossian goes on to flip the roles, asking his conversational partner instead to ask him the question that he had asked. This is a conversational move that I’ve literally never seen in real life, or even in online debates. It is perhaps this guide’s version of the “peacocking” techniques of the pickup artists. It is also the first sign that there is something strange going on in the book, something that has more to do with psychological tactics than Socratic dialogue for the Twitter era.

A second technique discussed in this chapter is “defining words up front.” My disagreement with Boghossian and Lindsay here is very important — I see a lot of people making the mistake of taking this advice too far. It is important to define some words in a disagreement to make sure that the disagreement is not what philosophers call “merely verbal.” However, one cannot define every word one is using — this quickly gives way to an infinite regress problem (since words can only be defined using other words). Further, we often don’t want to define every word we’re using. That can make actual disagreements look like merely verbal disputes. Take a debate between Bob and Cindy, where Bob thinks it would be good for their company to do one thing, and Cindy thinks it would be good for their company to do another. Imagine Bob says: “My definition of ‘good’ is as follows” and gives a definition. Then imagine Cindy says: “My definition of ‘good’ is as follows” and gives her definition as well. If it turns out that they have different definitions, then by the lights of the “define words up front” crowd, we’ve figured out that their dispute is merely verbal. But it obviously isn’t just about words or talking past each other, because they still disagree about what’s good and therefore disagree about what their company ought to do. This shows that there are obvious limits to this approach. (Another obvious limit to this approach is that many words are defined ostensively and that their meanings don’t seem to exist merely in the brains of the people who use them.)

This chapter also features a very telling framing of a philosophical concept. Boghossian and Lindsay write: “Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It’s the effort to understand how we know what we think we know.” This is true for certain senses of the word “how,” but not for others. In many ways, the “how” of thinking is the subject of psychology, not epistemology. This confusion between epistemology and psychology has real consequences for Boghossian and Lindsay’s treatment of disagreement, and it’s instructive when it comes to understanding their approach.

Probably the strangest part of this chapter is the advice Boghossian and Lindsay give that both sides of a conversation should “acknowledge extremists.” The idea is something like this: I find common, middle ground with you by disavowing the crazy people on “my side.” Since there are crazy people everywhere, this is easy enough to do. I don’t mean to say that this is necessarily a bad idea. But it really narrows the scope of a book on impossible conversations! Readers might have come into reading this book hoping for a way to have impossible conversations with those extremists.

I think Boghossian and Lindsay can be interpreted here as making a point about conversational charity: We shouldn’t immediately attribute the craziest view that fits an interlocutor’s statements to them in some sort of attempted gotcha. Instead, we should give them a chance to clarify just which one of a universe of possible views they hold, and should proactively clarify our own views in such a manner. That makes a ton of sense. But, sometimes people do hold the seemingly crazy view. Is productive conversation with them not just “impossible,” but so impossible that it is beyond the scope of this book?

The next chapter — the “intermediate level” — has the first instance of something I’d hoped to see from the beginning of the book: advice on how to change your own mind. The problem is that there is almost nothing in this section. Boghossian and Lindsay say nothing about when I ought to think that one of my beliefs is mistaken. They only say:

At any point in the conversation, if you realize you’ve been harboring an incorrect belief, say, ‘I just realized my belief might be wrong. I’ve changed my mind.’ Because this almost never happens, when it does, your conversation partner will likely be taken completely aback. There is, of course, a catch. You should only say this if you’re sincere.

This passage exemplifies, I think, a lot of flaws of this book.

First, it assumes that the readers already possess many of the tools they might hope to find in a book like this. In particular, it assumes the readers already know how to recognize they’ve been harboring an incorrect belief. Second, it lumps together information about whether some technique (here, changing one’s mind) is rational and information about whether that technique is effective toward the goal of persuasion or psychological manipulation (that whole “taking them aback” thing). Third, it belabors obvious points (you shouldn’t lie about having changed your mind), confusing the reader as to just what is going on.

Another muddle comes immediately after: Boghossian’s and Lindsay’s discussion of “scales.” The authors suggest that we should ask our conversational partners: “On a scale from one to 10, how confident are you that X [the belief] is true?” They go on to say that “scales add precision.” While I agree that thinking in terms more fine-grained than belief or non-belief can be helpful sometimes (these more fine-grained states are sometimes called credences in actual epistemology), it’s likely that introspection alone can’t give a person much insight into their confidence levels regarding particular beliefs. The apparent precision of these “scales” is therefore likely to be an illusion in many cases. Like the discussion of “defining words up front” that came before this one, it’s another instance of apparent rigor that can actually threaten to confuse the issue in many cases.

Another place where these sorts of things get confusing is Boghossian and Lindsay’s discussion of disconfirmation in the following chapter. They trot out a probability-based version of the common view, adapted from Karl Popper’s falsificationism. The idea is that it’s often more productive to focus on what might prove a proposition wrong than what might prove a proposition right. One problem with a focus on disconfirmation is that it seems like, if we believe something strongly enough, it is rational to look for alternate explanations in the face of something that could disconfirm what we think. This is a presupposition of the method of reflective equilibrium, in which our judgments about individual cases guide which theories we subscribe to and our chosen theories guide our judgments about individual cases. We move back and forth.

In 2017, Daniel Lakens, a psychologist known for his incisive writing on statistical reasoning and the philosophy of science in the wake of the replication crisis, wrote on a widely-publicized finding that judges were far more likely to give out guilty verdicts before lunch than after lunch. Lakens said that “we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible.” That is to say: we should not take the finding as a disconfirmation of our deeply-held background theories about the effect size of hunger on psychology, but we should take that deeply-held background theory to suggest that the data just cannot be right. If you think about it, this is exactly what Boghossian and Lindsay must have, so to speak, “wanted” the peer reviewers to do for the journals to which they submitted their hoax papers — to say, “Look, this data disconfirms a lot of my deeply-held beliefs. For that reason and that reason alone, I think it must be a hoax.” Otherwise how could we distinguish a hoax from a good-faith effort to begin with?

By the time I got to the book’s “expert level” chapter, I was feeling a little bad about myself. While I had qualms here and there, and didn’t really understand why basic social interaction and norms like “don’t lie” had been included alongside an account of what Boghossian and Lindsay chose to call “epistemology,” the advice wasn’t so bad in the end. There was a lot to agree with! Here I was, planning to write this big, mean takedown review, when maybe what I should have been doing all along was to engage in all the ways Boghossian and Lindsay themselves suggested. Then everything seemed to come crashing down.

The most notable technique discussed in the “expert level” section is something called altercasting. Here’s what altercasting is (in my words, not theirs): You tell someone they have certain characteristics and then explain what someone with those characteristics would do. Then, Boghossian and Lindsay suggest, they’re more likely to do that thing — more likely because of you having told them these things. For instance, if you sense the argument you’re in is about to get heated, you might say, “You seem like a rational person. I think a rational person might step back and look at the evidence here, then explain just how likely they think the various possibilities we’ve been debating are.” You “altercast” this person as rational and then they act rationally.

Boghossian and Lindsay write: “Altercasting is a powerful yet controversial technique that can be used to induce behavioral changes. … The ethics of altercasting can be murky for the obvious reason that it’s potentially manipulative.” (It seems more like “necessarily” manipulative to me.) But “these ethical concerns can be sidestepped by limiting Altercasting to two conversational techniques: 1. Take their favorite solution off the table. 2. Altercast conversational virtues like civility, fairness, and open-mindedness. These techniques should present no ethical quandaries.” It’s not quite clear how they came to this conclusion — to many readers, I expect, manipulation will seem wrong qua manipulation — but okay.

A bigger problem might be that if you are really capable of, as Boghossian and Lindsay put it, “creating the conversational partner you want to have,” it’s not clear why you — as the sort of open-minded, questioning person who would read this book — would want to do so. After all, this book recommends changing your mind, looking for ways to disconfirm your beliefs, and so on. But altercasting is all about controlling how your conversational partner speaks and presents their point of view. It’s not clear how this strange-sounding technique, even if it’s effective, fits into Boghossian and Lindsay’s arsenal. That seems like a way of avoiding certain kinds of disagreement — of ruling out substantive and challenging disputes. And, as in the case of the extremists above, deploying tactics for controlling your interlocutors seems like a way of avoiding “impossible conversations,” not having them.

There is another problem with altercasting that relates to positions Boghossian and Lindsay have taken elsewhere. If you can really “create the conversational partner you want to have,” then what else could you create? Boghossian and Lindsay often take the position that the “social constructionism” of modern “grievance studies” disciplines makes no sense — it doesn’t fit the evidence.

I agree with them. But if I really believed in altercasting, I don’t think I could agree. Consider the following method for “socially constructing” gender norms: I simply go around elementary schools “altercasting” all the boys as competitive, thing-oriented, and systematizing. Or I go around “altercasting” all the girls as cooperative, people-oriented, and empathizing. If altercasting works so well, I could do this myself — but imagine if everyone is doing it! And isn’t a situation in which everyone is doing this almost exactly the sort of situation that feminist theorists, in one way or another, describe? It’s confounding to me that Boghossian and Lindsay seem to think that large-scale behavioral manipulation comes so cheap but that, simultaneously, social constructionism is implausible. What, ultimately, is the difference?

At the end of the “expert level” chapter, Boghossian and Lindsay tell us their preferred “counter-intervention” strategy, for when you feel that someone is attempting a conversational intervention against your beliefs: “Go with it.” But as in the section on how to change your mind, we’re never told quite what this amounts to. In a sample conversation included early in the book, we see Boghossian trying to convince someone that it’s irrational for them to be a fan of the Los Angeles Lakers. Most of the players on the Lakers weren’t born in Los Angeles, Boghossian says. And wouldn’t you be a bigger fan if they all had been? So why aren’t you a fan of some team that does have a lot of Los Angeles natives instead? But who really has the side of rationality in this conversation? Isn’t it possible that a team’s home city and the cities of origin of its players are independent reasons to be a fan of that team? What ought the fan have done in that conversation, and on what basis? Do Boghossian and Lindsay really think that a robust theory of sports fandom simply emerges from the dictates of “street epistemology”?

The “master level” chapter is about values. In this chapter’s first section, Boghossian and Lindsay suggest that we should ask: “how does one know or come to know moral truths?” I think this is a great question. I also think that asking this question is a great way to make “impossible conversations” even more impossible. This question has been debated for thousands of years with no resolution. If you introduce it at your Thanksgiving dinner as a way of trying to cause some family member to doubt their position on immigration or whatever, you’re dropping a nuclear bomb on an anthill.

In this chapter’s second section, Boghossian and Lindsay try to help us “understand moral intuitions.” They use the word “intuition” in a bit of a nonstandard way here. Normally when philosophers talk about moral intuitions, they’re talking about intuitions about cases. For instance, you might have the intuition that it is wrong to scapegoat an innocent person in order to satisfy an angry mob even if that mob will probably hurt more than one innocent person if it isn’t satisfied. Boghossian and Lindsay, however, use the word “intuition” to mean what Jonathan Haidt calls a moral foundation. Haidt is a moral psychologist, not a moral epistemologist, so this final section can be safely put into the “persuasion technique” box.

All in all, How to Have Impossible Conversations was better than I expected. If you do as Boghossian and Lindsay say and not as they do, you’ll probably be more successful in persuading people during contentious conversations — as long as you have enough common sense to exclude the weird shit as well.

The toughest question for Boghossian and Lindsay, I think, is whether persuasion really fits neatly with the other goals they advocate. They talk about Socrates a lot. I love Socrates! But he was no master of persuasion. He didn’t have many strong positions of his own, and he got himself killed by being “the gadfly of Athens.” He wasn’t studying weird mind-control techniques like altercasting or anything; he was just trying his best to understand what people around him were talking about, and it turned out they didn’t understand that very well themselves.

If, as Boghossian and Lindsay seem to indicate, the readers’ own beliefs are as brittle as anyone else’s and rest on as shaky a foundation, why should they be in the business of trying to persuade anyone of anything? If we are really masters of doubting everything we believe, why would persuasion techniques be a rational thing to try to engage in? What would we be trying to persuade people of… stuff we ourselves don’t think is true? Who in the world would that help?

Take this very review, for instance. You might think that by Boghossian and Lindsay’s standards, it’s in many ways minimally persuasive. I started out with invective — by damaging rapport instead of building it. But if my goal is finding the truth, you might think that’s a good thing. You might think that if I had built a lot of rapport with Boghossian and Lindsay and their fans, then I would be in a situation where those people were likely to be generous with my criticisms of the book regardless of whether or not they’re true. You might think that by undercutting rapport, I instead find myself in a situation where my criticisms are subject to the harshest possible scrutiny from their targets. That’s the opposite of what the book advises. But if what I want is to find out whether or not those criticisms are good and true, then it’s not clear at all why this would be a bad strategy.

The sort of people who are interested in having “impossible conversations” probably want to have them in part because discussing contentious ideas can test their own thinking and address their own doubt and uncertainty. That sort of person is the intended audience of this book, and I’m that sort of person. I think doubt and uncertainty are good. But I don’t share Boghossian and Lindsay’s interest in dancing around disagreement circuitously with fancy and manipulative tricks. If you really want to have impossible conversations, why not go straight there?