Become an intellectual explorer: Master the art of conversation | #10 of Top 10 2019 | Big Think

Become an intellectual explorer: Master the art of conversation

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Big Think's #10 most popular video of 2019 will teach you how to expand your intellect through the art of insightful conversation. First up: What is a great conversation? They are the ones that leave us feeling smarter or more curious, with a sense that we have discovered something, understood something about another person, or have been challenged.

Emily Chamlee-Wright, president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, details the 3 design principles that lead to great conversations: humility, critical thinking, and sympathetic listening.

Critical thinking is the celebrated cornerstone of liberalism, but next time you're in a challenging and rewarding conversation, try to engage sympathetic listening too. Understanding why another intelligent person holds ideas that are at odds with your own is often more enlightening than merely hunting for logic errors.

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EMILY CHAMLEE-WRIGHT

Dr. Emily Chamlee-Wright is the president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, which supports and partners with scholars working within the classical liberal tradition. She was previously Provost and Dean at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Prior to joining Washington College, she was Elbert Neese Professor of Economics and Associate Dean at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin.

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TRANSCRIPT

EMILY CHAMLEE-WRIGHT: So think about the last conversation you had where you thought, golly, that was such a great conversation. What did it feel like? Why did it seem like a really great conversation? And the chances are good that it was a kind of conversation that left you feeling smarter. It was the kind of conversation where you felt like you discovered something new, that it left you deeply curious about something else. It might have been a conversation that challenged you in all the right ways. That's a truly great conversation. It's one where we genuinely learn something or we come to a deeper understanding about why someone else holds a particular point of view. Right? That deeper understanding and that learning is what we're after with great conversations.

And so one of the things I'm interested in is what are the design principles of a great conversation. What are the essential elements that make a conversation truly a great conversation? And humility would be one basic design principle that we should all start from. Now with humility, I don't just mean deference to expertise, right, that you are so much smarter at that thing so I'm going to have humility with respect to you on that thing because you know more about it than I do. Now maybe that's true, right? But that's not the kind of humility I'm talking about, because that's a sort of humility that could come to an end, right? I could learn as much about that particular topic, and therefore with that kind of thinking I would say I can set aside my humility.

t's true whether one person is the expert or not. Right? We have the opportunity to gain in our knowledge, to learn from anyone. With this way of thinking about humility, anyone can be your teacher, whether it's your professor, or whether it's an elementary school student who's lived on the planet in different circumstances than you lived on the planet. That elementary school student can teach you something that you can only get by talking with them. That's that deeper level of humility.

Some of the other key design elements of a great conversation would be, for example, critical thinking and sympathetic listening. There's a lot that gets said about critical thinking; it's that ability and eagerness to identify gaps in logic or shortfalls in evidence-based argumentation. It is the cornerstone of what it means to have a liberal education, is to engage in that kind of critical thinking. Now less often discussed and surely less often celebrated is what I call sympathetic listening. And I use the word sympathetic in the way that Adam Smith used the word sympathetic, which is: Am I really understanding from that other person's point of view? That commitment to understanding the argument from the other person's perspective.

Now, what sympathy in this case means is not that I feel what they feel. It's that I'm willing to set aside, even if it's just temporarily, that hunt for the slightest misstep in logic or reasoning. Setting that aside for a moment so that I can listen really carefully... Read the full transcript at