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Nassim Taleb’s Way of Pinpointing the EXACT Moment When You’ve Won an Argument
“You never win an argument until they attack your person.”
-Nassim Taleb
Hurling a personal insult when you’ve run out of anything productive to say is like throwing your gun at the monster when you’ve run out of bullets.
All the great debaters and arguers and, yea I’ll say it, lovable cranks like Nassim Taleb know that when they attack your person, that’s when you know that they’ve got NOTHING to say against your argument.
That’s how you can tell that you’ve won!
“Attacking the person” is a logical fallacy called an ad hominem, which means that, since you can’t find anything wrong with the other person’s argument, you’re trying to score points by making them look bad, attacking something else that’s irrelevant about them, or what have you.
If you can’t think of any logical reason why they’re wrong, and instead just call them “dumb,” you’ve committed a logical fallacy and ceded victory to the other person.
As soon as this happens to you, however, you know that you’ve won the argument! They have nothing to say, no counterargument, nothing to defeat you with, so the only thing that they can do is insult you.
