[This is the second in a series of posts labeled "You talkin' to me?" dealing with interpersonal communication. All the posts in this series, except for the first, will be found at the current URL for this blog, all identically labeled. Only the first post in this series is archived at the original URL for this blog, but also identically labeled.]
Frequently, reading a post of Norm's will bring to the fore a thought I have had that lends itself to a post of my own. This is one reason that normblog is a favorite of mine.
Norm's latest, as of this writing, reminds me of something that had been irritating me for many years. It is related to my ideas as I expressed them here. To wit, I detest the common practice of cherry-picking the points made by one's adversary in a debate, with the goal of winning the debate rather than resolving the issue being debated.
You know the drill. If your goal is to resolve the issue, you will sometimes embellish a primary point with secondary or tertiary pointlets, only to have your adversary, whose goal of winning the debate is orthogonal to your own goal of resolving the issue, pouncing on your pointlets to the exclusion of your principal point. Naturally, the orthogonality of the debaters' goals favors the cherry picker, who invariably is just interested in winning. The pointlets are usually less well presented, as befits their lesser importance to resolution, and are therefore easy pickin's for the win-intent adversary. I hate when that happens, since I am usually on the receiving end of a cherry-pickin' lickin'.
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