The Importance of Setting Yourself the Goal of Understanding What They Believe

I always tell students is when you meet a famous advocate of you who don't agree with, just ask them questions. See what they say. Yeah, you're not going to convince the world's most famous pro-lifer, but you can learn something. It's much easier to argue as a typical angry member of the angry adherative of you than to argument as a really good thoughtful version. I felt confident when I was reading your essay that I could be pretty good at something like this with someone comparably educated to me.