How to use the Socratic method with other people

This is not my priority at all, but I still think it’s important to note

• (Also note that there are whole chapters on this, like “Socratic rules of engagement”, that I am not planning on revisiting whilst my main focus remains “get good at doing this on my own)
• A key thing is that Socrates wouldn’t tell people what to think → he’d extract someone’s own thinking, show how it is paradoxical, and kind of leave them there. A lot of the dialogues end with people leaving, lol, but I imagine they remain very much perplexed
• This is key because it involves the ego of the other person. If Socrates were to tell me that what I think is wrong and I should think this other thing instead, I could just go “well whatever, he doesn’t get it”, and move on, learning nothing
• But, if he progresses entirely by coaxing stuff out of me that I fully endorse, and then shows how this line of logical is paradoxical and doesn’t work, then I will feel personally involved; he has shown that my own thinking is faulty
• This is where aporia comes in (an impasse, the lack of a path forwards), and it feels very perplexing, and it’s human nature to want to figure out a path forwards
• I’ve experienced Socratic coaching from a friend, and aporia does feel incredibly potent, bedevilling, frustrating.
  • It creates a very salient open loop, in the same way that doing top-down learning, where you go “huh, Israel just stuck Iran, I know nothing about Iran, let me make some predictions about it, I think there’s a 60% chance Iran borders Israel”, and now you want to know if you’re right or not, and when you realise you were pretty damn wrong, that creates a very salient, ego-bruising learning.
    • See e.g. Israel & Iran (session 1)
  • Aporia is the same way: “ugh, wtf, I’m so confused, I need to resolve this”. It’s actually very addictive, and pretty much guaranteed to create an open loop that you are very motivated to solve (at least in my experience!)
• Agreement