Reading Stephen Downes’s article, Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge, October 16, 2006

Insight: people’s views about things are often really reflections of their values, rather than statements of beliefs about fact. People believe things because of the connotations; because of the other people that believe them; because of the values that they perceive to be associated with them.

But (and here is the big “but” ) discussion and argument rapidly become fruitless and futile on this model. You can’t argue against values through “mere” facts.

Solution: surface the values. Help people to make their values explicit, so that they don’t have to use beliefs about things as proxies. That way, if we have congruent values, we can work together even though we may differ in our beliefs.