Why the BCCI won't be swayed by Richardson's DRS claims

The ICC's CEO hopes to get India on board and backing the review system, but that doesn't look likely to happen

Martin Crowe in Cricinfo

March 24, 2014

 

How can there be a zone of certainty for something that never happened? © BCCI

David Richardson, the CEO of the ICC, runs world cricket from an executive position. He also set up and designed the one and only DRS, which is sometimes nicknamed the David Richardson System.

The roots of this experiment with technology date back to 2007, when Richardson was the ICC's general manager. Following the awful Monkeygate controversy in Sydney in 2008, when umpiring howlers dominated a nasty contest between Australia and India, Richardson fast-tracked the DRS to avoid any further outcry for technology to help the umpires in the middle. It made sense; umpiring mistakes followed by copious replays, enabled by technology, of those mistakes, were killing the spirit of the game. That nasty series was the watershed. Enough was enough.

In mid-2009, the launch of Richardson's system was hastily arranged in time for the Sri Lanka v India series. For some reason they chose not to use the highly credible Hawk-Eye technology and instead went with a rookie rival, Animated Research Limited, a New Zealand-based operation. The result was a disaster. The details are well documented. The upshot was that India, rightly, condemned the predictive path used, and the conditions of the player challenge.

Since that ill-fated start in Sri Lanka, the DRS has spluttered along, accompanied by a mixture of embarrassment and the inevitable spin that all is well. Apparently, according to Richardson himself, the percentage of correct decisions has risen, but that is going by the rules of the system itself, which, with its "zones of certainty" concept, offers flawed predictions. Hardly an accurate measure for basing statistics on. Overall, the system has lacked credibility, and the BCCI has been the only one to consistently point this out.

Last week, however Richardson seemed to pre-empt a BCCI about-turn, based on his convincing former India captain Anil Kumble, who is on the ICC's technical committee, and also the upcoming appointment of N Srinivasan as ICC chairman. Kumble, who was critical of the DRS back when it first appeared is now seen as an easy pushover, ensuring that Richardson finally gets full global approval for the system.

Kumble is an independent, astute, balanced, outstanding man and player, well respected in the world game. I had the privilege of working with him in 2008, in the first IPL, and over the next few years on the MCC World Committee. Without question, he will be true to his beliefs. As for Srinivasan, nothing seems to faze him, and his opposition to the system has been unyielding.

Two things stand out. Firstly, it is inconceivable that Kumble, or the BCCI, will buckle. Secondly, the system is so flawed that the only long-term solution is to bin the dog's breakfast it is, and start from scratch.

The flaws have been well debated. The predictive path is never going to be bulletproof, and it often shows trajectories significantly different to those that would have come to pass. After all, the system is operated by humans.

The player-challenge rules are ridiculous, with two gambling chips offered for either side, slowing the game down and continually disrespecting the umpires' ability.

	The player-challenge rules are ridiculous, with two gambling chips offered for either side, slowing the game down and continually disrespecting the umpires' ability

Take a look at an imaginary scenario, of the sort often seen in Tests now (although not necessarily off consecutive balls as described below).

A batsman is hit on the pad and is given out. Knowing it's a 50-50 call, that he is a key batsman, and that his team has two unsuccessful challenges, he decides to review. The ball-tracking predictive path shows the ball clipping the leg stump by a whisker, so with the benefit going to the umpire, and not the batsman, the lbw is upheld. The batsman walks off convinced there was doubt about might have happened. He's convinced if the DRS wasn't in use, he would have been given the benefit of doubt, so he rues the system. The umpire himself learns that it only just clipped the top of the leg stump. He is relieved, yet also perhaps startled at how close it was, and put in two minds, remembering that in the pre-DRS days, it was the batsman who usually got the benefit of any doubt.

With the next ball, the new batsman receives the same delivery. He is hit on the pads, and this time, after much rumination, is given not out by the same umpire. The fielding captain, knowing it's 50-50 and that he has two unsuccessful challenges left, decides to review. The predictive path shows the ball just clipping the leg stump, not inside the "zone of certainty", so the review is turned down, the batsman and the umpire getting the benefit, the fielding side losing a challenge. The batsman previously given out is watching in the dressing room as he undoes his pads. He's fuming.

Next ball, there is another shout for lbw. Again, it looks similar to the one before, so the umpire gives it not out. The fielding captain, knowing he has one unsuccessful challenge left, decides that again it's worth the gamble to remove this key new batsman, so calls for another review. The predictive path shows the ball just hitting leg stump, but a little closer to the middle of the stump. In fact, when it's zoomed in really close, it has hit the leg stump only a fraction inside where the previous ball struck. But as it is hitting the centre line of the stump, and is therefore inside the "zone of certainty", the third umpire must tell the umpire in the middle to reverse his decision and give the batsman out. The umpire in the middle crosses his arms and raises his finger. The batsman and umpire have both been denied the benefit, while the fielding captain is cock-a-hoop because his gamble has paid off. On top of that, he keeps his one remaining challenge alive.

In three balls you have a snapshot of the ridiculous system the ICC has hung its hat on. Zone of certainty? For something that never happened, was simply predicted? No wonder so many players think it is flawed - though they rarely say it out loud in case of retribution. Also, it is little wonder the fans think it's madness, because it's confusing, complex and often contradictory.

The DRS as it is needs to be scrapped. Instead, why not sit down with everyone's interest and opinion tabled and we might see the following, or something similar.

One unsuccessful challenge per team per innings. The clear direction to all players will then be that the only time the system should be used is when an embarrassing mistake has been made that should be overturned for everyone's sake. In other words, the players are protecting the umpire. The system is not for personal or team tactical use. That would be regarded as going against the spirit of the game and the umpires.

This way, the game keeps moving, whereas if the third umpire was given the exclusive role of reviewing, he would be doing it every time, including for any 50-50 calls, for fear of been hauled up and exposed for not getting every single decision right. This would only slow the game down more, and cricket is already an incredibly slow sport. In truth, all sports can't ensure all decisions are accurate; that is part of their beauty. What is important is to remove embarrassment, to protect the umpire and the player on the wrong end of such a howler.

No predictive path is necessary. The trajectory that is forecast never came to pass in reality. It is subjective to the umpire and his expertise, and is part of cricket. To remove the howler, Hot Spot and real-time Snicko, along with super slo-mo replays can do the job.

The technology that should be used is the actual path and the virtual mat. That is accurate to a few millimetres and is sufficient to assist the umpires with line calls regarding balls pitching outside leg or hitting outside off, just as it does for line calls for stumpings and run-outs, and as in tennis.

Alas, Richardson is incredibly stubborn. There isn't a chance in hell he will back off his own creation, and hence the ongoing stalemate. He is hoping to sway Kumble, Srinivasan, and the BCCI, with spin. One would imagine that Kumble knows bad spin from good more than anyone. Richardson is up against a resolute, enduring opponent. He, for one, has a shelf life, and the BCCI, which isn't going anywhere, won't budge an inch. The stalemate will continue.

You're more biased than you think – even when you know you're biased

Nobody’s political opinions are just the pure, objective, unvarnished truth. Except yours, obviously

‘Even when people acknowledge that what they’re about to do is biased, they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.’ Photo: Spencer Platt /Getty

When it comes to the important issues, I’m pretty sure my opinions are just right. Of course I am: if I thought they were wrong, I’d trade them in for some different ones. But in reality, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we’re all at least somewhat subject to bias – that my support for stricter gun control laws here in the US, for example, is partly based on wanting to support my team. Tell Republicans that some imaginary policy is a Republican one, as the psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did in 2003, and they’re much more likely to support it, even if it runs counter to Republican values. But ask them why they support it, and they’ll deny that party affiliation played a role. (Cohen found something similar for Democrats. Maybe I mentioned Republicans more prominently because I’m biased?)

Surely, though, if you tell people you’re giving them biased information – if you specifically draw their attention to the risk of being led astray by bias – they’ll begin to question their own objectivity? Nope: even then, they’ll insist they’re reaching an unbiased conclusion, if a new paper by five Princeton researchers (which I found via Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard) is anything to go by. 

Emily Pronin and her colleagues asked Princeton students, and other people recruited online, to look at 80 paintings, and to give each a score from 1 to 10 based on their artistic merit. Half of the subjects weren’t told the artists’ identities. The other half were allowed to see a name, purportedly that of the painter of each picture. In fact, those names were a mixture of famous artists and names pulled from the phone book. As you’d predict, those who saw the names were biased in favour of famous artists. But even though they acknowledged the risk of bias, when asked to assess their own objectivity, they didn’t view their judgments as any more biased as a result. 

Even when the risk of bias was explicitly pointed out to them, people remained confident that they weren’t susceptible to it; indeed, they actually rated their performance as more objective than they’d predicted it would be at the start of the test. “Even when people acknowledge that what they are about to do is biased,” the researchers write, “they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.”

This is more evidence for the “bias blind spot”, a term coined by Pronin which refers to the head-spinning fact that we have a cognitive bias to the effect that we’re uniquely immune to cognitive biases. Take the famous better-than-average effect, or Lake Wobegon effect, whereby the majority of people think they’re above average on any number of measures – their driving skills, their popularity, the quality of their relationship – when clearly they can’t all be right. It turns out the bias also applies to bias. In other words, we’re convinced that we’re better than most at not falling victim to bias. We seem to imagine we’re transparent to ourselves: that when we turn our attention within, we can clearly see all the factors influencing our decisions. The study participants “used a strategy that they thought was biased,” the researchers note, “and thus they probably expected to feel some bias when using it. The absence of that feeling may have made them more confident in their objectivity.”

This helps explain, for example, why it’s often better for companies to hire people, or colleges to admit students, using objective checklists, rather than interviews that rely on gut feelings. As Jacobs notes, it’s also why some orchestras ask musicians to audition from behind screens, so that only their music can be judged. It’s no good relying on the judges’ sincere confidence that they’d never let sexism or other biases get in the way. They may really believe it – but they’re probably wrong. Bias spares nobody. Except me, of course.

DONIGER - In defence of the offensive

VASUNDHARA SIRNATE in the hindu

The right to free speech and expression also includes the right for people to be exposed to differing points of view. Book purges have been a staple of regimes trying to establish authority by ensuring that there can be no criticism against them

In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the main protagonist, Guy Montag, is a “fireman” whose task is to burn all books. Set in a fictional town in the American Mid-West, Fahrenheit 451 is about a society where “firemen” hunt people who hide books, raze their houses and burn all literature. Out of curiosity, one day Montag steals a copy of the Bible from the house of an old woman, who chooses to set herself aflame along with her books in an act of defiance. Shocked by the incident, Montag begins to read, eventually joining a group of drifters that memorise books for a futuristic time when society will need books again.

Responses to literature

Mr. Bradbury’s inspiration for Fahrenheit 451 came from three diverse political phenomena that preceded the novel. The first occurred on May 10, 1933 when members of the German Students Union burned a reported 25,000 books written by Jewish, French and American authors that were considered subversive, anti-National Socialism and un-German. The second phenomena was the Great Purge conducted by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union when many anti-communist thinkers, writers and philosophers were arrested and executed along with thousands of peasants in an attempt to consolidate the communist regime. The third was the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 that blacklisted the Hollywood Ten — a group of scriptwriters and directors thought to be sympathetic to communism.

I invoke Mr. Bradbury’s book precisely because the incidents that inspired him crossed the boundaries of political ideologies suggesting that many varying regime types have the capacity to censor free speech and expression. By caving in to Dinanath Batra’s call to ban Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, it has become ‘reasonable’ for a group of individuals to hold metaphorical knives to the necks of established academics engaged in research. By effectively banning this book, Mr. Batra and Penguin India are encroaching on the Freedom of Speech and Expression because the right to free speech also includes a right for people to be exposed to differing points of view. To quote the Indian Supreme Court’s judgment in Union of India vs. Association for Democratic Reforms, “One sided information, disinformation, misinformation and non-information, all equally create an uninformed citizenry which makes democracy a farce. Freedom of speech and expression includes the right to impart and receive information which includes freedom to hold opinions.”

Book purges and burnings have been a staple of regimes trying to establish authority and legitimacy by ensuring that there can be no criticism against them. Salman Rushdie, another proscribed author, writes about becoming Joseph Anton — borrowed from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov — in his memoir. He says that an Iranian man on his deathbed, Ayatollah Khomeini, who hadn’t even read his book, banned The Satanic Verses. A fatwa was issued and Rushdie lived his life under the constant threat of being murdered for writing some brilliant prose and upsetting Muslims.

A call for action

The pulping of Dr. Doniger’s book is the latest in a steady stream of books that have been similarly treated because, it is claimed, such books offend communities. I offer here a slightly different argument in defence of her book. Dr. Doniger’s book does not do Hinduism a disservice. It is a call for action against the historical priestly expurgations that have accompanied the evolution of Hindu epics and history. She re-injects the lost narratives of Dalits, women and other lower castes — narratives that were removed by design by some male Hindu priests who sanitised the books to suit their agendas. In order to dislike a book one first has to read it. Mr. Batra’s petition has encouraged mob behaviour where Hindus, who don’t even know what’s in the book, are now participating in the rising Indian Cult of the Offended.

At its foundation, religion is mostly about trusting the unknown. It is about handing one’s resolve to some being that may or may not exist, to accept individual fate as something decided by powers outside one’s control and by regaining that control over one’s life through meditation, prayer and charitable deeds. Nowhere does Hinduism say that to reinforce and express one’s faith Hindus must destroy books that are deemed offensive. Nowhere does Hinduism say that one cannot use Freudian analysis as a theoretical frame to comment on the structure and history of Hinduism. In fact, the very basis of Hinduism, and what has made it persist, is its ability to incorporate varying critical arguments that have broadened the scope of the religion.

The objections to Dr. Doniger’s book come because she injects sex and lust into Hinduism by reclaiming desire as an important, yet hidden, story arc in Hindu texts. Anyone who knows Dr. Doniger or has attended her lectures will know that she has a witty style of writing and presentation. She often uses modern metaphors to explain her point about Hinduism and sees humour and meaning even in incidents where she has been attacked, one notably where an audience member threw an egg at her. Much of her writing uses anachronisms to describe epic characters and storylines.

There is nothing wrong or offensive about this. Other critics have also argued against Dr. Doniger’s books because they don’t agree with her point of view. This is called academic debate. Debate and discourse is how societies try to push thinking about issues and circumstances to other levels. The truth is Hinduism does have a rich transcript of desire. Hindus are free to argue against it and say it is embarrassing or they can take pride in it for having such an openly sexual past. Either way, one can pulp a few books, but it is virtually impossible to suppress a book in the digital age, and second, one cannot really brush a temple like Khajuraho under the carpet in the vain hope that no one will notice the naughty bits carved into the walls.

Rise of the right wing

Dinanath Batra, a former school principal and the founder of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, is offended by the book. He also asks if Muslims can ban books that offend them, why not Hindus? Most Hindus he claims to speak for have not read the book because it is written in English and is over 600 pages long. If we square this away with our literacy rates, it seems unlikely that more than a fraction of the very diverse Hindu community has been able to access the book. From this set, many have spoken out against the book but have done so through the written word, not by a call to ban the text. Mr. Batra has chosen to speak for a very diverse set of people counting on the fact that they will not look at the book themselves and make up their minds. His organisation attacked Dr. Doniger, by saying that she is driven by “Christian Missionary Zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.” On the contrary, Dr. Doniger wants to show that Hinduism was and is much more than a written record of priestly literature. She shows how the forgotten people, the oppressed and the women whose voices were silenced under an overarching control by male priests and their translations were in fact crucial to the formation of modern Hinduism. She gives these voices a place of respect and dignity in the existing Hindu narratives.

Mr. Batra stated in one interview that he wanted “Indianness” in the field of education and was on a mission to purify the minds of the youth and keep them free from “corruption” (read Westernisation). For all his rhetoric, he seems to have missed one central point – in a country as diverse and as rich in divergent cultures as India, he barely has the right to speak for his own neighbourhood let alone all Hindus across the world. What is most disconcerting is that Penguin India has kowtowed to this act of bullying citing that it has a responsibility to protect its employees from threats.

These threats do not come from a court order or a fatwa, as Arundhati Roy crucially has pointed out. These threats come from groups in society that want to advance a carefully constructed purist vision of a Hindu nation, knowing full well that their hand will be strengthened by the possible and perhaps pre-eminent electoral emergence of a right-wing party. It is these same groups that beat up couples on Valentine’s Day, attack women in nightclubs, and impose dress codes on women for no good reason, except that a woman’s knees or armpits somehow offend them. The problem, from my perspective, is that the capturing of the corridors of power by a right-wing party strengthens groups in society with a narrow vision of modernity, a deep dislike of intellectual freedom, a commitment to sanitise Hindu history, and to persist in an unabashed encroachment on the rights of others.

Why we argue – and how to do it properly

The internet provides ample space for stating opinions. But true persuasion is an art – one this week-long series aims to teach

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Monday 9 September 2013 13.00 BST

Marlon Brando as Mark Anthony in the 1953 film Julius Caesar. 'True persuasion is democratic.' Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

It's the weekend and you are heading out to meet friends at the cinema. You are looking forward to seeing the new thriller by a favourite director. But then you discover that some of your friends would rather see the latest superhero movie, or some a new romantic comedy. Everybody pauses, uncertain how to proceed. You decide to get everyone to see the thriller. You won't force them – after all, they are your friends and unlikely to remain so if you threaten them. You could bribe them by offering to buy the tickets – but movie-going is expensive enough as it is, and you don't want to set a precedent. So you decide to try and persuade them – to get them to really want to go. But how?

You could begin by telling your friends about reviews you have read recommending your chosen film and trashing the others – or by pointing out the relative box office success of the movies on offer. But what reviewers do your friends trust? Do they want to see a hit movie or are they the sort of people who like to "discover" hidden gems?

Perhaps you should remind them that on previous visits to the cinema your choices have been good ones. And all you want is for everybody to have a good time. Alternatively you might explain just how much you have been looking forward to the movie after a really bad week. Are your friends likely to be moved by pity or should you appeal to other feelings?

Perhaps these appeals – to the authority of reviewers, your own character, and to your friends' emotions – seem too manipulative. You could try logic. Movie-going may not be an exact science but there are degrees of reasonableness. If a director's movies have been dire since that first breakout hit then it's a good bet that the new one will be weak. You might argue that the superhero blockbuster is good but the genre can never be truly great; that one of the movies has a lead actor with a bad track record; that the comedy is so long the bar will shut before it ends.

However strong your convictions about quality cinema may be, these alone will not win the day. You need to make an argument. And a successful argument must appeal not to just anyone in general but to your friends in particular. It must be adapted to their estimations of movie reviewers, feelings and beliefs about you and your character, and rely on rational claims of a kind they will recognise.

What is true of the cinema is – in this case – also true in public and political life. In a democracy, rather than force or bribe people to assent to our ideology, we try to win them over through persuasion. That can be a challenge. It requires us to understand where other people are coming from and to develop arguments that are outward-facing.

Not everyone thinks as we do. People have different experiences and possess different information; they have different values and do not always share our criteria of judgment. To persuade them we have to make connections with our audience – with what they might think, feel and be familiar with. This is not about tricking people or fooling them. It is about truly persuading them to share our views on a particular issue – and that means developing a relationship.

A glance at the newspapers and much of the internet demonstrates, however, that many people think the purpose of public communication is to reflect well on themselves – to announce their own importance, specialness or cleverness. An infamous academic chooses not to be convincing but to increase his brand value by performing provocatively; a troll communicates publicly but seeks only private "lulz"; shouting things your audience already believes, yet pretending that you're not allowed to say them, seems to be an easy route to success on talk radio or the op-ed pages. But the only thing such people are saying with their arguments is "look at me!"

Online communication makes easy the simple affirmation of our beliefs, the monetisation of strident "opinion" and the anonymous onanistic expression of inchoate hostility. And that means more arguments – but less persuasion.

True persuasion is democratic. In giving people reasons to act with us we recognise that they aren't inferiors who can be compelled but thinking, feeling and speaking beings. And true persuasion is an art. Contrary to the books on the self-help and business psychology shelves there are no magic "words that work". You have to cultivate an "eye", developing a feel for situations and empathy for those you want to persuade. The name of that art is "rhetoric".

Of course, you don't need to bother with any of this if you and your friends just go and see your favoured films separately. But that is to give up on society, politics and progress. If people cannot persuade or be persuaded then there can be no shared beliefs, co-ordinated collective action or intellectual evolution. The only change will come from force, bribery or manipulation.

In defiance of such a bleak outcome, Comment is free will over the coming week run a series on how to argue in the spirit of Isocrates, the ancient Greek philosopher and rhetorician: "the kind of art which can implant honesty and justice in depraved natures has never existed and does not exist … But I do hold that people can become better and worthier if they conceive an ambition to speak well, if they become possessed of the desire to be able to persuade their hearers."

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How to judge your audience and remain true to your arguments

Being two-faced has had a bad rap recently. But to convince people of your argument you have to adapt it to your audience

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 September 2013 13.20 BST

'On BBC Question Time Russell Brand is never going to persuade Melanie Phillips, and she will never sway him. They'd be foolish to try.' Photograph: Matt Crossick/PA

One of the greatest achievements of reality television gameshows has been the promotion of a distinctive ethical principle: that almost the worst thing you can do is be "two-faced". To say one thing to one group of people and something else to another is widely regarded as the epitome of dishonesty. And the very worst thing? The failure to be "true" to yourself – to moderate or modify your public appearance in response to the expectations of others.

Adapt to circumstances

But if you want to persuade people, or simply communicate clearly, the last thing you should do is say the same thing to everyone and refuse to adapt to circumstances. On the contrary, the first step in developing a good argument is to think about how to fit it to the situation in which you find yourself. It used to be that skill in this was considered a virtue. Rhetoricians called it "decorum".

Today we think of being "decorous" as conforming. But all it means is being "fitting" – using words and arguments that are "apt" given the situation. It is generally a bad idea to give an expletive-packed wedding speech that endlessly insults the bride, not because expletives and insults are always bad but because they are at odds with the mood of collective celebration characteristic of weddings.

Similarly, an economist explaining the Phillips curve ought to do so differently if talking to a niece taking business studies GCSE, the retired sales executive next door or a room full of trade unionists.

Know your audience

In making an argument you are trying to bring three things into alignment: yourself, your words and your audience. You are trying to move your audience so that it is in agreement with you – but to do that you need to move too. And between you – what moves you both – is a form of words and a set of arguments. If you are inflexible, using words and making references that are completely at odds with your audience you won't persuade anybody of anything (except of the view that you are unconvincing and unintelligible).

In practical terms this simply means that you need to know your audience. Cicero, the Roman philosopher, rhetorician and politician, believed that the perfect orator would have to master everything to do with the life of other citizens: laws and customs, traditions and general outlooks, "the way people usually think". In becoming familiar with the general outlooks of other people, as well as the particular outlook of specific groups, you are better placed to adapt your argument as needed.

A problem in the present day is that contemporary communications media make decorum extremely difficult, if not completely impossible. Politicians have long been aware that words said in one context may be rebroadcast in quite another. They have tended to deal with this by being bland and non-commital or by supplementing what they say with briefing and spin. In adopting such positions on the basis of opinion polls and focus groups politicians make the opposite mistake to the foul-mouthed best man. They forget their argument and give themselves over entirely to the audience (who, in turn, succumb to boredom).

It's not only politicians who can find their words taken and used in a quite unexpected context. These days any of us might be live-tweeted or filmed and put online. The examples are piling up of those who forgot that what they said on social media was not private but being said to everybody. On below-the-line comments boards – where most are anonymous or pseudonymous – it is difficult to be sure who one is talking to. This is one reason why people on Guardian comment threads often try to appeal to the (possibly imaginary) audience they know that exists: the moderators, subeditors, or "Guardian readers".

Pitching to the third party

But if you want to persuade you need to have a better idea of the audience you mean to reach. And it isn't the person whose comments you are attacking. On BBC Question Time Russell Brand is never going to persuade Melanie Phillips, and she will never sway him. They'd be foolish to try. They are trying to persuade the people watching them. It is the same online. Persuasive arguments will be pitched to a "third party" – the audience of readers.

Of course you don't know who that audience is. Are they old or young, male or female, new to the topic or experienced? Yet all of us, when we start to compose some kind of general argument, has in mind an "ideal" or "typical" audience. It is worth being clear to yourself who you think this is. It shouldn't be people who think exactly as you do – since those aren't people you need to persuade. Nor should it be a bunch of idiosyncratic types who think like nobody else.

Let's be reasonable

It needs to be something like generally "reasonable" people, neither fanatical nor obstinate, informed but not specialist. What views or outlooks can you assume they share? What are they likely to think decent, kind and reasonable and what might they think is unacceptable, unkind and daft? Be clear on this and you can start to think about how to argue your case. That means paying attention to, and thinking about, other people, their feelings and experiences. If you want to have a chance of persuading people then you need to have a lot more than two faces. Don't be true to yourself. Be true to your arguments.

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How to use your anecdotes well – and sparingly

There's an art to telling stories to complement an argument without overdoing it – or making yourself the centre of attention

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 September 2013 11.01 BST

David Cameron, left, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown all used anecdotes about people they had met during the 2010 leaders' debate. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

The most memorable moment of the 2010 general election leaders' debate was when David Cameron tried to justify a point about immigration by citing the agreement of "a 40-year-old black man" he had met in Plymouth who had served in the Royal Navy for 30 years (thus enlisting at the age of 10).

This impossibly young seaman was not the only person called as a witness in that debate: Nick Clegg had been talking to a ward nurse in a short-staffed hospital and a burglary victim from London; Gordon Brown had met a trainee chef and received a letter from a recovered cancer patient; Cameron had also recently met a crime victim from Crosby, a drug addict from Witney and a man suffering from cancer of the kidney. The latter reappeared in Cameron's 2012 speech to his party conference, and in a recent speech on social security Ed Miliband told stories of meeting a young unemployed man in Long Eaton and "somebody who had worked all his life, for 40 years" in the scaffolding business.

Are such stories a good form of argument? They seem to be popular with political speech writers and advertising copywriters who often use them to lend colour and "human interest" to a speech. But as the leaders' debate demonstrated, they can also sound such a false note that they distract from the claims you want to advance. To work well, stories must be in harmony with, and contributing to, your overall argument.

One way they can do this is by bringing to your argument "witnesses" who provide evidence that supports a particular claim. In school we learn to quote supposed "authorities" – writers who lend support to our case not simply because of the veracity of their findings or the eloquence they lend to our words but also because they have some kind of recognised standing which we hope to add to our own.

Know your witnesses

Outside school such citations are useful, but the range of potential sources is greater and the usefulness of any single one cannot be taken for granted. Different audiences value different sorts of "authorities" and a fundamental mistake is to refer to something your audience cannot evaluate or will not evaluate positively. Far from strengthen your case this will weaken it.

Use your anecdotes sparingly

Even good witnesses should be used sparingly and carefully. Excessive and obvious reliance on them will make it seem as if you can't think for yourself. And it can easily seem pretentious. Someone trying to persuade you simply by dropping names of powerful people they have met or of authors they have read is, to put it mildly, annoying.

Make anecdotes tell stories

Stories can also serve as examples – instances of reality which are presented as proofs of some kind of norm. They invite people to make an induction – to conclude that there is some kind of general underlying rule at work and of which we must take heed. When a child points out that their friend doesn't have to go to bed so early, or a teenager insists to a parent that "nobody else has to visit Grandma every weekend", they are trying to illustrate the presence of a rule or a norm from which their parents are unreasonably or bizarrely departing. In a similar way Cameron wants us to conclude from a single dramatic example that the NHS is bad for patients and Miliband that apprenticeships are working out well.

Anecdotal examples of this sort are a necessary and valuable part of everyday, public and political argument. That is because (climate change partially excepted) such arguments are rarely about the nature of physical reality but often about social reality. They concern partial and practical judgments about some aspect of our varied and complex cultures: whether or not people are on the whole trustworthy; the likelihood that people receiving social security are "striving" or "skiving"; whether exams are getting easier or harder.

To make strong claims about the social reality of these things you will need to present examples and these can be made vivid if expressed in the form of stories. The most effective – combined with other evidence and information – help bring clearly to mind something you want the audience to think about more, to sympathise with or to see in a new way. They help to establish a picture of a situation and a definition of reality on the basis of which conclusions may be drawn.

Stories come in many genres. They may be little comedies or tragedies, homely confirmations of what "everybody knows" or unexpected revelations. It is important to be sure that your story is emotionally in tune with the rest of your argument (rather than a substitute for it). And it certainly must not dominate.

Don't make yourself the story

One of the more annoying techniques of politicians is to use purely personal experience as an anecdotal exemplar – as if, just because the politician "got on their bike", we must accept that everyone could or should do likewise. Stories about the speaker may be fine for entertaining dinner speeches (on the way to which a really funny thing happened), but they have a limited place in argumentative speeches where the good character of a speaker should be evident and not need explicit mention.

The problem with Cameron, Clegg, Brown and Miliband's stories is that often they aren't a contribution to the main argument but an attempt to convince the audience that these are great guys, men of the people, on our level. They have forgotten that a good argument is always about the audience to whom it is addressed and not the person making it. If you make yourself the story your argument will fail.

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Ask yourself: what are you arguing about?

Life is not a well-set exam – the questions we ask may be ambiguous. Defining the dispute is itself part of the argument

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 12 September 2013 15.30 BST

'When your flatmate accuses you of eating the last of the cheese your first reaction might be to refute the conjecture.' Photograph: CS-Stock / Alamy

The New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hasan recently addressed his online interlocutors thus: "Dear thickos on Twitter, for the 100th time: opposing arming the rebels does not make one 'pro-Assad'."

Now, there's a lot happening in this short rhetorical moment – including invective and hyperbole aimed at the refutation of a false syllogism. But overall it is an argument about arguments. Hasan wants to argue over the question "Should the UK arm the rebels in Syria?"; others would prefer the question: "Should the UK support Assad?" Although connected, these are two distinct questions. Which one is asked makes quite a difference to how a discussion about policy towards Syria will unfold. In any argument what we are arguing about may be the most important thing to dispute.

What are you arguing about?

Life is not a well-set examination. Our problems are not clearly specified and the questions we have to answer to ourselves are rarely unambiguous. Even something seemingly simple such as an argument about what music to play at a family party might also, possibly, be an argument about what kind of party it is to be, who the party should be for, or which members of the family deserve most respect. If you think the debate is about the relative merits of Britpop over glam rock, you might be in trouble if your partner thinks it is about your inability to respect your in-laws. In short, the point of a dispute isn't clear or fixed before an argument begins. It is one of the things established in and through the argument.

Understanding this can be emotionally important when organising the family get-together. It is of immense political importance when there is going to be a vote. Voters think lots of different things and they think them in all sorts of different ways.

Consequently, a vote will work out differently depending on how voters perceive an issue. For example, the renewal of Trident might be presented as purely a defence issue. People's views will then depend on how they think about threats to security and how they assess the usefulness of Trident in warding them off. But the issue can plausibly be construed as one of cost. In deciding on that question, the same people might take a different position. "Should we seek to deter nuclear attacks on the UK?" and "Are nuclear weapons your No 1 priority for government spending?" will lead to very different outcomes.

Four kinds of argument

In arguing, then, we need to think carefully about the explicit and implicit questions we are addressing and about the kind of argument that we want to have about them. Roman rhetoricians had a useful way of thinking about this. They used the term "stasis" for the "point" around which a dispute could or should turn, and identified four general kinds.

1. Fact

The first kind is "conjecture". This is the argument about fact – whether something is or is not the case. When your flatmate accuses you of eating the last of the cheese your first reaction might be to refute the conjecture – you were at work, you are allergic to dairy, your flatmate ate them last night when he had the munchies.

2. Definition

But suppose you did take the cheese and there is no denying it? The argument might then shift to "definition" – the name that should be given to your action. You might have taken the cheese thinking it was yours – in which case it wasn't "theft" but a "mistake".

3. Quality

Your third option is to make the argument one of "quality"; you admit the crime but argue that your action was a good one. You were aiding your flatmate in a diet, the cheese was almost out of date and you were avoiding waste, you gave it to someone who was really hungry.

These are all ways of shifting the terrain of a dispute. How you use them depends in part on whether or not you are in the position of prosecution or defence. A prosecutor wants to keep things narrow, presenting an audience with a simple choice of yes or no, guilty or not guilty. A defendant will want to open up a variety of arguments so as to sow reasonable doubt. The political conservative might want to keep things at conjecture so as to avoid challenges to "traditional values" while the political radical may want an argument about "quality" so as to show how an unconventional action expresses a higher moral code.

You can see how different stases work in many contemporary political arguments. Debate about the EU is an obvious example. "Sceptics" have successfully made the argument about a conjecture. They ask, implicitly, "who has given away British sovereignty?". They then resist any sort of nuance seeking only to bring forward as many examples as they can to prove the fact that sovereignty has been lost. "Europhiles" try to move on to a debate about definition (talking about "partnership" and so on) or over "quality", where they like to argue that since sovereignty is weakened by globalisation, joining a larger bloc is to enhance rather than give away power.

4. Place

There is a fourth "stasis" that the Romans referred to as "place". Here, the dispute is over jurisdiction – whether or not the issue is one that can legitimately be addressed. In Rome that meant disputing that it was something the court could hear. In politics this is usually a "reactionary" argument since it is intended to ward off disputes.

Thus, we hear often that government has no right to decide on same-sex marriage or tell people who they can and can't employ, and that courts cannot judge the content of newspapers. But in our crowded and cacophonous virtual public spheres we (like Mehdi Hasan) might all make good use of the stasis of place. The art of arguing involves knowing which questions to ask and how to ask them, learning how to answer the questions put and deciding which questions to ignore. Sometimes, just before the guests arrive is neither the time nor the place to start an argument.