Published on November 14, 2025 7:57 AM GMT
This is my distillation of rationality community wisdom on how to disagree. For this audience I fear this is all obvious or has been said better elsewhere. But I've been extolling the benefits of articulating insights in one's own words, so I'm taking my own advice. The eightfold path is as follows:
- Collaborate on characterizing the disagreementClarify your cruxesSubject yourself to ideological Turing testsSteelman your opponent's positionEmpathize and seek common groundState what you've learned from your opponentRebut and criticize only after all of the aboveCelebrate mind-changing
The overarching theme is seeking truth rather than a debate victory. From the first part of the first step — collaboration — we're cultivating the scout mindset. You want to literally love being wrong. David Heinemeier Hansson, of Ruby on Rails fame, in a blog post titled "I love being wrong", puts it like this:
Being wrong means learning more about the world, and how it really works. It means correcting misconceptions you've held to be true. It means infusing your future judgements with an extra pinch of humility. It's a treat to be wrong.
A debate in which both sides are eager to understand each other and genuinely excited about the possibility (however small it is) of being wrong feels amazing.
Alright, so let's discuss each of these steps in more detail.
First, you'll want clarity on whether you're disagreeing about facts, definitions, predictions, or values. Many disagreements immediately dissolve just by doing this. Take the classic debate about a tree that falls in the forest without anyone hearing it. Does it make a sound? There may be a fun debate to be had there but you'll want to start by clarifying that it's a debate over definitions. Should "sound" refer to acoustic vibrations or an auditory experience?
Step two, clarifying your cruxes, means articulating what would make you decide you are wrong. Most of my nerd friends think Daylight Savings Time is a transgression against Nature and Benjamin Franklin has the blood of generations on his hands. I think DST is an ingenious hack that solves a coordination problem with no other viable solution. But I can lay out a cost/benefit calculation with traffic deaths and programmer hair loss on one side and how much people would collectively pay to hit the snooze button on the sun setting in the summer on the other side. If the costs outweigh the benefits, then I'm wrong. In general, be explicit about things that would hypothetically/counterfactually change your mind. A debate with anyone who can't do this is quite futile!
(Of course you extra bonus points if you can state your crux as a wager. As the saying goes, betting is a tax on bullshit.)
Ideological Turing tests (step three) are amazing, just as a concept. You should understand your opponent's position so well that you can pass as a believer of it. It's tragicomic how abysmally people commonly fail this. The loudest people in the abortion debate in the US, for example, seem to believe their opponents have a bloodlust for babies, or are seizing on an excuse to oppress women, respectively.
But you don't need to formally administer an ITT (though I'm not saying not to — it sounds super fun). Here's how Daniel Dennett described the first of Rapaport's rules for ethical debate:
You should attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."
Number four, steelmanning, takes that even further. Remember the overarching theme: collaboration and truth-seeking. And recall that the strawman fallacy is when you argue against a weak or stupid version of your opponent that's easy to knock down. You want to do the exact opposite. Can you improve on their arguments? You want to be wrong, after all. If there's a version of your opponent's argument that defeats yours, that's the version you want. Collaborate with your opponent to try to find that version.
Empathizing and common-ground seeking (step five) are self-explanatory. Both do wonders for setting the tone of a debate and keeping everyone in scout mindset. And don't just perfunctorily list things everyone agrees on. Uncover the most surprising or uncommon points of agreement.
Telling your opponent what you've learned from them is step six. If you can't find anything to learn from them, what are you even doing? How is the debate worth your time? The part about actually telling them is, like step five, about fostering scout mindset and collaboration.
After all that, we get to rebuttals and criticism in step seven. Phew. Again, the point is to conscientiously hit all six previous steps before you allow yourself to rebut and criticize. I'm basing this part in particular on the Rogerian model of argument (thanks to Theo Spears for pointing me to it).
Finally, rounding out the eightfold path is a major theme of Julia Galef's book (The Scout Mindset — and I'll link again to Scott Alexander's excellent review of it): Never try to catch someone out on their old views. Help cultivate norms in which changing one's mind is something to be truly proud of. Learn to love being wrong.
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