How to Disagree (2008)

This is a PG classic, and a perennial HN favorite.

It left an impression on me the first time I read it 10 years ago; but since then, I've actually found it to be more useful as a piece to introduce people (designers, teachers, writers, musicians, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) to how "computer people" think - in extremely hierarchical, rule based systems that they see as impervious to everything else and that leave no room for nuance - and how to work with them.

There are many cases where any of the layers mentioned can be perfectly fine on its own. If a medical doctor dismisses someone by saying they're a "homeopath", that's really all you need to know - going in a 2 hour lecture about why homeopathy is quackery would only waste the doctor's time (and it is well know that the amount of effort needed to refute bullshit is orders of magnitude more than the effort needed to produce bullshit). The fact that, in PG's framework, it falls as "DH0 - Namecalling" really doesn't matter. You're a homeopath, go away, stop trying to get my money.

Within the definitions established by PG, the best possible form of disagreement comes from a perfectly refuted central point, nothing less. But that presumes that there is such a thing to refute in the first place - that the person you're arguing against isn't moving the goalposts every other sentence, appealing to emotion, etc. If you were to debate Donald Trump, how much would following PG's framework help you?

Schopenhauer's "Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten" ("The Art of Always Being Right") is the perfect manual to defeating this in the field.

The corollary of all of that is that it's extremely easy to persuade nerds - you effectively just have to make them believe you're operating at "DH 6", to borrow PG's terms, rather than a well disguised DH 1 or 2.

I really like this article as it takes something I think a lot of people have an intuitive feel for already and formalizes it.

Unfortunately, one of the interesting things that stuck out to me since this was written is that a lot of our discussion platforms (twitter / facebook / etc) seem to self-select for and encourage visibility of low quality arguments. Maybe this is a problem with society itself though, since at the core of it, it's people upvoting/liking/etc those arguments.