I ran a “Productive Disagreements” event last night, a new interactive format I’ve been working on where attendees practice structured disagreements on controversial topics in order to learn from each other and get experience accurately modeling other people’s perspectives.
Here are the materials, in case you want to run an event like this or just learn about the format:
Part 1: Brief presentation about why disagreements are so often unproductive
1. You want to “win” more than you want to figure out what’s true (e.g., seeing disagreement as a competition)
Example: you want to one-up the other person, the other person is a rival
2. It’s really about your group identity, not about the content of the disagreement per se (i.e., what the argument is really about is whether my group is better than your group)
Example: Republicans vs. Democrats, Yankees vs. Mets
3. Others are watching and you think backing down would lower your social status or lose you respect (e.g., you think it would look bad to back down)
Example: dinner party disagreements, public debates
4. You have emotional discomfort with finding out you are wrong on this topic (e.g., cognitive dissonance, feeling dumb for being wrong, realizing that you did something immoral in the past)
Example: you’ve already said you are “certain” you are right, so think you would look really dumb now being wrong
5. There would be real-world negative consequences to believing the truth about this, which your subconscious detects, and so you fight against learning the truth (e.g., social rejection, feeling that you’d need to abandon your current lifestyle)
Example: religion, eating animals, addiction
6. You feel pressure to back down in the disagreement or that it would be inappropriate to mention flaws in the other person’s argument [H/T: Divia]
Example: disagreement with your boss, or in an especially polite social context, or with a person who you think would react negatively to be being challenged
7. The conversation drifts, so at first it was about your disagreement over X, but now it is about your disagreement over Y, so you can’t make progress on X
Example: pointing out whenever the other person says something you disagree with, even if it is tangential to the main point
Part 2: Tips for having productive disagreements that both parties learn more from (for attendees to keep in mind during the interactive portion of the event):
Tip 1: Remember that you are here to learn from the other person, not to “win” an argument
Tip 2: Work from the assumption that the other person has good intentions and is not a bad person, even if you think they believe something harmful
Tip 3: If the other person changes your mind about anything (even something small), tell them so and thank them for helping you have a more accurate perspective, changing your mind means you’re doing this right!
Tip 4: Carefully clarify definitions, since words are ambiguous and people often mean different things by the same word (once you do this you may realize that you don’t actually disagree at all)
Tip 5: Try to discover WHY the other person believes what they do, not merely just WHAT they believe
Tip 6: Remember that some of your beliefs are inevitably going to be wrong, it’s better for you to find that out now and start believing the truth as soon as possible rather than to hold tight to those wrong beliefs indefinitely
Tip 7: Remember that even if the other person IS wrong, you can still gain a more accurate view on the issue by understanding any valid points they are making
Tip 8: Remember that most controversial topics have at least some reasonable points on both sides, and you should know the best of what the other side can offer
Tip 9: Remember that even if your goal in the end is really just to persuade the other person, it still helps to ask lots of questions so that you deeply understand why they believe what they believe before trying to persuade them
Tip 10: Remember that we shouldn’t be 100% confident in any of our beliefs, so it’s better to think of your beliefs in terms of confidence levels (“I’m reasonably confident in this belief”) rather than in terms of things being either all true or all false, and talking to someone who disagrees with you can help you make your confidence level more appropriate even if you don’t end up concluding they are correct (e.g., after the discussion you might change your mind from being “very” confident to only being “moderately” confident)
Tip 11: Stay on topic, and hone in on the core of the disagreement, don’t get distracted by side disagreements or let the conversation drift away from the most important parts or you will inevitably not make progress, and if the other person says something you disagree with that is not that relevant to the topic, just let it go
Part 3: The interactive portion of the event
Handout 1
A spreadsheet of 59 controversial topics (print one out for each attendee): everyone will fill this out. If a person doesn’t want to discuss a certain topic, they should mark it as “unsure” or just leave it blank.
Important note: while this might sound like a huge number of controversial topics, it seems that a large number of topics is actually needed since many items people will not have an opinion on, or will agree with most other group members on (due to meeting groups often having similar views in many domains), or will find too ambiguous. If you write your own controversial topics, I don’t recommend using less than 50.
Here is another spreadsheet of 59 controversial topics adapted for people in the effective altruism community.
Handout 2
Step by step instructions for the interactive portion of the event (print one out for each attendee):
Step 1.
Find a random person to be your partner, preferably someone you don’t already know.
Step 2.
Compare your sheet with your partner (overlaying them after folding the right edge of one sheet works well) to find a topic where one of you selected “agree” and the other selected “disagree.”
Don’t select a topic that either of you marked as “unsure” or that either of you left blank; those topics are off-limits.
Step 3.
(i) Pick who will start as Person 1 (the explainer) and who will start as Person 2 (the asker).
(ii) Person 1 then explains why they marked that they agree or disagree.
(iii) During this time, Person 2 asks clarifying questions, with Person 2’s only goal being to try to TRULY understand Person 1’s perspective.
Good questions for Person 2 to ask include, among other things:
A. What do you mean by the word X? (i.e., clarifying a definition)
B. Could you give me an example of that?
C. Could you explain why you think that’s true?
(iv) Person 2 then tries to repeat back to Person 1 the reasons that Person 1 said they agree or disagree with the original statement, until they can do so in a way that Person 1 confirms is an accurate characterization of Person 1’s view. Being able to state someone’s perspective back to them is a great way to confirm you’ve really understood it.
Step 4.
Now switch who is Person 1 and who is Person 2 and repeat exactly what you did in Step 3.
Step 5.
Spend a final few minutes discussing the topic with the goal of pinpointing exactly why you disagree.
(i) Is it just a semantic disagreement, where once you agree on the meaning of words and definitions you actually agree with each other? This happens surprisingly often!
(2) Is it a disagreement of values (e.g., one of you simply values autonomy more than the other)?
(ii) Is it a disagreement about empirical facts that one could check (e.g., there might be studies out there that would settle the disagreement)?
(iii) Or is it a disagreement about intuition (e.g., you have different intuitions about a topic but can’t really explain why)?
Your goal should be to discover the “core” of the disagreement, the ultimate explanation for why you have different perspectives.
Step 6.
Now you’ll rotate to another person and repeat the whole process over again.
This piece was first written on June 25, 2017. Grammatical edits were made and an EA-adapted version of Handout 1 was shared on June 27, 2018. This editing note was added on December 23, 2022.
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