Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

And three interpretations to consider:

0: The default: That person is irrationally attached to being wrong. Best to walk away, argumentation will be futile, and I have a life to lead.

1: Whoa! Sometimes that person is me.

2: If they didn't reason themselves into it, how did they get into it? What if their position represents their values, not some perfectly architected strategy for maximizing some hypothetical measure of rightness? In that case, if I wish to discuss it with them, I should be talking about their values and my values and where they intersect, rather than arguing right and wrong?

I have personally found all three of the above useful at one point or anther.

Mencius said: "The trouble with people is that they are too fond of being teachers to others."

仁者如射，射者正己而後發。發而不中，不怨勝己者，反求諸己而已矣。

The benevolent person is like an archer. The archer corrects their own posture before releasing the arrow. If they shoot and miss, they do not blame the one who surpasses them, but simply turn around and seek the cause within themselves.

孟子曰：「愛人不親，反其仁；治人不治，反其智；禮人不答，反其敬。行有不得者，皆反求諸己，其身正而天下歸之。《詩》云：『永言配命，自求多福。』」

Mencius said: "If you love others and they do not become close to you, reflect on your own benevolence. If you govern others and they are not well governed, reflect on your own wisdom. If you treat others with courtesy and they do not respond, reflect on your own respectfulness. When things do not go as you wish, always turn inward and seek the cause in yourself. When your own person is upright, the whole world will turn to you. The Book of Odes says: 'Always strive to align with your destiny, and seek your own blessings.'"

On a more personal level, the reason people are frustrated about arguing is because they can’t fully articulate their reasons. They don’t realize it themselves. The older you get and the more practiced you get at arguing, the less contentious it becomes, as you can simply say what underpins what you’re saying in an easily understandable way, and then if that didn’t convince the other side, you did all you could.

Because I also like being correct, a debate to me has become something of a game where (ideally) we both win in both end scenarios: either my thinking was correct, and now I verified/validated it, and got you to think differently; or my thinking was incorrect, and you corrected it for me (or helped me get there).

However, I implicitly figured out that there are some qualifiers to actually getting the benefits:

- Can I be, and remain, polite and reflective? If not, my personality or knee-jerk responses will always get in the way of an argument's benefits.

- Is the subject sensitive to the person for whatever reason? If yes, any argument inadvertently becomes a signal of a person's worth.

- Are we in a competitive setting (e.g., corporate meeting, or larger social group)? If yes, any argument inadvertently becomes a social status competition.

- Do I know how to stick to the issue (instead of moving goalposts), and stop when the debate gets overwhelming (too long, too much difference)? If not, I'll overstep the boundary after which it isn't mutually beneficial anymore.

These are not easy to figure out, and sure, maybe stop arguing with most people if the conditions aren't right.

But unless you stop communicating altogether, I don't see how you can stop arguing with people in general.

Maybe this is why pull request reviews can become contentious. The reviewer thinks the author is open for feedback while in fact it’s just the widely accepted practice and team/company enfored that you are supposed to give feedback.

If you're trying to convince the other person, be humble. Be gentle. Be subtle. Ask them questions. Let them think they came up with the idea entirely on their own. If any bystanders are watching this discussion, they are more likely to think that the other person is right, or that they are "winning". But this will give you the best possible chance of convincing the person you're talking to.

If you're trying to convince bystanders, project confidence. Present compelling evidence. Pick apart the other person's arguments and show why its flawed. Chances are, this will make the other person dig in even more strongly and resent you. But this will give you the best chance of convincing neutral bystanders.

Use the right tool for each job. If you're using "debate tactics" in a 1:1 discussion, you will never get the desired results, no matter how data-driven and logical your arguments are. I've made this mistake far too many times, and this seems to be what OP is getting at as well

How about: maybe I’m wrong and I didn’t let their ideas influence me. How about: even when I think I’m right, it will be better to calmly kindly discuss, listening as much as talking, not debating or arguing or speaking over them, but attempting to see new perspectives.

I could well be wrong about this :)

When you join a new team, don't try to change team tools, processes etc. starting in the very first week.

Most things are the way they are for a reason. Your "obviously better" idea may lack the full context. Start with observing the situation, talking to people to build understanding and historical context, and don't jump to conclusions too early.

Sometimes you'll be right, and things are suboptimal and based on long-outdated assumptions. Then, it's great to change them and improve! Freshman eyes are great for spotting such inefficiencies, and "new blood" is critical to make the team well-functioning and to improve the legacy stuff.

But improving and rewriting everything all the time has a cost. If you do too much of it too quickly, the team loses the understanding of long-stable processes and things. You may become a bottleneck as the "last person who touched this" in too many areas. People also have limited bandwidth to support your "rewrite everything" ideas every day, while trying to move on with their tasks.

Don't hesitate to suggest improvements, but please be mindful about the volume - especially in times of AI where everything can be vibecoded in an hour.

Finally, some "objectively better" things have no business justification. Improving performance of a piece of code than runs once a month? There's probably 10 more important things to do in your backlog.

>Arthur: And are you?

>Slartibartfast: No. That's where it all falls down of course.

>Arthur: Pity. It sounded like rather a good lifestyle otherwise.

Adulthood, career, marriage, parenthood, nearly everything since I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a (pre?)teen has been slowly, stubbornly learning that this exchange is basically the key to everything.

And it's great! You can learn a ton from having these arguments with smart, engaged interlocutors. It's not that ego doesn't come into it at all. Often, the "loser" of the argument -- and there isn't always one! -- won't admit they're wrong, and at some point will just bow out and live to fight another day. But the point is that everyone agrees they need reasons for their beliefs, and rebuttals to strong objections, and if they lack those they need to go find them. So the arguments serve to help you find those gaps. People argue because they want to be right, but being right is hard. So you work at it. You aren't just trying to assert dominance, you're trying to prove -- to yourself, first and foremost -- that you have the right beliefs! And if you can't, you might even change your mind.

Leaving that world was eye-opening, because I still expected people to feel a powerful need to justify their beliefs. But most people don't, and they take the mere act of asking for justification to be a personal attack. This cost me relationships with people until I really learned the lesson.

Reading this article has me a bit surprised, and the culture the author describes does not sound like an engineering culture to me. I am a bit saddened to think that people have to work in such an environment, and I am curious what it would take to change such an environment for the better.

The latter types are the only ones who you can have honest intellectual debates with.

This is something I've learned over the last year and it's made life a lot better.

Once you detect that you're having a battle of egos (not minds/ideas), cut and run is the next best step. I've internalized a little mantra I start saying to myself as soon as I catch it: "they want the fight, you don't." Repeating that internally made it very easy to move away from arguing with others all of the time and knowing when to move away from people who just want to fight to fight.

"Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it."

> In this world, there is no one you can change. Not your spouses, not your friends, not your kids, and of course not strangers on the internet. Only yourself.

A few years ago, working at $PREVIOUS_COMPANY, we had 4-5 hours of company-sponsored time with a a coach/counselor and she also said those words to me. It's something that hit something inside myself and it's really, really true and... liberating, when you fully embrace it. Especially when you are a parent, but also in many other situations. You cannot change the others. You can only change yourself.By changing yourself MAYBE you might influence others - especially kids, by being a virtuous example, and they can decide to follow what you do. But changing people, let alone by arguing, that's impossible and will only cause you frustration.

Most people are ego-driven and won't listen to your logical arguments. They will only get angry with you even if you're right. So don't argue with them. Give advice only if they ask.

If you really know something others don't realize, maybe that's a valuable edge for you to profit from. Use it.

And don't hesitate to ask others for advice when it might help you.

That is how sales work, if someone is ever interested in increasing sales and one of the pieces of advice that opened my eyes the most. It is like the argument: hey, stop reasoning about features with your potential customer and making them bored: make an impact, something that creates reaction. Good or bad (bad is even better than indifferent sometimes).

Something that provokes emotion. Otherwise they are going to be indifferent.

They are not going to end up buying bc of the features most of the time anyway when there are ten or fifteen similar. They will do it bc you cause some kind of emotional impact, be that trust, authority or something else, though those ones are pretty important.

C. S. Lewis participated in many arguments about Christianity. He was a professor and had a very good memory (the biography says "total recall") so he was a formidable opponent. Yet he himself wrote in private writings that he never felt himself farther from Christianity than after having won in another such dispute. It was around fifty, I think, when he decided to stop doing that and started to write the first book about Narnia.

Sincere communication is only possible when the ego defenses are down; when ego is vulnerable. Ego is scared of that, so this rarely happens. But this is the only true communication; all the rest are status games. (If you haven't read "Impro" by Keith Johnstone, pick it when you have a chance.)

I also think it's too adversarial. The author's claim, "If you genuinely believe something others don’t, that’s not a debate to win. That’s an edge," is not very persuasive, because you communicate far more with teammates, bosses, and subordinates than with enemies and competitors. Most of the people you communicate with on a day-to-day basis are people who can be dealt with more profitably through cooperation.

"You Can Only Change Yourself" is another far too absolute conclusion. You change and are changed by everybody you come in contact with. Every conversation is a chance to influence someone. If you can't make them see your point right away, you can sow the seeds for a future insight. Or you can clarify why you disagree. You can change their mind from "this person doesn't understand the problem" to "this person cares about an aspect of the problem that I don't think is primary."

I think the author should broaden their idea of what can be achieved in talking with someone they disagree with. It won't help them win arguments, but it will help them reap more benefit over time.

People seem to learn better this way, and there is no better argument than reality itself. Of course it cannot be used everywhere, eg if trying X until it fails takes too long, if it involves buying an expensive machine that we will not be able to change etc, but there is a good portion of stuff it can actually reduce interpersonal friction on. And the process of changing from X to Z happens organically that sometimes I don't even have to explicitly say that "I knew all along" (though I must admit I derive an internal satisfaction that I knew all along).

It was a time when at work there was a widespread interpersonal tension between everyone, and reducing interpersonal friction was more important than spending more or less time on sth that would not work. I dont think arguing and discussing things are to be avoided per se, but in certain circumstances, if one knows that a team will eventually go down on path Z anyway due to necessity, it may not be worth arguing about at all.

Vast majority of people probably hate to argue with someone who's a jerk during said argument, regardless of their correctness.

I've also found myself arguing against someone whose point I actually support, but who is arguing in a non-sensical way, or with bad arguments for said point. Because I don't want that point to be dragged down by easy-to-defeat arguments, even if I then have to fight both sides.

But anyway: how you argue matters, put some effort into it, and don't assume that being right means you're doing a good job.

* The socratic method. I ask questions. Why did you do it this way? What are the tradeoffs? Get them to explain their reasoning. And not in an accusative way, I'm genuinely interested in how they arrived at the decision. Sometimes I just need more context; sometimes they rethink; sometimes we figure out something new together. It is a voyage of discovery, no egos involved.

* Be tolerant. Sometimes design issues are bikesheddy, and my rule is to err on the side of "let the person doing the work decide". Even if it isn't the way I would do it. I will usually phrase it something along the lines of "this is how I would do it, but if you strongly prefer this other way, it's fine". Pick battles that are important; help engineers develop "good taste"; but try to empower, not disempower, them.

I have some hard lines but they're easy and everyone knows them. Immutable data structures, use the typechecker, constructor injection, don't use null, etc etc. I wrote up a doc that all new employees read and it's distilled into a CLAUDE.md file. AI review usually takes care of these.

The only place I find that I still have to push a little is applying the YAGNI rule. Folks aren't particularly resistant, they often don't realize when they're violating it. Over-engineering is habitual. But people eventually get it.

1) many disagreements are not ultimately about facts but about intentionally different tradeoffs/prioritization.

2) if in fact one argues on facts/logic then losing the argument means you had your own logic or facts corrected, which should be a good thing, not a bad one.

I disagree on one point though: You don't have to stop arguing, you just should do it differently. You will really "win" when the other person thinks it was actually their own idea, or that you came to this conclusion together. You can do so by staying kind, humble and polite and guide the other person towards this revelation, and offer small thoughts and hints. If you have charisma you can be more direct, but such people are in a different league anyways.

The most important thing is staying friendly and kind. You will never convince or win people with an offensive "YOU ARE WRONG!" attitude.

This is probably how flat earthers think. If you engage in arguments without being prepared to be proven wrong, and you're hoping people to accept your argument as truth instead of both of you arriving at the truth together, you're not debating, you're being eristic (which is a fancy word I just found).

Thanks for sharing

> "Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it."

Due to my odd approach to life, I'm not competitive. Haven't been, for most of my life. It hasn't been a problem.

I always find it fascinating, that folks can't just be good at something; They have to be better than someone else.

I know that it happens, because I see it all the time, but I can't actually understand it.

> There’s a clean exception to all of this, and it flips the entire logic.

Humans don't write like this. "The feeling doesn't read" is nonsense.

I've met quite a few people who see themselves as rare rational individuals in a world full of irrational, emotion-driven people. In each case, when I've gotten to know them better, I realize they actually have pretty low awareness of their own emotions and are as prone to irrational outbursts as anyone.

Saying something like this signals to me not that you've achieved mastery of your emotions, but rather that you haven't even learned to notice when you're having them.

Or, perhaps you're just an AI operating autonomously and in fact have no emotions, in which case well played for making it to the top of HN and successfully wasting my time.

I have often had to tell myself "I wish they had listened to me." or, not quite "I wish I was wrong", but at least "I regret that I was right." because it led to a situation where someone suffered without objective need for it. Only a jerk would proudly state "Ha, of course I was right, they should have listened to me."

I experienced myself at least two of those points. In different words:

Never teach to people that did not ask you to teach them. They will not listen to you. They will forget. They will not thank you. Time wasted. As a corollary, I'm sorry for most teachers at school and even at universities.

You can change your mental state. A friend of mine told me about 3 years ago "When X happens I can't change the way I react" and she was not necessarily reacting in a good way. My answer was "Your mental state is the only thing you can control." She stopped talking and started thinking. I don't know if it had an effect. Changing the way one reacts to a stimulus takes time and effort but it can be done.

If there's nothing major at stake (say, trying to convincing someone with cancer to seek treatment instead of ignoring it), it's not worth your (or their) time.

My main complaint of the article, though, is the lack of nuance. Especially amongst complex topics where, maybe the definition of correct is not established, or there are multiple correct/valid interpretations.

See below "The Blind Men and the Elephant" fable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

Oh your math is wrong? Well i guess i cant discuss this...

Seen many great engineers walk that road right into burnout and then exiting tech all together being fed up.

It's a sad and anti social state that drives people to depression and more sad is the fact that all you really can do is just take it and accept at work things just aren't always logical and correct.

It's more and more, unlikely to lessen as more people enter tech with shallower required upfront knowledge due to more advanced tooling being available to them (more often then not, built by that 'grumpy guy' who quit.)

Try to accept it and have hobby projects you can scratch your real engineering itch with, would be my advice.

I wonder if victims of religious persecution agree...

Facts do not always win. The evolutionary fitness of an idea is (sadly) not entirely dictated by its truthfulness.

In life, I've learned "don't cast pearls before swine" as you have to understand if someone wants to learn something. I fully accept that I can be wrong, but I look at results I drive and I would like to believe others want similar results. This is far from true since some people just like complaining about problems and doing nothing about it. I don't understand this mindset, at all, but I've come to learn that I will tell what I'm doing, answer questions to the curious, and then stop there.

Wouldn't it have been easier to say they are idiots? (I guess you needed to explain it, but like you said, it won't help.)

There is a certain logic to this. If someone can't reason, there is no point in giving them the truth. You might as well lie to them.

Of course, your ability to assess someone's reasoning depends often on their existing opinions, so there is a circular reasoning here where two sides with the same mindset can each believe the other to be stupid because of their position, and then refuse to engage in good faith discussions.

I don't make a lot of friends this way, but I usually try to just focus on facts no matter what, and do my best to separate the fact that I'm discussing ideas and not people. An idea might be good or bad given a certain situation, but not the people involved.

> There is no “right” without a “wrong” to make it right

> Once I stopped treating correctness as an absolute, I stopped needing to win.

> Arguments Are About Ego

> They feel first, then reason backward to justify the feeling

> let people meet their own consequences, because that’s the only teacher they’ll actually listen to.

> when someone [asks], I give everything I have.

> Let people disagree. Their disagreement is where the money, and the meaning, is.

> Every hour spent trying to change someone who didn’t ask is an hour stolen from the one person (yourself) you can change

I am sure each person will extract different lessons here from their walk of life, but as an engineer the lines above are a watershed moment on how to view the world. Engineers are quite intelligent creative people who have big dreams. And sometimes in pursuit of those dreams with a feeling of intelligence we swim in creativity ... and put ourselves in a God-complex. We don't judge humans appropriately when we are in this God-complex.

1. Appreciate the wrong. It is a different way of thinking.

2. Stop trying to win. This is not a fight.

3. Arguments are about ego, but ego is about defending yourself. So arguments are really in self-defense.

4. If someone has more emotion than intelligence at a given moment, ignore their ideas. It doesn't count. It is clouded. This is how women judge between informations. They look at the emotion of the person speaking. The calmest one wins.

5. Some people like making bad decisions because it helps them learn. You can't do anything here.

6. Information provided vs Corrections made: But when someone does not seek information, don't give it. And don't correct someone unless you are their boss.

7. You can't change people... is a lesson I can never understand.

Of course, the author seems to have a pretty individualistic mind, comparing the political nature of humans to startups and markets, and that will lead to disaster in my opinion. We cannot survive in the long-term like that.

What I do now:

Explicitly state what should be obvious: "there is rarely a free lunch. everything has trade-offs." This also _always_ neutralizes the conversation, because it's no longer about winner-take-all existential threat to my ego, it's about preferences across a continuum.

For example:

I was at dinner with friends, I was talking about Roblox and the founders discussion on Conversations with Tyler. We were interrupted by the waiter to take an order. Afterwards, we resumed and I said "where was I?", my friend said: "you were telling us why Roblox is bad." and I said: "I am a poor communicator, there isn't a bad and good, it's that there are trade-offs..." This gave everyone an opportunity to keep their respect and dignity without feeling like there was a judgment.

---

Why did I spend so much time posting this to HackerNews when I should be working? Ego!! No one cares what you have to say, pricees, go back to work. Okay, I will!

Haidt's metaphor is the rider and the elephant: the elephant (intuition) leans, and the rider (reasoning) invents the justification afterward and then defends it like a lawyer, not a truth-seeker.

Intelligence doesn't fix this - it just makes people better at coming up with hard-to-defeat arguments; that explains why smart people disagree all the time.

A well-conducted argument serves important purposes.

- It flushes out good counter arguments to consider, or at least valuable historical context to help build empathy.

- You can set a better example for others to follow, as we all have this nearly irresistible urge.

- You're quite unlikely to change the mind of the debaters (yours included, hat tip to Dumblydorr's comment!) BUT you might sway someone on the fence who is a witness.

- Finally, I'm a firm believer in the idea that it's nearly impossible to change our mind in the moment, and only by taking a public (even if with just one other person) stance and holding it seriously (even if... ESPECIALLY if it's a ridiculous stance) can we move past it. If the idea perpetuates itself forward only in your head, you'll never dislodge it.

Don't stop arguing, but argue with humility, style and respect.

It applies to arguments in general, and increasingly there seems to be fewer and fewer 'pure' technical issues.

I have observed a proliferation of people believing things that are simply not true. Much of this comes from people stating unproven or undecided factors as absolute fact, and then building an argument on those foundations.

The caveat is that I think you have to remain civil, be meticulous at addressing the argument, and to never assume that you know the hidden state of another person's mind.

This isn't about winning arguments, it is about balancing them. This is well established on a court of law. A decision decided after a claim has been robustly challenged is held to be a more objective decision.

I don't feel like my part is to push a narrative forward, but to assist in stemming the tide of absolute ideology. I think the ideas themselves do have the capability to advance on merit, but not if they come under sustained attack.

I think a lot of people have given up on arguing, leading to the voices of only the most motivated becoming dominant, which in-turn, advances the more extreme positions that drive their motivations.

I think, perhaps in such an environment, Andrew Wakefield could have elevated his claims to be a majority opinion, he convinced a remarkable percentage as it was.

If unchallenged ideas becomes majority opinions it becomes very difficult to unseat them. The claim that most people believe a thing is enough to assert it's truth is pervasive.

The insideous thing is how many of these things have gotten through, what falsehoods do we believe that go unchallenged now because everyone believes them. You can't really tell yourself because you as part of the population likely believe it too.

- To convince myself. Sometimes I start writing and convince myself I’m wrong. Other times I just move to a more specific opinion or find a stronger justification

- Because sometimes a responder does convince me to change my opinion. Or they provide some interesting related information I didn't know before

- To be a voice of reason in comments mostly by people dumb enough to feel their surface-level opinion is still worth posting. Although obviously I’m only a voice of reason to those who share my opinions, sometimes even I recognize I’m again restating an obvious observation

- To get better at writing and arguing in case one day it does really matter

- Because I’m bored and have nothing better to do. At least it’s more productive than YouTube

But I think the core part is WHY we want to be right? To prove something to others, or to ourselves? To feel better? As a compulsion? As a gambler's fallacy? Many motivations are less lofty that we dare to admit.

I wasted way to much time arguing online. It was mostly wasted time, and wasted emotions. I mean, I also had many eye-opening and enlightening discussions, but these rarely were fights.

This applies to myself, too – the supposedly deep rational analysis I have on an issue oftentimes is just as prone to the same perspective problems as anything else. This kind of attitude is really common amongst logical/technical people, unfortunately.

This why Socrates was considered the wisest man in Athens: he knew that he didn’t know everything, unlike the people he talked to, who were confident in their answers.

And it works, to some degree.

And how do teachers teach? They don't start by trying to argue or by trying to prove students wrong. They teach by showing what's fascinating.

Taking the time to show people what's fascinating, what's perplexing, where the tension lies, and how it's resolved, is teaching.

Argument construction in social contexts is ironically ego-driven. Demonstrating something interesting, on the other hand, means asking yourself what what they would find interesting about what you want to tell them.

If you insist on the ego trip, at least make it about how much of a raging badass you are with the customer. The egos that work backward from the technology are a nightmare to deal with.

While much of what the author says is true, I'm not so cynical as to think that it's impossible to change others.

The fact that you can change yourself — as the author acknowledges — means you can change others, because much of self-change comes from your observation of others. Perhaps it's the approach that matters most.

Let's say you're discussing the next release and someone brings up some disastrous idea. You know he won't listen so you decide to keep quiet. The release comes, things blow up as expected.

Don't be surprised if you find your manager at your desk a bit later asking you to work late shifts to fix it. After all you are all in the same team, and you didn't speak up when the plan was discussed.

So in a meeting, speak up and don't give in if you are sure you are right. I have learned this lesson the hard way.

Thinking that a back-and-forth would eventually result in a "winner" and a "loser" was the way I used to think too.

Throw out your idea (counter-point, whatever) and then leave it for them to accept it or reject it.

Even on the best teams you should expect arguments to go off the rails sometimes. It takes real experience to learn how to argue well across a bunch of different personalities. When you get it right, arguing is genuinely fun and productive for everyone involved, and that's how you know you're doing it well.

I've seen many healthy technical disagreements; often leading to new insights coming to light, assumptions being made explicit, everyone leaving with a better understanding, sometimes resulting in one party conceding, sometimes resulting in a compromise. Guess it requires a certain level of maturity / people arguing in good faith.

The rules of go could be explained to a 4 years old. On the other hand, the superficial complexity of so many framworks/systems is just a facade and nothing more.

The same goes for NP-hard problems where complex solutions have trivial verification methods.

However, occasionally you’ll see code so bad you need to leave.

You need to lie in your next interview. Your co workers, who are doing such a poor job it’s borderline fraud, are fantastic smart people.

You have a great relationship with your manager who knows the code pretends to do things it actually doesn’t, and tells you the KPIs come first.

But some mean ole man who you’ve never met is trying to lay everyone off.

That’s the only reason to ever quit a job. Pending blameless layoffs.

1. Don't start with the argument, start with the data. Debates/arguments/discussions etc. are what to do about the underlying data, but I've found very often the disagreement stems from people having different bits of data. Before you get into how to marshall an argument, you have to start with collecting what ground truth is. Many people don't practice this intentionally, so they get into a debate over some decision the team is making without having all the facts.

2. Form opinions easily, be ready to discard them quickly. I am quite happy to share my understanding of some technical matter, and I almost always provide that understanding with an invitation for people to tell me why I'm wrong.

3. Over the short term, yes, it's hard to change people's minds. Over the long term, you don't have to change people's minds, you can change the people you work with. You can vote with your feet or (if you're more senior) you can influence how your organization hires and promotes people. I actively seek out working with people who disagree with me in interesting ways. Not pedantically, and not over minutiae, but in ways that change how I see a problem. It turns out, when you seek out people who are good at productively disagreeing, you don't run into some of the problems OP writes about as often.

4. One of the ways to help sift out who the people are you want to work with is by offering feedback. Most people are terrible at giving feedback, so it's important to first get good at giving feedback. The author says that people don't learn from feedback, people learn from consequences. One of the effective ways of delivering feedback is to structure it as "Here was the situation, here are facts about what happened, here is the outcome." However, once you get decent at giving feedback, some of the benefit of giving the feedback is in the signal of how the person responds. The people I want to work with generally take this feedback well, and in turn offer me similar feedback.

5. Debate what matters. A lot of technical debates engineers engage in are either not important to the end product are easy to change later. Don't waste your time on those.

Well, it's the exact same feeling as when you are wrong.

This is something that has always stuck with me, and handy to keep in mind when arguing.

Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness

Where I struggle and find my ego self defensively screaming “But…!” is in work relationships. Product managers, where their wrongness makes my downstream life more miserable. Basically any relationship where I have a (self perceived) need for the outcome to be a certain way to protect/enhance my well being. Asymmetric relationships.

Well said.

If someone can't answer that, it's probably not worth arguing about.

1. Your anonymous or whatever you say can't be used by another party against you.

2. There is a code of conduct that is strictly held (no interrupting, no ad hominem etc)

3. You can ask for time-outs and think before answering.

4. There is a bank of known knowledge that is considered true, very strict standards, as unbiased as possible, including confidence scales.

5. You are face to face.

Best section for me. Many times I have taken the contrarian view. It doesn't always work, I do get it wrong (fail fast) but when it goes right you earn virtual credit against the person whom you took the opposing view. Its not something tangible but its there and the next time you lock horns they remember.

Identifying the market is also important. There's the free market of capitalism. Then there are the other powers even in that market that can still say you're wrong, such as regulators, governments, politics, violence, etc.

If you're looking for an outcome, you still need to assess the circumstances that can generate that outcome, even if the author has identified one particular strategy that people often get wrong and one possible alternative.

Jean-Luc Godard, 28th May, 1982

I have come to the same conclusion; I saw my own journey in the author’s story.

At work, one of the statements I make to mentees, if asked, and to colleagues, if they lament people not listening to their advice, is this:

You’re only an expert if you’re invited to be one.

This is a way of saying that unsolicited advice is always unwelcome no matter how correct it is.

Koan to the author: What was never lost can never be found.

Lately I think I only argue when I know I will get something about it...

> You Can Only Change Yourself

This is a good reason to argue with people! Forcing yourself to look critically at your own positions via debate is a key self-improvement method. Simply not engaging and never having a back-n-forth is no way to improve. Feedback, critical self-evaluation, and more feedback.

Ofc, that's not encouragement to flame people on the internet or in-person.

True words are not fine-sounding; Fine-sounding words are not true.

The good man does not prove by argument; The he who proves by argument is not good.

Worth knowing which hills to die on and having a strategically chosen intention that is not rooted in ego. Ego is the enemy.

At some point, people have to introduce ideas into a broader consciousness, even if they clash with other ideas. How else will anything actually get done? Putting forth an argument doesn't necessarily have to come from the ego. Even if one does come from the ego, that doesn't mean the idea itself is bad.

I've mostly stopped trying to argue or debate on any topic because the probability of being chronically misunderstood usually outweighs any benefit that would come from successfully persuading the other person. I'm never convinced that I'm 100% right on anything, and life is too short to spend it arguing with those who do; which describes a lot of people.

The other reason I rarely argue anymore is that, if I am correct on something, reality usually proves that I was. That doesn't mean everyone else is gonna say "Ravenstine was actually right", because they never do, but at least I get the satisfaction of having been able to trust myself.

I’d just call direct confrontational argument an ineffective tactic. If I disagree with somebody in any real sense, we have a shared enemy: the disagreement. It’s easier to destroy it if we’re both working against it.

And then you encounter the askhole.

You don't know what events they had experienced that caused them to shape those views.

Just smile, nod and agree :)

“I’m at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you’re right. Have fun.”

of course if the stakes are higher, I may have to push a little.

This is frustrating to those of us who are focused on the project or the task - to try and find the best way to do something and come at the conversation from a place that feels like logic, and be met with ego and emotion.

But I think the overall conclusion lacks subtlety. I don’t think the best response is to disengage completely, then say “I told you so” and/or swoop in to profit off of the mistake.

So yes, recognizing that you also have an ego and can benefit from feedback but just take it a little further. Ask clarifying questions about why their solution is better, come from a place of collaboration rather than competition. Have them explain why their solution is better and once it’s clear you are collaborating, voice your concerns and weight the pros and cons together.

I know this is a simplistic version of how these conversations actually happen, but it’s an example of the fact that you can make more progress by recognizing some subtlety.

People will know they are wrong, but if they are supporting a friend's case or boss's they will choose them over you (naturally) even if you can definitively prove them wrong. There's upside and often no downside to being wrong or even outright lying in some cases, so people do it.

People will know 1 of the 4 in the group is right, but they don't want to be outnumbered or cast in an unfavorable light, so they will all choose the "wrong" stance on purpose, to be more socially accepted.

100% of people in a conversation can know that 1 person is right, but because nobody likes that person, nobody will agree with them.

You might be right a lot but that isn't going to help you win any arguments. It nearly means nothing. You get from a group what you negotiate with the group, and short of showering everyone in $100 bills daily nobody is going to worship you for anything, especially not "being right a lot". You're better off being conventionally attractive rather than conventionally intelligent (when it comes to easy social acceptance).

Furthermore, there are so many battlefields, so many arguments to lose, you'll eventually (hopefully) find a better use of your time!

So, so true. Not worth it.

Also see this video[2], which extrapolates on the types of people you shouldn't try to save. Gives pointers on how to deal with narcissists (both videos use AI-generated imagery and narration, which I typically despise but I had both playing in a background tab so I didn't have to see it at least).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TspV1odsXo

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTMj28NS7to

my life has gotten so much better when i actively don't engage in arguments. especially when i know i'm right.

of course it's easier said than done but growth is a long road.

I credit my mom for teaching me very early on that the POINT of argument is to come to a decision or understanding, not to determine right or wrong or assign any credit or blame. She was insatiable in running down every technicality. I learned to ask her, "okay, so how does that help with what we're doing?", which she usually had no answer to. That might sound antagonistic, but it was really just a personality thing. She would say, just as matter-of-factly, that it didn't help, it just was true. She has no malice, and no intention of "being right". She just couldn't help but be pedantic. Something about the way her mind works. Luckily, she's working as a quality control supervisor for a warehouse, where the details are essential. Nice when things can work out like that.

The point crystallized for me when I met one of the best developers I've ever known. He would calmly and firmly insist on his absolute correctness until you were blue in the face. But the second you gave him even a hint that he could be wrong, he would run down your point to its conclusions and then adjust his stance without ever changing disposition. You were wrong without question until you gave him any reason to believe you weren't. At that point, he validated his argument against your new information and changed his position without any equivocation or excuses. Just "oh, okay, you mean this? Now I see what you mean. Yes, you're right, that will work.". Sometimes he would laugh at himself for not getting it, and he would always be upfront about being wrong if you insisted he acknowledge it. But he didn't offer up any humility because now we had an answer and could move forward. No reason to dwell on the wrong stuff. It's still my favorite working relationship. I get so tired of the effusive repiping of the whole argument to assign right and wrong that is so common in corporate spaces. Feels like such a waste of time, once you've experienced true absence of ego. I still think of him as a kind of compiler. Provide exactly the right info and get what you want. Provide the wrong info and there will be no way to move forward until that is reconciled. As a dev, it's a breath of fresh air from humans who are often so far from strict logic.

AI Slop

You can be correct that your method makes code more DRY, and miss the point that the other person believes that things are going to diverge significantly over time and doesn’t value DRY.

You can be correct that your method is more resilient to failure, and miss that the other person believes that some level of failure is OK and wants an option that is less technically complex.

I’ve seen people get upset that they were correct and yet the room shifted against them. Most times, it seems like they are correct. But they are correct on a narrow axis, that misses the motivations of the other people in the room.

This is part of the reason high level account reps focus on the mix and viewpoints of people in the room over technical specs. Get the lay of the land first, and then you can tailor your pitch to be correct in the way that the audience will be receptive to.

Being right is important in the context of the work you're responsible for delivering on, but so is knowing when to be right, and knowing when not to care if they're wrong. If the decision is outside of your control, document extensively, establish and preserve a paper trail, and move on. "Thoughts, knowledge, and opinions, loosely held."

(i believe that is the point of author's piece; pick your battles, you will not win every one, nor should you try or think of it as winning)

> "If you remember one thing, it's this: if you are arguing, you are losing."

>So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones.

So uh... anyone have any tips on _identifying_ the kinds of folks the author is describing here? I guess I'm left to presume it would mean those people _would_ explicitly ask, but if not how would you determine what kind of person you are dealing with? Sure, I can brainstorm and reason through, but looking for feedback from folks who have been successful in doing this professionally.

For some background see;

1) List of Cognitive Biases - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

2) List of Fallacies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

3) Modes of Discourse - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_discourse

4) Argumentation Scheme - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentation_scheme

5) Conflict resolution - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_resolution

6) Negotiation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiation

1) performativeness. if the person responding to you is performing for other readers rather than having a genuine good-faith discussion with you, just move on. i still catch myself being performative sometimes and it grosses me out when i recognize it lol.

2) real world vs online behaviors. if someone is an asshole in the real world, we just wouldnt talk to them. not sure how we've convinced ourselves that online is different. if someone refuses to take the time to respond in a socially normal way, then why would you take the time to respond? if they wont take the time to be social, why would you?

little ass kids learn this shit in like kindergarten. if someone is a dick, no one is friends with them. if my friends and i are in a bar and some random is being an asshole, we dont "debate" them, we move on. again, tiny children learn this shit lol.

3) real people whose opinions you care about. make a list. when i did it, it turned out to be less than 20. the people on your list are the only people you should feel any obligation towards. not randoms on the internet. dont spend your valuable time/energy/mental arguing with random internet assholes. your list of real people are the only ones you should feel any obligation towards because if you value them, they likely value you opinions as well.

4) good faith. you'll know in one or two responses if the person replying is there in good-faith. if they're not, move on.

5) knowledge peers. its ok to recognize that someone is not on the same knowledge level as you in a topic. whether they know more or know less, either way, its ok. if we're lucky we are experts in one or two topics and dipshits in most topics. accept that fact. i know this is tough in our industry, we are overflowing with people who think they're smarter than they are. its ok to recognize that the other person is not your knowledge peer on the topic and adjust accordingly: up, down, or out.

6) conversation vs debate. if someone doesnt recognize there is a vast difference between normal conversation and debate, dont waste your time. honestly, they're typically gross to engage with.

and of course, find real world hobbies. once you have the hobby, it naturally becomes "why would i argue with this dickbag online when i could be doing something way more fun."

There have been many books written on cults written by reputable people and some are even on youtube talking about this.

I didn't really understand this. I grew up before the internet, and I have ADHD, which essentially means I have limited working memory.

One of my compensatory strategies for this is to have a fairly comprehensive world model at the ready in long-term memory.

If you told me something that contradicts my mental model, I might argue, in order to figure out whether I need to update my model or not.

The argument between someone ego-driven operating on a motte-and-bailey basis, and someone who just truly wants to understand, but won't let it go because they feel they need to understand, gets ugly quickly.

Fortunately, I'm older, my model doesn't need to change as often, I'm better at discriminating about things I care about or that are irrelevant, and, of course, I can always disengage with "that's interesting; I'll have to research it" and go down a rabbit hole on the internet if what they are saying doesn't seem to make a lick of sense.

I will say that the need to be right -- not the need to lord it over others, or the need to prove I'm right -- has probably helped my programming career immensely.

The burning desire to be right can be completely orthogonal to giving a shit about whether others think you're right or not, or giving a shit about others when they're wrong and it doesn't adversely affect you.

The fuck? Words mean things. The moon does not exist because the Sun exists. And what about Earth? It doesn't have an opposite, therefore it has no way to exist? If this is the logic you're going to use in an argument, you did the right thing by stopping.

It's such a burden to be always intellectually superior. If only ideas triumphed over base human emotions!

I'll apply my vast intellect to solving this riddle.

Often though, I find the arguments are things I have already heard before and either incorporated or debunked - either way they do not affect my positions.

https://magarshak.com/blog/why-im-confident-in-my-views/

As for strawmen like “well that’s not true of ALL cases” (I never said it was) or “that’s whataboutism”, those are just bad argumentation:

https://magarshak.com/blog/whataboutism-considered-harmful/

This seems more true for the author than everyone else.

They didn't discover anything new about others, nor did they learn to argue more effectively. They just discovered their own ego, finally realized how often it gets in the way, and gave up.

While I agree that the best course of action is often to "do nothing", sulking is not nothing. I'm convinced they're the type of person who still argues with people on reddit all the time, but decided to stop doing that at work and with family. That's still unhealthy.

Kantian ethics indicate that it would be unethical for me to allow posts I consider harmful in sway to remain unargued. I am fighting for truth or what I think should be truth.

This is why debating is taught in school in the Netherlands (and I'm sure other countries, too). Winning an argument is not the same as convincing someone they were wrong: that's something you need to learn how to do and then something you need to actively practice with others.

Just having good arguments makes you a dick. Having good arguments and being able to empathize with the opposition's and conceding their position on any merit, while showing there's a solution that'd they'd prefer even if they don't know that yet, makes you someone helpful and trustworthy.

So: I state my point. They can take it or leave it. If passionate I'll follow up offline/async with more ideas.

You really wanna be working with good faith people who are reasonably smart or all bets are off. Put the effort into a better work circumstance if not.

I don't think we need to disengage in debate with everyone. That said, you have to know if you're talking to someone who's willing to reason, and you have to be open to their reasoning as well. There is absolutely no sense in contradicting the opinion of an irrational person who has made their beliefs part of their core identity. That person will hate you for showing them the truth, no matter how clear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM

But then I realized that most people don't think that way. It's more important to not be alone than to know the truth, and people tie their individual identity to their group identity - if a fact contradicts their group identity's approved list of observances, they'll take it as a personal attack. So I just say 'ok' now.

The 4 hour work week isn’t life

> It's not just the foo, it's the bar. Short sentence. Every sentence attempting to be profound, but isn't. I quietly put adverbs in strategic locations, quietly, deftly, and always lists of threes. Your advantage is the ability to foo, not just bar.

=====

re: the content

You're missing the point of "arguing" in the workplace if you're arguing with individuals and you see it as your objective to destroy them with facts and logic.

> So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones. With the first kind, a disagreement is a joint search for the better answer, and both of us walk away sharper.

This one points out the biggest miss and why this person finds their strategies impotent. The goal of "arguing" in the workplace, or more pr-friendly, "debating the merits" should never be to convince that guy to take your position. That's both ineffective and way harder. You should focus your energy instead on constructing the arguments towards the audience and bleeding support. Nothing of importance gets resolved in a singular meeting with a singular debate.

Watch some Oxford style debate prep to understand this point more deeply, but some number of peers are going to agree with your position ahead of time and some are going to disagree with your position. Instead of trying to obliterate all the points one-by-one from the person on the other side of the issue, try to make just a few succinct points that will pluck off a few onlookers. That's all you need at the moment. Take the tiniest win, move the overton window a little further in your direction, and retain all the goodwill and camaraderie on the team or in the org.

Do this in *SMALL* and *INFREQUENT* ways and over time you end up becoming the person who tends to be right on the issues and onlookers become more sympathetic to your positions by default. This lets you make bigger pushes, or allows conversations to start off as already "in your camp" to begin with. This builds up social credit (reputation) which you can then spend on taking more risky bets/positions within the org.

----

The other thing it lets you do is open the door for others to debate merits of their ideas. By keeping the focus on just a singular point or two, keeping it low stakes, and then being willing to walk away amicably at the first sign of any emotions you implicitly grant permission to others (who may agree with you, or who might just need to practice their own abilities) to voice a dissenting opinion on something orthodox. Maybe you agree with them, maybe you don't - but never shoot down a first timer's / shy guy's idea on it's first float.

“You’re absolutely right! And you know what - Haha this is how girls want me to talk to them - you know what, thats brave!”

But it doesn’t. We don’t live in a meritocracy. You could have the best product in its category while selling very little, while your competitor which is a multinational corporation with an inferior product beats you on marketing and price to a level you could never match.

There’s a reason “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” is a popular saying.

The whole article would’ve been better without that whole “Don’t Win the Argument, Profit From the Difference” section. Its inclusion muddies the point and shifts the perception of the author’s motivations. Most ideas in the world which are worth debating don’t immediately translate to money.

> In this world, there is no one you can change. Not your spouses, not your friends, not your kids, and of course not strangers on the internet.

Myself and a long time friend would be the first to tell you that we were profoundly changed by each other. We are very different people from when we met, and have each other to thank for a lot of that.

Instead I will simply say that an argument is /not/ about winners and loses, it's about communicating ideas and reaching consensus. The moment you bring your own ego into the argument, you've become the loser because you destroyed any opportunity to reach consensus, invalidating the entire point of sharing your thoughts or listening to others. If you aren't prepared to listen, understand, and reach consensus, why are you involved in the conversation at all, you're just wasting your time and the time of others and damaging relationships.

I am unsurprised that that author found themselves in multiple situations where they lost the room despite "proving themselves right". Humans are not computers, conversations are not programs, and they don't have deterministic outcomes based on the inputs. It matters how you conduct yourself, and it matters if you are trying to truly understand other people or just talking past them. An audience is never going to be swayed if you act like an asshole, even if you think you are right.

One of the most important things I had to learn in my life when I was younger was the value of listening and empathy, and how it deepens our own intellection. Logic and empathy are not opposing concepts, although it is often trendy to think so now. Logic requires empathy, reason requires empathy, because what are you reasoning about except for systems which interact with humans?