It's easy to disagree with people. You just say, "That's wrong" and decline to elaborate.

But that's not very interesting. If you want to be making progress — instead of ragebaiting — it usually helps to find a way for your disagreement to be productive.

Productive disagreements start in the place where you are already in agreement. The places where your models of reality overlap. Without any overlap at all, it gets quite difficult to successfully converse. You need to be speaking a language your interlocutor can understand, for starters. That's actually not trivial to establish. Defining your terms before a debate is done for a reason, and it can be quite hard. Especially when the thing you are arguing over doesn't have a good term or definition in the first place.

That's hard enough, but the more difficult thing in my view is to not get a false understanding of your interlocutor's view. Sometimes a friend will say something like, "taxation is theft" and I nod along, as I backfill their claim with a possible set of observations and inferences. Yet when I interrogate the claim, I find the path my friend took to get there [...]

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First published:
April 17th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NswFX66W36Ls2aqsr/if-it-s-worth-arguing-it-s-worth-arguing-with-whiteboards

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.