Ian Miller

I grew up in a strong Republican household. Both my parents vocally supported Mitt Romney, then Marco Rubio, then Trump, then Trump again. My Dad was a Libertarian at heart, and often spoke in Milton Friedmanisms. One of his favorites (that I of course adopted as one of my favorites) was Friedman's position on the minimum wage. "The real minimum wage is zero." I took that one to school with me and lobbed it at classmates who weren't yet old enough to legally work a minimum wage job. As a kid, I didn't hesitate to voice my opinions on political issues. I wasn't particularly well-informed but I knew what my parents thought and that sufficed for me. Some of my friend's parents had different opinions and therefore some of my friends had different opinions and I spent many lunch periods in high school exchanging opinions with them. It never occurred to me that to disagree meant anything more than an interesting conversation, or sometimes a game to be won or lost. But just like losing a basketball game against a friend, it didn't destroy my relationship with that person.

I love disagreeing. As a kid, it was not obvious to me that most people do not like disagreeing. I think most people don't like disagreeing because it requires you to interrogate yourself. In the process of formulating a coherent thought for others, you often have to tread new ground in your own brain. That takes work. For many people, that kind of work is draining rather than exciting or entertaining.

When I went to college at MIT, I became much more guarded than I was in school. The bustling city took some getting used to. I had never spent much time away from home, and I missed my friends and family. I had been dropped into a strange new world with strange new characters. To exchange opinions meant exchanging vulnerabilities. I no longer could point to my parents as the reason something was right - these new people didn't know my parents and didn't care what they thought about the minimum wage. Not only did I have to actually think through the defense of my positions; I had to fully own the positions themselves. These new people would form sticky opinions of me that would immediately inform our next disagreements.

MIT students were highly capable verbal sparring partners. Disagreeing in this environment proved a very different sport than in Central Florida where I could easily run laps around my peers. For the first few months, I actively avoided disagreements. I wanted to make friends first, and then exchange vulnerabilities later. This approach came with a cost. Ultimately, 3 bad things happened:

I became a less interesting conversationalist to everyone, including people that would've otherwise agreed with even my most unpopular opinions. Perhaps some people found me boring as a result.
Every social interaction felt like work because I was trying to play a character that was well-liked rather than by myself. This made every social interaction exhausting instead of recharging. Certainly, this caused me to spend more time in my dorm and less time mingling out and about.
I learned less quickly. The fastest way to get better at basketball is by playing basketball, not by watching other people play basketball.

But I did make friends, and I did successfully cultivate a reputation for being open-minded. Was this worth the cost? What is the best way to disagree with someone?

Sometime in my senior year in college, I read a book called The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. The central idea in this book is that cooperation can evolve spontaneously in a population of self-interested individuals. An important caveat here is that cooperation is more advantageous as a life strategy with people that you have repeated social interactions with. For example, I see my coworkers every day at work and have reliably repeating social interactions with them. At the gym, I see the same few folks at the 6:30 class on Tuesdays on Thursdays. In college, I knew most of the people in my dorm, and plenty that lived elsewhere on campus. In all three of these examples, it was very likely that any given interaction between me and a member of that population would not be the last. However, cooperation is less advantageous in a population when members of that population don't repeatedly interact with each other. If I meet a stranger on the street in DC where I live now, I'll probably be nice to them but I'm much less likely to invest a lot in that relationship because I'm almost certainly never going to see them again. Axelrod's book is based on research that he did in the 1980s (and continues to this day in various open source projects).

In a weird way, disagreeing with someone feels analogous to cooperating with them in the Axelrod sense. This is because disagreement requires cooperation immediately after the fact to get reap some goodness out of the interaction. The best way to disagree with someone depends on the likelihood of repeated interactions with that person. If it's highly likely that you'll see a particular person again, sharing your dissenting opinion openly and freely is the best strategy. In this repeated interaction case, you'll have plenty of opportunity to prove to that person what you're like and what kind of ideas you have. The variance will smooth out over time, and with repeated interactions, you'll be afforded that opportunity. If it's unlikely that you'll interact with a particular person again, it's risky to disagree openly with that person. In this case, the window to form impressions is small, and disagreement usually doesn't yield much good in these short-lived interactions. If we consider the 3 bad things that I mentioned, in this case, I don't really care about coming across as boring because I won't ever see this person again. I also won't have to repeatedly exhaust myself by talking to strangers. And I've rarely learned something interesting from first-time interactions or conversations.

Assuming that you've made the decision to disagree with someone openly and freely because you are very confident you'll interact with this person again, what's the best way to proceed? It's important to identify what kind of disagreement first: sport or school. Am I entering into this disagreement to have fun and play (sport), or am I looking to either teach or learn (school)? Usually, the former only happens with very close friends and family and there don't seem to be too many rules on this type of disagreement. The latter can happen with any person that you interact with regularly.

I often disagree with my friends, usually in an effort to make them laugh - or make myself laugh. These disagreements can get personal and leverage every kind of logical fallacy in the book because who cares? The only end that matters here is fun. With good friends, you have a long history of disagreements that can be mined for laughs and fun in the present.

The goal of the other kind of disagreement is quite different. When trying to learn something in a disagreement, it's best to minimize ego and ask as many questions as possible. A good intellectual disagreement often gets derailed when people shift priorities midway through the disagreement and start thinking in terms of winning and losing, rather than learning. In order to learn in a disagreement, you must make yourself vulnerable and expose the boundaries of your knowledge and understanding. Listening to and questioning the opposing party exposes that boundary and also gives you the opportunity to expand that boundary. By arguing your own position, you are potentially expanding your partners knowledge boundary. This is a great thing.

It's important to note that 2 parties in a disagreement don't necessarily agree on the type of the disagreement they're engaging in. This is the central problem motivating this essay. When I say something provocative to have fun, my sparring partner might not interpret my opening salvo as such. He might assume I'm being sarcastic or exaggerating because I think there is nothing I could learn from him. He might not even realize I'm being sarcastic. Or he might just think I'm too dumb to be worthy of having an intellectual disagreement.

Some people are very good at disagreeing. They are willing to share their opinions openly and simultaneously make the other side feel respected. The thing that these people are very good at it is sensing their opponents goals throughout a disagreement, and adjusting accordingly. Are we playing, or learning? If your opponent is threatened, it likely isn't fun or educational to continue a disagreement. So before your opponent gets to that point, you must regulate yourself. That starts with slowing down, and listening.