Disagreements Are Not Zero-Sum Games

Once you stop trying to be right, you'll start to understand more (and you'll be nicer to know).

One of the problems of our times is that people are convinced that the only way they can win is for someone else to lose. Couple that with the fact that many people care more about winning than about the actual longer-term outcome, and you end up with a dysfunctional and noisy world.

A simple difference of opinion can end up as a confrontation. Some people enjoy that, and others walk away. Neither side actually wins in that situation.

No one wins a zero-sum argument

This approach is called dialectical reasoning. It assumes there are elements of truth in both sides of an opinion, and it emphasizes the benefits of trying to synthesize something new and bigger from them. Just as important, it turns something that threatened to be a confrontation into an interesting discussion.

Try This: Practice dialectical thinking

Here's an exercise. The next time you find yourself disagreeing with someone, try not to flip the bozo bit and assume they're an idiot. Rather than trying to show them they are wrong, instead genuinely try to work out if maybe you are. Be actively interested in what led them to their position, not because you're hoping to trip them up, but rather because it might give you insights. Your mission is not to prove you're correct, or that the other person is wrong. Instead, you are trying to find out which parts of each of your positions have merit, and from that synthesize a new understanding that's better than the two original ones.

This is tricky; it's easy to come across as condescending or maybe sly. You might start by saying "I hear what you are saying, but I need to understand more about Xyz, because it doesn't quite line up with my experience. Could you show me what led to your belief."

Never disagree; you're not trying to win. The exercise is to see things from their point of view. A nice side effect might be that you end up learning something.

Try This: Arguing with knives

There's a fun exercise that helps you practice seeing things from both sides. Next time you're at a lunch or dinner where half the people advocate one thing, and the other half advocate the opposite, suggest the following game.

Everyone who agrees with the position should place their knives (or spoons, or pens, or...) pointing into the center of the table (the way a knife is normally set). Those who disagree should place their knives at 90º to this, parallel to the edge of the table.

Let the debate run for a few minutes. Then pick a pair of people who disagree and flip their knives around; the person who previously advocated for the position must now argue against it, and the person who previously refuted it must now do their best to sell it to everyone else.

Keep swapping a pair of knives every few minutes. Try to give everyone a chance to cycle through both sides of the issue more than once.

It becomes a game: how can you marshal what you know to support something you disagree with. It's like high-school debate.

You're not trying to find winners or losers, or even to find a consensus. It's just an interesting way to spend 30 minutes with friends. But, on the way home, you might just find yourself reevaluating some of your strongly held views.

Absolute is the enemy of simple

Every time you hold an absolute and inflexible opinion, you’re very likely to be at least partially wrong. Even if you believe your idea is justified by science, try to remember that the fundamental tenet of science is to disprove what it believes.¹

That means that there will be times when your firmly-held opinion may be contradicted by your direct experience. Now you have a choice. The rational approach is to treat the inconsistency as an opportunity to explore and possibly revise your belief. The most popular approach, though, is to come up with some kind of justification of why your belief is still 100% true and reality is mistaken.

One of the problems with lying about things is that you need to remember your past lies and make sure that everything is consistent with them. Subsequent lies now multiply the complexity of your imaginary world; most people struggle to maintain a consistent story when it’s informed by more than one lie.

Denying reality in favor or a belief is lying to yourself. Do it often, and you are forced to build a world view that is so convoluted that it takes a lot of mental energy just to maintain. Meanwhile, the decisions you make based on this baroque version of reality become less and less effective as you struggle to reconcile their outcomes with what you thought would happen.

Everyone lives in this state to some extent; it’s a consequence of the world being unknowable. But some people embrace opinions which are detached from reality. These are the people who are angry at the world, because the world is wrong. These are the people who make debate difficult, because they are not interested in exploring alternatives. These are the people who feel threatened by “different.”

And it all comes down to the fact that disagreement is not a zero-sum game.

This is an adaptation of one of the practices in my new book, simplicity, available now in beta from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

1. Although, to a first approximation, a belief backed by genuine science is likely to be more true than one formed from rhetoric, received knowledge, or people shouting on TV.