alt Hacker NewsMost arguments are about ego, not ideas
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Arguing has negative connotations and conveys the author is bringing up minor quibbles for the sake of being pedantic: "Is the sky blue?" -> "No, the sky is not blue we just perceive it to be that way due to..."
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:
And is Claude the one that got frustrated arguing with people? If not, why is Claude the one writing this?
Someone upthread mentioned that arguments can be about convincing the person you're arguing with or convincing the audience which is absolutely true.
I'd suggest that arguments are frequently not about convincing anyone of anything. They become conversations withe people who already agree with you using the person you're arguing against as a foil.
"I would walk away technically right and completely alone."
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.
> Help people when they explicitly ask for help. When someone asks, the cause and effect reverse. You’re no longer imposing your judgment on someone who never wanted it.
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.
Some reasons I still argue over the internet
- 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
This whole honesty based approach stopped working a decade ago latest online and in politics, there is no accountability anymore and who is the most persistent wins an argument in the public sphere, those actors exactly bank on that most people will give up eventually.
I really love the art of a good argument, but likewise I’ve come to realize that most people don’t form their opinions from deep rational analysis on an issue, and therefore aren’t going to change that opinion from a new rational analysis. They form opinions from their life experiences, culture, and so on.
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.
It is not always a good idea not to argue, even given all the points that the author has made. If you have a meeting, and someone proposes something: if you don't speak up, it means you agreed to it.
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.
The author's argument is hilariously wrong because we've been doing something for thousands of years: teaching.
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.
There was "It’s Not Enough to Be Right – You Also Have to Be Kind" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490714
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.
Haidt, in his great book "The Righteous Mind," has been arguing that reasoning evolved not to discover truth but to win arguments. There's a lot of scientific research backing his idea.
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.
<Many people are ego-driven. Their opinions aren’t positions they hold; they are the position. Prove the idea wrong and you haven’t corrected a fact, you’ve attacked a person. So they defend it the way anyone defends themselves: not with reason, but with resistance. The stronger your argument, the harder they dig in.>
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.)
I was about to start arguing why I don't agree but then I thought it was better not to :P
FWIW I appreciate people like the author's old self. I am one of those who hates and simultaneously appreciates being corrected when I'm mistaken. I hate being mistaken and I appreciate the opportunity to correct the mistake.
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.
Most people don't care enough to argue at all. But no team ever created anything great without a lot of arguing. It's the only way to get to a "best idea wins" culture. It has to be productive arguing to be useful though, and it has to stay non-toxic to be sustainable.
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'm realizing how frequently people don't have to agree with me. I need to be valued at my company to stay employed certainly, and of course I need to be valued by my family. There's a far narrower set of opinions where I need to be agreed with, such as if everyone is making plans that I'm certain are going to turn out poorly. Usually though you can just let bad ideas slide away, especially when I know I can't change an opinion about them. It's more important that I back up someone's feelings at that point.
>If you genuinely believe something others don’t, that’s not a debate to win. That’s an edge. The market rewards being right in a way that no argument ever will. Instead of persuading the skeptic, ship the thing they think is wrong and let reality settle it.
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.
The ego thing is a spectrum and the most powerful treatment I've experienced so far is watching someone with a substantially larger ego trip operate right in front of me. I think this one of the best possible cures. To see yourself in the proverbial mirror.
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.
Since this is at the top of Hacker News: this article is not good advice generally. Here's what I do (and mentor people to do the same):
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.
I like the author’s viewpoint, but I would have appreciated mentioning that:
1. Truth does not always rely on Boolean logic. Both A and non A can be true at the same time
2. Truth is often relative, so it may change depending on the viewpoint
Do you know that feeling you feel when you are correct?
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.
Hmm, there's a difference between unnecessary arguments about every tiny detail, and productive arguments.
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.
This is very correct.
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.
> It is a fine thing when a man who thoroughly understands a subject is unwilling to open his mouth, and only speaks when he is questioned.
Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness
I mostly agree, and I try not to argue on things that are either not that important or ok either way, or what I call "religious grounds" - things people will defend outside of logic or truth, only because it's to them tied to their identity/faith/being. The only time I would present an opposite case is if I know for a fact that the "other way" might not end well.
"We like to believe humans are rational animals who occasionally feel emotions. It’s the reverse. We are emotional animals who occasionally think."
Well said.
In family and friend relationships, this all resonates completely.
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.
Sometimes, the point of argument is not to convince the ego-driven person you're arguing with, but the others who are watching.
Nice quote from Tao Te Ching about complexity and simplicity completing each other.
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.
probably only peoples who has the gift of doubt can argue in the common search of knowledge. Everything else, right or wrong, are, as stated, more about ego, quite useless about real problem solving..
Sure no one like to be wrong, so to argue with is necessary to spark interest in the search of alternative point of view.
Remembering Hagakure: "To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. One must become close with him and make sure that he continually trusts one's word." ..... "Have him receive this in the way that a man would drink water when his throat is dry, and it will be an opinion that will correct faults."
Words from a more civilized ages.
Yeah, state your case. Done.
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.
Mythical place to argue with people:
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.
> Don’t Win the Argument, Profit From the Difference
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.
The author put it very well (with a little ai writing help :-)
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.
Careful with this philosophy. It does work well for the short term. At some point of constant following of 'disagree and commit' mantra, you'll end up in a world where you have zero agency and zero energy to constantly do the work you hate.
Alternatively I’ve found it beneficial to try and clarify and further elaborate on your “opponents” reasoning. If you’re correct, then you should find the errors in their reasoning; without ever actually having to oppose them (your opponent and their arguments).
Everyone believes they are right until they are shown otherwise. What matters most is not just what you say, but how you say it.
I love this bit from the documentary "Behind the Curve (2018)." One of the scientists poses the following question: "What evidence could I show you that would change your position?"
If someone can't answer that, it's probably not worth arguing about.
I had two reactions, possibly more, as I read this.
First - yes, I agree. This is exactly how I think. I agreed with this. Then I thought. Why would somebody write something this... simple? true? obvious? Perhaps because they came to this realization a bit later in life, I thought. Maybe, yes. That must be it.
Then as I read more, I felt a bit incensed. Does this smell of... AI by any chance? The writing looks sincere and simple, but some tell tale signs pointed to AI. The argument structure is awfully well constructed. The inflection is just as the right moment.
Consider this: "Their opinions aren’t positions they hold; they are the position."
Or this: "You can’t win an argument like this, because it was never an argument"
Or this: "They learn from consequences. They have to touch the stove themselves. Words bounce off; pain sticks."
The contrastive negation is tell-tale AI. It could possibly be human, but I've read far too many AI-written articles now to think otherwise.
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Does it matter, though?
In the large scheme of things, probably not. One reads an article, one moves on. But in the much grander scheme of things, when tons of articles are AI-written, I believe we will stop paying attention. To a greater or smaller degree.
YMMV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also stopped arguing, I don't waste energy or my focus on random stuff, did happen with the age I think... unless... unless it's my wife or my mum who is wrong. If I think I'm right and they wrong, I will argue with al my energy. Of course!
"I don't really like arguing because everyone wants to convince the other person, and in the end, everyone leaves thinking they have convinced the other person, and no one has changed an inch."
Jean-Luc Godard, 28th May, 1982
This smells like a humble brag, driven by strong ego; count the number of 'I's in the post. I reckon the author is just as rigid in conversation as they always were, but now they can add "ego free" to their self satisfaction.
Good for the guy. Whatever he was doing before - it was probably too much, too soon or with the wrong people (e.g - arguing with a senior architect who's been in the company for a decade is not the same as with a junior colleague).
I think that there are times as a leader\supervisor\co-worker\parent\coach where you might argue despite knowing you won't change the outcome simply to show that you are willing to fight for those you represent.
There was a standup bit I saw recently guy says '"how to win an argument, you just say "I'm gonna stop you right there"' and then don't say anything
What the author says about ego goes both ways. People often reject arguments because of ego. Arguments can imply that they way someone has been doing something is suboptimal or even flat out wrong, or at least that's how they may be perceived. Even if something you're arguing for can improve the situation, the other parties may refuse to give it a chance because they need to protect their egos.
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 only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones.
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.