Argue the ideas, not the person

Over the course of a long career, I’ve been involved in more hard arguments and conversations than I would like. Sometimes they’re polite, if difficult - in fact, most of them are. But sometimes they can be very hard - personal, bitter, intractable. Why is that?

When the argument is about something factual, it can be easy for the participants to feel emotionally detached from it - you can say things like “let’s go get evidence, run an experiment etc” and people who disagree often can agree to do that.

But if the argument feels like it’s getting down to values, there’s much more potential for it to be personal. What does this mean? It means that one or more of the participants in the conversation takes it personally - losing the argument means something meaningful about them. For example, if two people are discussing which programming language to use, and neither has strong attachments to any language, they can calmly discuss the merits of each. But of one of them, say, identifies themselves as a Java engineer, and one identifies as a Python engineer (for example), then the fight really becomes a judgment on them personally, and on the value of their judgment and intelligence.

When this happens, the stakes are higher. If you’re one of the people who are partisans in a conversation like this, at best your opinion will be seen as biased, and at worst, the conversation will devolve into an argument. What do you do?

The best thing to do is get some distance. Sometimes a values based discussion is ok, but it has to be done in a neutral way that doesn’t personalize. This is hard. Better, if you can, is to try to reduce the conversation to a more pragmatic framing (in our example, language features vis the project at hand, maybe). This is also hard, people easily fall back into defensive postures. One other technique is asking questions as much as you can - particularly if you feel threatened yourself.

It’s hard to do this. There are lots of hard questions in the world* that we have to grapple with, and it’s challenging to let go of hard-won opinions on them. It can make you feel insecure, lost, even dumb to have to back down on something you’ve deeply internalized. I like the framing of “strong opinions, weakly held” - it’s hard to achieve but a bit of that suspension can help in these hard conversations.

*This is a total digression but one that’s been on my mind lately. We all are “gifted” the same hard problem of “existential/metaphysical terror”: we come into existence, more or less alone, with no explanation, and at some point have to confront the idea that we will stop existing. It’s terrifying! As a child, when you are most enjoying the gift of existence, you learn it will be taken away. This is a horrible, hard problem that each of us has to confront. There are all kinds of ways to confront it: science, religion, nihilism, pretending it doesn’t exist, etc. But everyone does form some answer to it, and that answer often contains deep values about the world (“things are chaotic and random”, “there is a rigid hierarchy of good and evil”, “nothing matters” etc.). This is why this kind of conversation is almost taboo, and is always the hardest one to have: if you “lose” a conversation about the nature of this dilemma, it goes to the very root of your theory of who you are and what you’re doing here. That’s probably the scariest conversation at all, and why this entire footnote probably felt faintly uncomfortable and impolite to you. Talking about this shared moment and its implications is one of the most uncomfortable, embarrassing things we can discuss, almost.