Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement

by Buster Benson

Ideas: Does the space encourage or discourage diverse perspective...

People: Is anyone able to enter and exit this space of their own free will, or are there consequences and/or restrictions in place that limit who can enter and exit?

Culture: How are past and present interactions in this space remembered in the future?

I learned that Jared believed that making the question a bit provocative would generate more conversation, whereas my approach of framing it neutrally would require people to do more work in responding and therefore lead to lower participation. Jared isn’t the only person who feels this way about the relationship between provocation and disagreement.

Context matters. The spaces in which we have our conversations matter. Power dynamics, expectations of purpose, and access to different perspectives in the room matter. A productive disagreement needs healthy soil to produce fruit of growth, connection, and enjoyment.

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Quoting “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aporia is the feeling of realizing that what you thought was a path to truth actually doesn’t lead there at all.

Instead of leaping into the chasm, imagined solution in hand, by acknowledging the impasse in front of you, you remain uncertain about how to get across and are therefore able to resist false security. Instead of grabbing whatever certainty you can, even if it’s incorrect, you can grab the voice of possibility and begin to look around for other ways across that you might have missed.

One way out of chronic unresolved anxiety is to blame someone or something other than ourselves, get angry at them, and wash our hands of it. Unfortunately, doing that doesn’t solve the problem that was causing the feeling—it only absolves us of feeling responsible for it.

What is the difference between accepting a dangerous idea into the room and endorsing it?

Head realm

Should we be willing to hear ideas that we don’t endorse? If so, why?

Heart realm

How might the monkey’s paw twist an honest desire to learn from dangerous ideas into something that is unquestionably regrettable?

How might we accept ideas that we don’t endorse in a productive way?

Hand realm

The biggest change I’ve noticed in myself, and which I hope readers of this book will experience as well, is the gentle lifting of the burden to fight every battle—not because you are dissociating from the world’s problems or avoiding them, but because of the slow dawning of the idea that there’s more to disagreement than who is right, and that in many cases the places we speak from are more complicated than a simple policy position or belief statement reveals.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a common saying in the tech world, and has been used countless times to turn a question about preferences and values into a question about data and evidence.