The hazards of arguing against bad takes

The best way to become obstinately wrong is to argue with people who are even more wrong

I was once 15 minutes into a conversation where someone was trying to convince me of something, when they said, “look. I’ve been talking about this for 10 years. I’ve had every conceivable argument. In fact, I’ve already had this exact argument dozens of times, and every time the other side could not find any flaw in my argument. This time won’t be different, so you should give up now.” I realized that this was true, and that it would be true even if his original claim was completely wrong. In that moment, I was enlightened.

If you’re reading this, you probably believe things. Some of those things are true, and some are false. One great way to believe more true things and fewer false things is to expose your beliefs to criticism by arguing with people.

Unfortunately, good counterarguments are a scarce commodity. Most people simply have not spent the same amount of time as you thinking about the things you care about. So even very smart people will often have difficulty making arguments you’ve never heard before and which cut to the heart of the matter.

On the other hand, no matter what you believe, no matter how stupid it is, there will always be people who disagree with you for even stupider reasons. If you believe the Earth is flat, someone on X (the everything app) will come up to you and argue that the Earth must be round because everyone says so and it’s impossible for so many people to be wrong about anything.

Every time someone makes a terrible argument against you, your dialogue tree of cached responses to arguments grows, like a chess player learning common openings. “Aha, I see you have played the satellite photo opening, Soviet variation. A classic rookie blunder.” It turns out that if you’ve been spending years thinking about something, it’s pretty easy to come up with arguments that stump most people long enough for you to declare victory. Even if you're dead wrong.

With practice, you get so good at responding to people that few ever break out of your dialogue tree, and nobody has ever made an argument that you didn’t find a devastating counterargument to. Your reasoning faculties shrivel and decay, replaced by a big lookup table. You lose hope that anyone will ever make a good counterargument, and slowly stop participating in arguments, except to reply to the occasional ragebait post on X (the everything app). Since your beliefs have survived the harsh ordeal of the world, you become extremely confident in your correctness.

Once the condition reaches this stage, the prognosis is grim. Once someone forgets that other people can sometimes be correct ever, then it becomes very frustrating to talk to them. Many words and phrases will pattern-match to some part of the dialogue tree, and you must not utter them, or else you will have to prove that you can subvert expectations to break out of the dialogue tree. This reduction in contact with the outside world only makes it even harder to encounter good takes.

How can we prevent this from happening to ourselves? To entirely stop arguing with people who disagree is like burning your house down intentionally so that it can't accidentally burn down from a forgotten stove. Nonetheless, there are still a few measures that can help avert such an unfortunate fate. You can curate a set of people who are thoughtful and are able to give reliably interesting pushback. Social media platforms are terrible; they show you the most braindead takes on the planet so you will get angry and reply and make those sweet sweet engagement numbers go up.

This has several other implications as well. If you find yourself up against someone with a well developed dialogue tree on some particular issue, they have an unfair advantage, and you shouldn’t let yourself be pressured into accepting the claim just because you got caught flat footed by a question in the dialogue tree. I would probably have a tough time arguing off the cuff against the best prepared flat-earther in the world, because I haven’t had time to go and think about their theories and look up pieces of experimental evidence that would disprove them. Of course, this isn’t a get out of jail free card for never admitting to being wrong about anything. If the question under dispute is actually worth figuring out, then you should go and think about it carefully on your own time. While it’s certainly not trivial, it doesn’t take nearly as long to be able to cut through the dialogue tree as it does to form it in the first place.

Conversely, we should also have more grace towards people who don’t accept our arguments, even if they don’t have good counterarguments of their own. It’s correct for people to feel apprehensive about accepting arguments, especially ones that have huge sweeping implications. The only solution is to convince them that this is important enough for them to spend time forming an opinion on.

Finally, this effect is a reminder for all of us to be kinder to our counterparties in arguments, even if we think we’ve already heard the argument before.