The Art of Constructive Disagreement
How studying Eastern and Western philosophy and geography can lead to better, more meaningful, and more highly constructive debates. Coherency is king, baby!
“But debating is the best way to learn! And I want to learn from you!”
The last message I received from a follower on X before blocking them.
I’ve been on the internet since AOL and Instant Messenger. I was inculcated into “armchair debate culture” as a teenager, and yeah, I spent my time on forums debating things like gay marriage and religion versus atheism back in the early 2010’s.
Having participated in many dialectical discussions and Socratic debates, I will say that debate is, unequivocally, not the best way to learn.
At the same time, I love it when people give me good faith disagreements. Internet culture usually defaults to basic rhetorical tactics that average people think are “clever” like moving the goalposts and bailey-motte fallacies.
The point of debate, historically speaking, is for the benefit of the audience to see both sides. This is why you have political debates. They aren’t trying to prove each other wrong or right or make epistemic progress. Instead, what they are doing is demonstrating their position. However, a normal back-and-forth is pretty natural when you disagree with people.
Both Western and Eastern philosophers have reflected on this behavior at great length. I’ve read quite a few books on this topic, namely A Short History of Chinese Philosophy by Fung Yu-lan and Geography of Thought by Richard Nesbit. There are a few other books sprinkled in, but these are by far the best.
The short version is this: due to the geography of the Mediterranean, it was naturally given to trading with many people from many cultures. Europe to the north, Africa to the South, Asia to the East. Oceans were the ancient superhighway, allowing for goods, money, languages, and ideas to flow easily around thousands of miles and circulate quickly.
This geographical affordance is the polar opposite of Chinese geography. Because of this, Mediterranean culture and Chinese culture couldn’t really be more different. Geography is destiny as they say.
But why? Here are a few reasons:
Language: The chief problem in trading with many people from many cultures is language. Debating over meaning, definitions, and references meant that Western minds had to get good at abstraction. Meanwhile, the Chinese mind had to get good at consistency. This is why Chinese philosophy, around 2000 years ago, dealt with the rectification of names. They came up with standard terms, definitions, and philosophical constructs around the same time the Greeks were discovering atoms.
Food and Commerce: The merchant marine of the Mediterranean allows for completely different economic structures than the fertile river valleys and rice paddies of the Chinese interior. These affordances create fundamentally different lifestyles even at the same iron-age technological level. The cultivation of rice requires a lot of cooperation, which is why both China and Japan have “collectivist” cultures, while hunting, fishing, and trade in the West are highly individualistic.
So when someone on the internet says “Well how do you define that?” This is not actually a new phenomenon. Imagine you’re standing on a wharf in ancient Athens. You’re a local who speaks who Greek, and on one side you’ve got a Turk and on the other side you’ve got a Carthaginian. In order to do business, you had to get real comfortable with working through language barriers, semantic differences, and rhetorical nuance.
The Chinese reconciled this problem through imperial bureaucracy. The West, on the other hand, was more of a “dog eat dog” decentralized approach. These geographical differences, I believe, create insurmountable cultural differences that, despite repeated efforts, China cannot escape. This is interesting because Chinese thinkers are far more cognizant of these cultural differences, and have been for a long time. Despite the fact that they recognize these differences, their cultural heritage as the Middle Kingdom means they cannot deign to adopt Western thought.
The Rice Principle: Because rice cultivation required coordinated irrigation and planting, Chinese philosophy evolved to value harmony and coordinated action over individual achievement. This manifests today in China’s preference for top-down economic planning over free market individualism. Likewise, this also explains why Japan has a strong “obey your elders” vibe, as village elders have been the glue of Japanese society for more than a thousand years.
The Mandate of Heaven Principle: Being geographically isolated led China to develop a worldview where authority flows from the center outward. This created the concept of “天下” (all under heaven), where legitimate power must come from the center. Today this manifests in Beijing’s insistence that all major companies, even private ones, must ultimately answer to central authority. Interestingly, the Chinese also have an idiom “The mountains are high, the river is deep, and the Emperor is far away.”
The Rectification of Names Principle: Unlike Mediterranean traders who had to constantly negotiate meaning between languages, Chinese philosophy focused on standardizing definitions within one system. This creates modern friction where China expects other nations to accept their definitions of concepts like “democracy” or “human rights” rather than debating the terms. They really have a hard time contemplating that someone could come to a different worldview and not be categorically wrong.
The Immobility Principle: Both Daoism and Confucianism praise those who “stay put” because agricultural society required stable populations. This manifests today in China’s hukou system restricting internal migration and suspicion of internationally mobile Chinese citizens. The Tao te Ching has passages about how “A good man should hear the dogs of his neighboring village bark, but never see them.” This is how ‘anchored’ Chinese are supposed to be.
The Granary Principle: China’s geography made famine a constant threat, leading to philosophical emphasis on stockpiling and self-sufficiency. This appears today in China’s massive strategic reserves of everything from food to rare earth metals. This is also, in my estimation, why Chinese tend to think on much longer time scales than Westerners. If you can just pick and leave, you’re not thinking about how to survive in one place over the long run.
The Middle Kingdom Principle: Being hemmed in by mountains, deserts, and oceans created a worldview where China was the center of civilization. This manifests today in China’s difficulty accepting a truly multilateral world order rather than a Sinocentric one. This has been reflected throughout history with Chinese rejection of Western civilization as more than a “passing curiosity” when they encountered British explorers.
The Bureaucrat-Scholar Principle: Geographic isolation meant China could be governed as one unit, creating a class of scholar-administrators rather than merchants. Today this appears in the high status of government officials versus private entrepreneurs. One of the most shocking things I learned was that in China, the idea of a “teacher” being anyone other than a government official is a relatively new idea.
By studying East-West cultural and linguistic differences, it has really shined a light on our own quirks in the West. Really, we’ve always been somewhat Postmodernist, haven’t we? By standing at the crossroads of many cultures and languages, we’ve always been looking for greater abstractions, what are the truths and principles behind what we’re actually saying?
What does this have to do with debate?
Really, the point of debate is to test the robustness and defensibility of ideas. It’s not to prove who’s right or wrong, or to learn anything new. It’s about testing a theory or hypothesis or world model.
Back in 2009, I thought I was pretty clever when I realized this principle. I slowly stopped engaging in internet debates because I realized that my world model was better than my opponent’s and there was no merit in rehashing their same points over and over again. To provide an example, let’s look at gay marriage. The “trans debate” is following the same exact pattern.
“Gay marriage is wrong! The Bible says that marriage is holy and between a man and a woman! End of story!”
“Okay, but we live in a secular state, and the institution of marriage is now secular, so the Bible doesn’t apply.”
“Nonsense, the sanctity of marriage is enshrined in law!”
“But the law can be changed, and should be changed at the will of the people. That’s literally the point of democracy.”
“Ah, yes, but homosexuality is biologically wrong! It’s an aberration against nature!”
“Is it though? There’s plenty of homosexuality in nature, and plenty of gay people still procreate. Anyways, Modernists appealed to ‘Natural Law’ and we got eugenics, so you’re on a slippery slope there.”
“But allowing gay people to marry sets a bad precedent! If we’re talking about slippery slopes, what about pedophilia? What about polygamy? What about bestiality! Allowing gay marriage is just one step away from these things!”
“First, advocating for marriage equality does not automatically equate to those things. Furthermore, that’s changing the topic entirely. It seems like you don’t actually have any defensible qualms with gay marriage itself.”
“But it’s just wrong and I don’t like it!”
“That’s fine, no one is forcing you into a gay marriage, though, and we’ve already agreed we shouldn’t legislate morality.”
That is, more or less, the late 2000’s and early 2010’s internet debate culture in a nutshell. Here, you can see that debate was not about “proof” but rather a dialectic process to see which worldview was more defensible.
The “trans debate” is following the same exact epistemic pathway. People are presently debating about the same exact concepts:
Biological reality: What does the evolution, genetics, endocrinology, and neuroscience say about transgenderism?
Statutory constructs: What does the law say about transgenderism? At what point does this biological-social-psychological phenemonon actually intersect with policy?
Rhetorical and linguistic gymnastics: Some people, like Jordan Peterson and the folks at Triggernometry, resort to verbal gimmicks.
Generally what happens is that, once these internet debates reach their terminal conclusion, some legislative changes happen and everyone quits the field. I noticed a long time ago that people never really concede “I was wrong, you were right.”
They just quit arguing.
There’s usually some sour grapes kind of rhetoric like “well, I don’t really care anyways” or “I never cared in the first place” which is really just a coping mechanism.
In the case of the “trans debate” we’re already at the point of “legislating morality” and it’s been winnowed down to one real policy consideration: at what age is gender-affirming care appropriate?
The anti-trans community has already conceded, tacitly or otherwise, that trans people exist. Fine, yes, the biological evidence is overwhelming that sexualization of brains is not a simple binary (though plenty of knuckle-draggers have yet to catch on to this). And, okay, the more honest conservatives will concede that gender is largely a social construct with a huge variance across cultures, so there’s no defending “gender essentialism.” They’ve also stopped arguing about whether or not gender-affirming surgery should or should not be allowed—for consenting, informed adults they are fine with it. After all, when their heroes, like Elon Musk, get TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) this is also a form of gender-affirming care!
At the same time, the anti-trans voices have earned concessions from pro-trans voices. Yes, there are some important and durable biological differences between men and women. Men tend to be bigger and stronger, women tend to be more patient and sensitive. But this falls back to the “is-ought” problem.
The is-ought fallacy becomes particularly glaring in gender debates when people try to transform statistical tendencies into moral imperatives. Take testosterone levels: we can make factual “is” statements like “men typically have testosterone levels between 300-1000 ng/dL while women typically range from 15-70 ng/dL.” That's science. But watch how quickly people leap to “ought” statements: “therefore, any woman with high testosterone isn’t natural” or “real men must maintain high T levels.”
This faulty reasoning has spawned bizarre phenomena like “transvestigation,” where internet detectives obsessively analyze photos of female athletes, claiming that broad shoulders or visible muscles are “proof” they’re “secretly male.” Some of these men are so unfamiliar with female anatomy that they think pubis mons accounts to a “penis bulge.” The same logic leads to moral panic when women like Serena Williams or Megan Rapinoe display physical prowess that challenges traditional gender expectations.
The pattern becomes even more revealing when we examine how “transvestigation” cuts both ways. Take Kyle Rittenhouse: despite being elevated as a right-wing symbol of masculine force (quite literally through armed violence), he was later “transvestigated” due to his soft facial features and rounded cheeks. This shows how these pseudo-scientific “investigations” aren’t really about biology at all—they’re about policing gender performance through a weird mix of biological essentialism and social expectations.
The Rittenhouse example is particularly telling because it shows how even performing the ultimate “masculine” act in right-wing ideology (using firearms to defend property) doesn’t protect someone from gender scrutiny if their physical features don’t match arbitrary standards. It reveals a deeper anxiety: if someone can be “really a woman” despite performing the most stereotypically masculine actions, then the whole system of using biological determinism to enforce gender roles falls apart.
This is how you end up with avowed “realists” and “militant atheists” like Richard Dawkins to get triggered by female boxers like Imane Khelif.
Democracy is messy and noisy. These debates, while vexing, are a sure sign that society is functioning well.
Over time, we engage in this process of iterative refinement and distillation. We can atomize the real issues. So, in the topic of the “trans debate” it’s starting to boil down to a few policy decisions:
At what age is gender affirming care appropriate? The science is truly still out on this. Some kinds of gender-affirming care are irreversible. Furthermore, it is presently en vogue for doctors and therapists to prematurely conclude that someone is transgender and would be happier with reassignment. There are perverse financial incentives, which are deeply problematic.
At which point do you discern between “man” and “woman” for the sake of sports? This is pretty critical, as men’s and women’s sports have long been divided out of a sense of sportsmanship. Due to the aforementioned statistically significant difference in testosterone, men tend to excel as athletes. Even if someone is intersex and not even transgender, is it fair to let them compete against people who aren’t?
What role should gender identity play in regulating hate speech and other harms? Misgendering people is easily categorized as a form of microaggression. It’s not much different from using racial slurs or other putdowns, in terms of psychological impact to the recipient. It’s not illegal to call someone a slur, but we have corrected this behavior through social sanction aka “cancel culture.” But should transgenderism be so well protected that people get fired, fined, or imprisoned for misgendering people?
There’s probably a few other main points that have percolated up as “genuinely valid points of debate” but you get the idea. It’s following the same exact pattern as “the gay marriage debate” and it’s already close to the end. When things reach a fever pitch, and people like JK Rowling and Donald Trump are talking about it, the whole conversation is coming to a head.
No, I won’t debate you
The exchange at the top of this article was centered on someone who wanted to argue over the definition of AGI, and whether or not AGI was here. I blocked them for a few reasons:
They didn’t ask if I wanted to debate. I have better things to do with my time. I’ve produced plenty of videos and tweets and blog posts about my views. If you want to know my views, just use perplexity and ask “What does David Shapiro think about this issue?”
It was a waste of my time. When you’re semi-famous, a lot of people just want to waste your time. I call it “time vampirism” and the best way to deal with it is firm boundaries. My time is my most precious resources. Waste my time, get the banhammer. It’s that simple.
They were not participating in good faith. I provided ample evidence about my assertions about AGI, including conversation’s I’d had with Claude on the topic, and rather than engage with my stance, they simply wanted to get lost in pedantic rhetoric.
In terms of pragmatic impact, it’s far more important to have public discussions, such as articles like this one, as they are going to move the needle for many more people than just one-on-one debates. I’m not a politician and I have no interest in the performance of speaking debates, or trading jabs in DMs. I have started responding to people in the comments of my posts, but you’ll be sad to know I usually just feed my article and the comments to Claude and ask Claude to politely explain why the commenter is wrong.
Principles for High Integrity Disagreements
Alright, so wrapping up, here are some off-the-cuff ideas about “how to have a genuinely good, thoroughly engaging, and meaningful debate.”
Your primary referent should be the Truth: There is a ‘ground Truth’ whether you like it or not. Most people don’t have a sophisticated enough understanding of epistemics or ontology to participate in good faith, hence why I’ve been writing about metamodernism and an emergent view of reality. It’s time to move beyond Postmodernism with its unbridled relativism.
You should always “cleave to reality:” Cleaving to reality means maintaining constant contact with observable evidence and demonstrable outcomes, while ruthlessly discarding ideas that fail to align with what’s actually happening—no matter how intellectually elegant or socially appealing those ideas might be. Just as a blade cleaves away excess, this principle separates truth from narrative while binding us to what’s real rather than what we wish were true. The ultimate test of any idea, framework, or theory must be its coherence with reality itself, not its internal logical consistency or rhetorical appeal. Measurability is paramount!
Use cognitive dissonance as your compass: This one is new, and it comes straight from metamodernism: cognitive dissonance is your superpower, actually. Cognitive dissonance is a neurological phenomenon that allows you to detect incoherence. It is physically unpleasant, which means it demands that you resolve it. However, due to epistemic tribal theory, many people attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance through logical gymnastics and word games. We are all incentivized to maintain social status at any cost, and sometimes that cost is “being categorically wrong.”
Above all else, build the most coherent argument possible: When you discard the ideas that don’t work, and stick to the ones that do, it’s easy. As Bruce Lee said “be like water” flow around obstacles and change your form to fit the facts and you’ll never be wrong for long. Coherence is the meta-archetype that sits above intelligence, consciousness, curiosity, integrity, and authenticity. Coherence, more than Truth, is the apogee of intellectual achievements.
Don’t waste anyone’s time. The greatest respect you can show for people is to honor their time. Don’t waste your own time with pointless, circular arguments, or moving the goal post. Don’t waste your opponent’s time with trivial whataboutisms. Concede the points where you’re wrong, lick your wounds, and go pick up a book. Then rejoin the conversation once you’re ready. Maintain salience and cogency at all costs, and you won’t waste anyone’s time.
Hey Dave, just wanted to thank you for all the articles you’ve written. I’ve been on a journey for the past year to get challenge my own beliefs and get closer to the ground truth. You’ve helped a lot with that journey.
Great read. Lots to think about and I learned a thing or two. Can’t ask for more than that!