The blog post series ‘Better decision making’ is about learning to recognize, in ourselves and others, how emotions and group pressure can impede rational decision making and lead to short-sightedness. Such phenomena can be present in our daily lives, at social gatherings in school, in business meetings, talk shows or news reporting. The modified excerpt below is taken from The Mind Collection. Image by Loudacris.
“The internet made the writer-reader relationship more interactive. As a result, disagreement by way of the written word in the form of online comments surged. While ideas being challenged was a wonderful thing, we might want to develop a nuanced understanding of what quality disagreement looks like. Hence, we need to become aware of real versus misleading counter-arguments in order to facilitate high quality discussions and decision making processes.
Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement is an informal ranking of seven common strategies of dissent. At the bottom of the pyramid are low-quality forms of disagreement. At the top you find the high-quality ones.”
- Name-calling: Insulting or belittling a person instead of addressing the argument.
- Ad hominem: Questioning the credibility of a person without addressing the argument.
- Responding to tone: Someone is accused of a combative stance regarding an issue, without addressing the argument.
- Contradicts: The argument is addressed by simply saying the opposite, with little evidence.
- Counter-argument: The argument is addressed by saying the opposite, backed up by evidence.
- Refutation: Mistakes within the argumentation are identified, one by one, and countered with arguments, underpinned by evidence.
- Refuting the central point: If there is a main message underlying the whole argument this is identified and countered with arguments, backed up by evidence.
Read the full article on The Mind Collection for a more in-depth explanation of the different levels of the pyramid.
IWTW recommends the social media platform X as a tool to become aware of the quality of argumentation. For example:
- ‘Follow’ both proponents and opponents regarding major issues such as climate, migration and wars around the world.
- Read comments below tweets.
- Judge the quality of different arguments.