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https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/washington-post-opinion-page-shift-jeff-bezoss-note-to-staff-full-text-2686133-2025-02-26
its silly to assume people who take opposing view points do it because of personal/ ego reasons and not because they simply disagree with you about how to make the world better.
Regarding your second paragraph, I will say that while it is certainly silly to always chalk up disagreements to reasons of ego, it is sillier still to ignore how petty and spiteful even the very best of persons can be when they realise they cannot agree with each other.
I'm a leftist, but im not conceited enough to think that anyone who disagrees with me about socialist policies is being unreasonable. Theyre being manifestly reasonable. I just think theyre wrong even when theyre being rational and reasonable. Just like its possible for me to be wrong even when I'm being rational or reasonable.
I dont know about you- but I have found that its less than useless to approach disagreements with the idea that anyone who doesnt at the end of the argument agree with me is only doing so because theyre silly or petty or spiteful. People can disagree with me. No one has a claim to the complete truth. In disagreeing with each other we might actually find some common ground that actually would be the best path forward.
Your own unspecified example of the same ideology succeeding in one context while failing in another only further proves my point. Details matter. Process matters. Rhetoric is only an indication of intent and has little to no bearing upon the consequences that a policy promulgated in its name produces.
People can and do disagree in good faith. I never said otherwise. But there is a point beyond which disagreements cease to be useful in widening a conversation and end up limiting action itself. Not for nothing did CIA come up with a handbook on how to use civil methods to effectively obstruct any discussion.
Sometimes disagreements do lead to better decisions and sometimes they don’t. But that has little to do with the fact of disagreement itself. It has more to do with the implicit acknowledgement among the decision-makers that what matters is how something gets done and not whether it satisfies the vague purity of an idea. This is what enables compromise and collaboration, for better or worse. Mathematics is neither socialist nor capitalist. And you do not need an ideology to end famine or reduce poverty. Ideas are a fundamental part of how humans cogitate and rationalize. They are necessary and they are things of wonder. But ideas are not enough.
All of physical science evolved by people disagreeing about how to collect data, how to interpret it and how to test their hypothesis. Very good people disagreed with each other about whether the earth revolved around the sun or not. Galileo was persecuted by the emperors of his time because he said the earth revolved around the sun and proposed a helio-centric model.
The lesson you take from Galileo is that everyone should have had the implicit knowledge that the earth did revolve around the sun (even though Galileo was heretical for thinking so) and should have dismissed, condescended to, and ignored any opposition. The way you think about these questions would assume that we all know what the right thing to do is and we should all act on it. The truth is, we don't all know what the right thing to do is. No one knows what the right thing to do is—we're humans and not gods. What we can do is through free and open debate come to an agreement about some facts. In a world where heretics are ignored or persecuted, we would not have most of modern medicine, we would be giving heroin to babies for a cold and not have any knowledge of what a gene or an atom is.
Youre drawing a strawman by saying that I think ideology holds all answers—thats explicitly not my position. My argument is that no ideology- not right left or middle- holds any answers. So if we're really invested in solving problems,. Solving problems rather than virtue signalling, then we shouldnt shy away from freely discussing how different people view problems and what solutions might or might not work.
Just because some disagreements are unproductive- take the flat earthers in 2020s- does not mean we begin from a place that treats disagreements as suspicious or from a place where we characterise our opponents poorly. Doing that—what you're doing in this discussion now—thats a bad faith argument.
Everyone in the whole damn world wants to end poverty and famine. The fact that we havent done so already doesnt indicate some apathy in society, it indicates that poverty and famine are difficult problems to solve. And we will not solve these complex problems by writing off arguments because they come from a certain ideology. we will not solve these problems by ignoring the experiences and data produced by people not considered ideologically pure enough.
I never said implementation or details dont matter. What a silly little strawman youve created. All I said was that the idea that every good faith disagreement would only boil down to details and implementation and there are no good faith disagreements to be had about how we view the world is silly.
Theres no point at all to gluing your hand to a road and screaming "just stop oil" if you do not want to have an adult conversation about how we conserve the environment while continuing to pull millions out of poverty. Just stop oil activists are very convinced that anyone who disagrees with them does so because theyre evil ghouls who do not care about the world. And that entertaining disagreement there is to give in to some thought control or liberal navel gazing. Its neither. They simply have a world view entirely devoid of nuance and depth and imagine that they can scream complex problems into a solution and that anyone who disagrees with them must be an evil facist.
In your first paragraph, you say that I think disagreements never lead to anything meaningful. That is false. What I said was that there is a certain kind of a discourse (usually liberal but not exclusively so) that makes a fetish of disagreement to the point that it confuses all instances of people disagreeing among each other as positive signs of diversity, rationality, and competence. My position is only that some disagreements are meaningful and others are not.
In your second and third paragraphs, you refer to the history of modern sciences. I think any serious student of this fascinating history will surely be aware of Feyerabend’s Against Method where Galileo is prominently discussed. And while I do commend your vain attempt to draw some kind of epistemic analogy between Galileo and my argument(s), I do not think you have succeeded at all in the endeavour. You accuse me of being a moral absolutist and cite that as a flaw in my position(s). Well, anyone who has ever found themselves in the position of having to actually take a decision has to — in the moment of doing so, at the very least — be a moral absolutist. The privilege of pretending that none knows better — that what is “right”/“good” is not one, indivisible attribute and that the will to act in order to satisfy that “right”/“good” is a delusion of men pretending to be gods — is nothing but intellectual and moral cowardice of those relativists who underestimate the intelligence of their own species and confuse the peace of living in a society that has no fundamental values of its own — which it can define and fight for — with rationality. But it is not so. Immanuel Kant, among others, have argued, in great detail, the necessity and the inevitability of the human need and will to define their “good” and to act upon it. It represents far from simple arrogance of the ego. If anything, it is an act of great responsibility to define what is “good” and to then make the ultimate sacrifice of all that is pleasurable and trivial in human experience in order to achieve and realise that “good”. That is what beings like Galileo did and your misunderstanding of their moral and intellectual enterprise greatly distresses me.
In your fourth paragraph, you accuse me of reducing your positions to a strawman. But since you yourself admit that ideology is not the primary agent of change and meaning in human affairs and which is precisely the point that I have been making all along, I really do not see how I have misrepresented you. Perhaps I am guilty of compelling you to clarify your position from the jumbled mess that it originally was but I will let others be the judge of that.
In your fifth paragraph, now that is what is called a strawman, except you are doing it to me. As I have repeatedly said before to the point of exhaustion, some disagreements are meaningful and exciting because they clarify our facts and/or methodological frameworks, and some disagreements are lacklustre precisely because they contribute little-to-nothing and indeed, only further serve to obfuscate. And while I am happy that you have come around to accepting my position on this, it does you little good to now accuse me of being “suspicious” and acting in “bad faith”. This is an unfortunate example of the kind of disagreement I have previously called as absurd and lacklustre since I have never even suggested that just because not every disagreement is sensible that one should use that as an excuse to ridicule or mistreat others. What I have argued is to be critical in assessing the worth of knowledge as it develops through confrontation. It is pitiful that that you should have had to stoop so low in order to make a pointless point.
In your sixth paragraph, you say that poverty and famine are “difficult problems to solve”. I will need you to elaborate on what you mean by “difficult” here. Is it the act of defining what is poverty and what is famine? Is it the complexity of governance through which we respond to them? Or is it the simple incompetence and ordinary corruption of human personality that is the problem? But here you also contradict what you said earlier in your fifth paragraph. Like a lapsed believer, you cannot help but cling to (your) ideology. It is apparently impossible for you to see disagreements as anything but instances of ideology. While I am more than happy to say that I take no exception to people of different intellectual outlooks coming together to solve a problem, I find it unnecessary your insistence of reducing everything human to ideology. It is almost as if you are afraid that your own ideology should not be left out from the debate. I understand your anxiety but I do not think it is relevant here.
In your seventh paragraph, you re-state — what you falsely accuse me of mis-stating — your own mis-statement of my position. I must say, I admire the audacity with which you accuse me of doing what you have already done to me. Again, as stated so many times now, I never said that all disagreements are worthless. Indeed, it is only natural that human beings should think differently about the kind of reality in which they live and the kind of actions that are possible in it. But the possibility of possibilities is not a contradiction of geometry. Different experiences of human beings, while being valuable in themselves, are not proofs against gravity. The solution to hunger is simple and absolute. The struggle is in making that solution tangible and sustainable. It is a struggle of human personalities, of ambition and apathy, of consensus and corruption. My position is not a rejection of ideology itself but that of its centrality, its primary relevance in the nuts and bolts of a discourse. You can still disagree with my formulation here but what is the sense in distorting my actual position? But it seems this is the only way you think you now possess to respectably exit this conversation by reducing me to a strawman.
Finally (whew!), in your eighth paragraph, you seem to be channeling your rage from somewhere else upon me since I have never claimed to be an anti-oil activist, or of any other kind for that matter. For what it’s worth, I am happy (at long last!), in this instance, to agree with you. The anti-oil activists you referred to are a tragic example of how one should never argue. Their contribution to the discourse does not outlast the moment in which it is conceived.
I understand that after reading my response, you may think I have again done all the things you have (falsely, I assure you) accused me of doing. But I have not (I assure you, again) and I hope you will extend to me the same courtesy. I have being enjoying this conversation (up to a point) and I eagerly await your reply. But I do expect better arguments. Until then, good day/night to you, dear fellow.