Where and Why We Disagree
Where and Why We Disagree
Similarity, Difference, and the Illusion of Pattern
There is always something happening.
Atoms bounce around, we move our bodies through space, we think, we speak. . .
As such, when it comes to the topic of disagreement, it should come as no surprise that we can trace most disagreements back to our beliefs around the following questions, which relate to things happening:
What happened? (And what happened before that happened?)
Explanations of the past
What could have happened instead (if some detail or factor were different)?
Counterfactuals and alternative universes of the past
What should have happened instead?
Claims around ethics or a desired past state of affairs, as well as discussion of how a particular outcome subverted one’s pre-existing expectations
What is happening now? (And what does it mean + how does it “relate” to other things that have happened, are happening, or will happen)
Perceptions of the present reality
What would happen if. . .?
Forward-looking hypotheticals
What will happen next? (And what factors today are relevant for affecting what happens next?)
Predictions for the future
What should happen? (And the general category of decision-making: What should we do?)
Claims around ethics and one’s goals / desired state of affairs
Think about a passionate disagreement you’ve recently had with someone—which of the above categories does the source of your conflict fall under?
We could think of examples for each one of the above categories, but I think the most passionate kinds of disagreement come from the “What should have happened instead?” and “What should happen?”, prescriptive questions. This is because these questions relate directly to the Will—what you wanted to happen in the past and what you want to happen in the future.
The “should” relates to one’s vision of an ideal state of affairs or a desired outcome. Because we have different personal values, life experiences, and risk tolerances, we often have different desired outcomes than those around us.
If the outcomes are independent, where you want what you want for your life and I want what I want for my life, then it’s unlikely there will be much of a conflict between us.
But being the social creatures that we are, we often want outcomes that create an impact on other people’s lives in a way that would conflict with the outcomes they themselves want for their own lives, and vice versa.
You want Italian food for dinner? I’m feeling shawarma. . .
This is easy to see both a micro level, when it comes to family dynamics, and also at a macro level, when it comes to politics. All such interactions involve a negotiation between the Wills.
Even when we do agree about “what should happen” in the final stage of a process, we have plenty of room to disagree about the intermediate steps that “should happen” on the way towards the end state.
Concretely, so many of us share the same meta goals of achieving happiness, inner peace, some feeling of personal empowerment, etc., but we each have different beliefs in how to arrive there.
For example, two people may pursue the same goal of health and fitness, with one person doing HIIT and eating high protein and the other prioritizing outdoor walks and yoga.
Two entrepreneurs might pursue the same goal of running a successful company, with one preferring bootstrapped, organic growth and the other seeking the acceleration and capital that comes from a venture capital fund raise.
In other words, even when people have the same desired outcome and aim their efforts and intentions in the same direction, there can still be differences leading to disagreement:
Disagreement about the causal relation of intermediate steps in getting to the shared vision of the end state.
“If X happens, then Y will happen.”
“No—if X happens, then Z will happen.”
Complete agreement about causal if-then mechanisms, but disagreement on likelihoods/probabilities/observed frequencies of the factors.
“If X happens, then there is a 95% chance Y will happen.”
“No—if X happens, then there is a 70% chance Y will happen.”
Even if people will disagree about the factors involved AND the perceived likelihood of those factors materializing, they will still attribute differing comfort levels to the experience of those factors.
Everybody has a different level of risk tolerance or aversion. At its core, this deals with the dilemma of whether someone wants to take the sure thing that has lower expected value vs the thing that has a much higher payoff yet lower likelihood of coming to fruition.“I agree with your assessment of the probabilities that these events take place, but I don’t want to proceed with your proposed plan because I’m personally uncomfortable with the risks involved. I prefer the guaranteed inefficiency of the status quo. . . 😃”
Stated alternatively, most of why we disagree boils down to the fact we have different views on the probabilities of different events taking place as well as the weightings (importance and value) of the factors associated with the circumstance in question.
e.g. The mother says: “Your boyfriend drives a motorcycle and has a tattoo; you are in danger.” The daughter responds: “He is partner of a law firm and volunteers to help the poor every weekend.” Each applies a different set of weightings on what’s important and comes to a different conclusion regarding the probability of the relationship working out.
So much excess conflict comes from the fact that we don’t make explicit the context and assumptions we each bring to the table. Or we simply choose to not understand and respect the context that another person is operating from.
At the heart of our assessments and perceptions of probabilities and weightings lies a distinction in the way we each perceive similarity and difference between any two things. Whether it’s people, life situations, objects, thoughts… anytime we think about something, our minds find a way to contrast that thing with something else we believe it is not, and compare it to something else we believe is “similar” to it.
This act of categorization and putting things into “buckets” is our way of making sense and order of the world, so the complexity becomes less overwhelming.
There is no such thing as thinking in isolation. Whether we are conscious of it, our minds always apply a context to whatever the subject is. We put aspects of the subject into categories connected to things we’ve already experienced, and we also decide upon which characteristics to differentiate the subject with respect to such categories.
Simply put, it boils down to how we choose to classify things. Are two things more closely related than we believe them to be, or less?
The richness of Truth is experienced to the degree we can accurately and with precision see the real similarities and the differences between two things.
But how can we accurately perceive “similarity” and “difference”? What do we really mean when we verbalize the judgment of one thing being “similar” to another thing?
I think our perception in the degree of similarity and difference between two things comes down to the level of cognitive zoom we apply.
At the highest and most abstract level of zoom, everything is the same (i.e. with reference to the category of Being. . . every thing is a thing that exists). You can always find a common ground and shared category between any two things, if you just look upward enough through the topology of classifications.
e.g. A banana 🍌 and apple 🍎 are the “same” as far as being pieces of fruit. A banana🍌 and steak 🥩 are the “same” in that they belong to the category of food. Through a certain lens, a banana 🍌 could even be considered the “same” as the sun ☀️ , since we’re really just looking at a yellow thing in both cases. . .
At the micro level—on the other side of the spectrum—one can perceive everything as being entirely unique. There is no thing that is exactly like some other thing.
In some sense, every item in the universe belongs to its own, distinct, category of one.
e.g. I may claim to have two bananas 🍌 🍌 (a category of two), but these two items are not the same thing. . . One banana may have been harvested at a different farm. One banana may be more ripe than the other (so now we could have a ripe banana vs an unripe banana). If the bananas are superficially indistinguishable, they still necessarily occupy different points in space-time.
This is to say, no two objects can occupy the same space, at the same time, in the same sense. And that fundamental difference (which is present for EVERY thing in the universe) will always reverberate (butterfly effect) with opportunity for discovery of meaningful context, depending on how the observer chooses to frame it.
🥸 💭 If you keep going back and forth between philosophical theory and bananas, I will soon go bananas. . . 💭
In case you haven’t already noticed, the entire game of politics (for example) comes down to emphasis on sameness vs. difference.
“Here’s yet another instance of this party engaging in corruption. . .”
“This is unprecedented. . . we’ve never seen anything like this before. . .”
Through the funnels of sameness and difference, your own pattern recognition system gets weaponized to activate your emotions and drives (ultimately influencing your will and decisions).
Since there is no objective way to establish the degree of real similarity and difference between things (or at least, there’s no readily available moral prescription for how much cognitive zoom one “should” use when perceiving the world), the aim of any propaganda (or even basic marketing) is to influence your cognitive zoom both by selectively:
Encouraging you to see difference where you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Anesthetizing you from critically differentiating between events, such that the two things feel vaguely the same.
Absent perfect curation, we can’t control the content of the messages we receive.
However, we can choose to pull both the levers of sameness and difference and see how our perceptions and feelings change with respect to a given situation, as we toggle between the two frames (in fact, if there’s any takeaway I hope you get from reading this post, THIS is it).
For issues that are portrayed as opposing poles, it would make sense to pull the lever of sameness and create opportunity for bridge-building:
e.g. The pro-2nd amendment vs pro-gun control views are the “same” with respect to the fact that both aim to reduce the risk of losing innocent lives. Without such a recognition, one might misguidedly believe that the other side intentionally wants more deaths.
Other issues could benefit from increased specificity and emphasis on difference.
e.g. It would be beneficial for two people who believe in the merits of nuclear energy to distinguish between fusion vs fission, since the policy implications of implementing one over the other would be substantially different.
As a closing demonstration for this sub-topic of similarity vs difference, I’d like to cement in a bold claim:
Patterns don’t actually exist.
Or more precisely, they don’t mean anything unless they were designed by another intelligent being (who, consequently intended there to be a “recognizable” configuration of things, or pattern).
The concept of “pattern” is essential to any act of communication, because its output is a proxy for delivering our intent to another person. I.e. we do not have access to any other intelligent being’s internal thoughts and intentions, so we rely on the proxy of patterns to, by faith, exchange some “understanding” of what someone else is experiencing.
The ONLY WAY we could ever hope to communicate our experience to another person is by creating and offering a “pattern”. And lest we forget, language itself is predicated on “pattern”.
So then, what do I mean when I say that the patterns we think we experience “don’t actually exist”? It’s a reminder that too often we overvalue the certainty we feel with respect to any experience of pattern recognition.
Here’s an Example: I’ve written down a sequence of numbers, and covered up one of them with a blank (“_”).
1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, _, 0, 1, 0
What number belongs in the blank space in the above sequence?
If you think the answer is “1”, you are incorrect.
The correct answer is 57, because that’s the number I chose to write down.
If for some reason, you feel inclined to assert, with confidence, that the answer must have been “1”, you must assume that:
A) I intended to portray an intelligible, repeatable pattern.
B) I am necessarily bound to repeat that pattern in a way that the small sample itself would seemingly imply.
C) There is no greater context. The window you are looking through is sufficient to capture the “full pattern”.
While it is true that I did intend to portray something “intelligible” (A) for the purposes of creating “expectation” and triggering the pattern recognition system of your brain to anticipate a 1 after a 0, there is no Law that coerces and binds me to having to repeat that pattern (B).
I.e. My actions don’t have to make “sense” for me to do them. (Though I confess that to act in such a chaotic/random manner requires I overcome some perceived internal need for consistency, intelligibility, and order, which may otherwise have pushed me towards making that missing number, “1”).
With respect to point (C), why do we assume that the few numbers I provided were sufficient for establishing the pattern? What if the full context was actually:
1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 57, 0, 1, 0
1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 57, 0, 1, 0
1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 57, 0, 1, 0
1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, _, 0, 1, 0
If this was the window you were looking through, you probably would have guessed “57”, no?
How often do we find ourselves looking through a narrow window, believing that we are seeing the full picture. . .
To summarize, the arbitrary and unknowing use of similarity vs. difference as it relates to the topics of what “should” happen strike me as being the most potent cognitive sources for disagreement.
Any explanation of something that has happened / is happening / will happen / would have happened / would happen / could happen / should have happened / should happen involves:
A curation of facts (where some are chosen and others are left off the table)
A hypothesized deterministic relationship between the facts.
A belief about what matters
Which facts to focus on or prioritize
What “excluded” information, if any, might be implied by the explicit observation (the use of pattern recognition, which pulls the strings of similarity and difference)
I initially intended on saying more, including an exploration of the connective tissue of logic that creates perceived “patterns” between concepts, as well as a deeper dive on what we really mean when we say the word “should”, but I’ll leave these for a subsequent post.
Thanks for reading. If you have any feedback to provide, as well as examples that you don’t think fit neatly into the categories I mentioned, please leave those in the comments section below.
Happy Memorial Day Weekend!
—Drago
P.S. I recognize that when it comes to disagreement, there’s the whole layer of identity and emotional intelligence which would deserve its own coverage. For the purposes of how I framed the conversation here, you could consider these as drivers of the Will (and what we think “should” happen) as well as the windows and biases which affect our perception of sameness and difference.