The Death of Disagreement: Why Nobody Argues in Good Faith Anymore

There's a moment in every online argument where it stops being about the topic and starts being about winning. You can feel it happen. Someone misrepresents your position. You correct them. They double down. You realize you're not having a conversation anymore — you're in a performance.

This isn't new. People have argued badly for as long as people have argued. But something shifted in the last decade, and it's worth naming: we've built an entire information ecosystem optimized for bad-faith disagreement.

And it's making us dumber.

The Algorithm Wants You Angry

Social media doesn't reward nuance. It rewards engagement. And the fastest path to engagement is outrage.

A thoughtful post examining both sides of immigration policy gets 12 likes. A post calling the other side idiots gets 12,000 retweets. The algorithm learns. You learn. Everyone learns.

The result: public discourse becomes a performance art where the goal isn't understanding — it's signaling which team you're on. Arguments become uniforms. Nuance becomes weakness.

Research backs this up. A 2023 study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that tweets expressing moral outrage received 20% more engagement per word than neutral content. The platforms don't create outrage — they amplify it, selectively, because outrage keeps you scrolling.

We Forgot What Arguments Are For

Here's a question that sounds obvious but isn't: what's the point of an argument?

If you asked Aristotle, he'd say an argument is a tool for arriving at truth. Two people present their best reasoning, challenge each other's assumptions, and both walk away with a clearer picture of reality. The goal isn't to win. The goal is to be less wrong.

If you asked most people on Twitter, an argument is a contest. Someone wins, someone loses. The audience picks a side. The loser gets ratio'd.

These are fundamentally different activities, but we use the same word for both. And the contest version has almost completely replaced the truth-seeking version in public life.

Think about the last time you saw someone change their mind in public. Not "I've evolved on this issue" during an election year. Actually change their mind, in real time, because someone made a better argument.

It almost never happens. Because changing your mind in public feels like losing. And in an attention economy, losing is death.

The Strawman Industrial Complex

The easiest way to win an argument is to argue against a position nobody holds.

"People who support gun control want to ban all guns." Most don't. "People who oppose gun control don't care about dead kids." They do. But the caricatures are easier to defeat, and defeating a caricature feels like winning.

This is so common now that it barely registers. Entire media ecosystems are built on presenting the dumbest version of the opposing view and then demolishing it. It's intellectually empty, but it's incredibly satisfying. You get to feel smart and righteous simultaneously.

The cost is that nobody ever engages with the actual strongest version of the other side's argument. We're all debating ghosts.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett proposed a set of rules for productive disagreement. The first: you must be able to state the other person's position so clearly and fairly that they say, "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

When was the last time you did that? When was the last time anyone in a public argument did that?

The Steelmanning Deficit

The opposite of a strawman is a steelman: presenting the strongest version of an argument you disagree with. Not the weakest. Not the dumbest. The version that would be hardest for you to counter.

Steelmanning is the intellectual equivalent of training with a better sparring partner. You get stronger. Your arguments get tighter. You discover weaknesses in your own thinking that you never would have found arguing against the weak version.

But steelmanning is rare because it's hard and it feels wrong. Why would you make the other side's case better? Why would you give ammunition to people you think are wrong?

Because that's how you find out if they actually are wrong. Or — and this is the part that scares people — how you find out that you are.

What We've Lost

The inability to disagree productively isn't just an intellectual problem. It's a practical one.

In politics: Voters can't evaluate policies because they've never heard the strongest case for the other side. They've heard the weakest case, presented by people who oppose it. This isn't education. It's theater.

In business: Teams that can't argue productively make worse decisions. Research from Wharton shows that teams with constructive disagreement outperform consensus-seeking teams on complex problems. But constructive disagreement requires trust, good faith, and the skill of arguing without making it personal.

In relationships: The couples therapist John Gottman found that the number one predictor of divorce isn't the amount of conflict — it's the presence of contempt. And contempt is exactly what bad-faith arguing produces. You stop seeing the other person as someone with a legitimate perspective and start seeing them as someone who's either stupid or evil.

In your own thinking: If you never seriously engage with opposing views, your beliefs calcify. You become more confident and less accurate. You mistake the echo for the evidence.

The Skill Nobody Teaches

Here's what's strange: disagreeing productively is a learnable skill, and almost nobody teaches it.

We teach kids math, science, history. We teach them to write essays and solve equations. But we don't teach them how to evaluate an argument, identify logical fallacies, steelman an opposing view, or change their mind gracefully.

Formal debate programs do this, but they reach a tiny fraction of students. For most people, the only "training" in argumentation comes from watching cable news pundits yell at each other or scrolling through Twitter threads.

This is like learning to cook by watching food fights.

The skills of productive disagreement are specific and teachable:

• Steelmanning — restating the other side's argument in its strongest form
• Identifying assumptions — finding the unstated premises that each side relies on
• Separating claims from values — recognizing when disagreements are factual (and resolvable with evidence) vs. moral (and requiring a different approach)
• Updating beliefs — treating "I was wrong about that" as progress, not failure
• Distinguishing argument from person — attacking the idea without attacking the human

These aren't exotic skills. They're the basic toolkit of productive thinking. But we've built a culture that actively punishes their use.

The Way Back

There's no single fix for a culture that's forgotten how to disagree. But there are practices that help.

Seek out the best version of views you oppose. Not the Reddit thread. Not the tweet. Find the most thoughtful, well-reasoned articulation of a position you disagree with and sit with it. If you can't find one that makes you think, you haven't looked hard enough.

Practice arguing the other side. Take a position you hold strongly and argue against it. Not as a debate exercise — as a genuine attempt to find the strongest counterarguments. If you can't construct a compelling case against your own position, you don't understand the topic well enough.

Treat changing your mind as a feature, not a bug. Every time you update a belief based on new evidence or a better argument, you've gotten smarter. Every time you refuse to update despite good reasons, you've gotten dumber. The direction is your choice.

Notice when arguments become performances. The moment you care more about how you look than what's true, you've left the realm of productive disagreement. It's fine to notice it. The skill is redirecting back.

The internet didn't kill good-faith argument. But it buried it under a mountain of outrage, dunks, and strawmen. The ability to disagree productively is still there — it just takes more effort to practice in a world that rewards the opposite.

The question isn't whether you can argue. Everyone can argue. The question is whether you can argue in a way that makes both sides smarter.

That's the hard version. That's the version worth practicing.