“Four Types of Disagreement” by silentbob

Epistemic status: a model I find helpful to make sense of disagreements and, sometimes, resolve them.

I like to categorize disagreements using four buckets:

Facts, values, strategy and labels

They don’t represent a perfect partitioning of “disagreement space”, meaning there is some overlap between them and they may not capture all possible disagreements, but they tend to get me pretty far in making sense of debates, in particular when and why they fail. In this post I’ll outline these four categories and provide some examples.

I also make the case that labels disagreements are the worst and in most cases can either be dropped entirely, or otherwise should be redirected into one of the other categories.

Facts

These are the most typical disagreements, and are probably what most people think disagreements are about most of the time, even when it's actually closer to a different category. Factual disagreements [...]

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Outline:

(00:58) Facts

(01:59) Values

(03:18) Strategy

(05:00) Labels

(07:49) Why This Matters

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 13th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9vKqAQEDxLvKh7KcN/four-types-of-disagreement

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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