Transcript, E224: Debating our way to understanding

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Jessi Hempel:

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday. It's our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing all of us. I hate conflict. I've always avoided disagreement. It's in my nature. I want to be liked. I want people around me to like each other. And the idea of arguing, well, it evokes conflict for me fighting. But this week's guest really pushed my thinking. Bo Seo is an expert at disagreement. He's a two-time world debate champion for the country of Australia and for Harvard, where he got his undergrad degree and where he's currently a law student. Bo asks us to separate disagreement from any ideas we have about conflict. He wants us to think about arguing as an art form. When practiced well, it can help us know and understand each other more deeply.

Bo's most recent book is called Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard. He believes that the opposite of bad disagreement isn't agreement, not at all. It's good disagreement. Bo's book is his exploration of what that can look like. He comes to this position from an early life spent as a Korean immigrant in Australia. In his childhood, Bo tried so hard to be agreeable. But trying to be agreeable all the time just made Bo feel smaller and smaller. We're going to hear from him about his early life, what propelled him into the world of debate. And then Bo will share his thoughts on how we can all learn to disagree better. Here's Bo.

Bo Seo:

So I grew up in Seoul, South Korea, which is a kind of urban jungle, or it felt like that from a perspective. And one thing about Korea is there are a lot of Koreans.

Jessi Hempel:

Funny that.

Bo Seo:

And I'm a dispositionally very shy person, and I thought, "Oh, I would just kind of get through as one of the crowd." And you felt, being a Korean in a big class of Koreans, it's a fairly homogenous society, that that was a sustainable rhythm for me. And moving to Australia, that became unsustainable overnight, that ethic of just going with the crowd and with the flow. So I moved with a handful of English phrases in my back pocket, and I learned that the hardest part of doing that is adjusting to real life conversation, which is an experience that I think a lot of second language learners do when they actually go to the place.

And I learned that the hardest kinds of conversations to adjust to were disagreements. Part of that is just the fear of exposing yourself in that way. Part of it is that I think just linguistically people's speech becomes a lot less precise when they're disagreeing. They're emotional, they speak in fragments. The syncopation, the rhythm jumps around. Even the facial cues become harder to read, I think, when people are upset. So there was the language part, and then there was also the fear that I had of being other. And that drawing attention to my differences would unsettle any belonging I had been able to achieve in this new place where I was trying to make a home. And because of those two reasons, I resolved really that I was going to be very agreeable, that I was going to be the nice person, the nice kid to whom nobody could object.

Jessi Hempel:

What you're describing, for different reasons, for all sorts of reasons, I think a lot of people figured out how to navigate their childhood and early life and into adulthood by being agreeable.

Bo Seo:

Yes. And I have it even now. That kid I don't think has gone anywhere. He's still around. I see him all the time. And that kid comes out in settings where you're not even expecting it. And I relearn the facial expression of just a very mild smile, just nodding and keeping a lot of my thoughts to myself. And that just kind of, "Mm." There's a range of agreeable noises.

Jessi Hempel:

You mean sort of like what I'm doing right now in conversation?

Bo Seo:

No, you're being a good host.

Jessi Hempel:

Well, so that degree, that level of agreeableness is kind of what got you into debate in the first place, ironically, right?

Bo Seo:

Exactly. So I thought I was going to live my life like that, and I think I could've. I think I could've. But then a fifth grade teacher, trying to coax me into doing this activity, made me a promise, which was that on the debate team, when one person speaks, no one else does. And to someone who had been interrupted and spun out of conversation and afraid that I wouldn't be given the time in which to speak, that promise of attention was irresistible. That's what led me to sign up.

Jessi Hempel:

And what did your career in professional debates teach you?

Bo Seo:

Two things come to mind. One is when we're trying to reclaim good conversation, we try to think about all the preconditions that might be required. Good faith, patience, generosity, fellow feeling. And one of the things that I think is unique about debate is before we get to any of that, there is just the practice of disagreeing well, and those practices embody a lot of those virtues. So when I was a kid starting out on the debate team, I wasn't thinking about, "Where's patience? Where's virtue? Where's all of these lofty ideals?" I was just following instructions. They said, "Make your argument this way. And when someone else is speaking, you can't talk because of those are the rules. And you're going to take notes on what they're saying and you're going to try and make your remarks connect with theirs." So it wasn't just that good faith leads to good action, but that it could be the other way around, that good action, good practice, good craft could give rise to some of those virtues. So I think that's the first thing.

I think the other thing, to put it simply and broadly, I think it taught me that disagreeing can be the path to a bigger life. That to present yourself in your fullness means presenting yourself in your difference as well as your similarities. That is not just a you in the world thing, but that allows you to have deeper relationships where you're talking to all of the other person as opposed to walking a tightrope on the areas in which you agree, that through the process of exchange, ideas butting up against one another, experience is butting up against one another, that there's an enormous generative power of new thoughts, new proposals, new pathways forward, that disagreeing need not be a destructive, but that it can be a creative act.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:08:04]

Bo Seo:

?... disagreeing need not be a destructive, but that it can be a creative act.

Jessi Hempel:

Well, you know Bo, as I listen to you speak, I keep hearing you articulate the power of expressing, but really it feels to me like the magic in your theory is that it is a framework and an instruction manual for how to listen well, because it's not enough to express, but in fact, you need to connect your position to the position of your opponent. And the thing that is going to help you best to do that is to listen well enough that you can hear them ... not just sort of skate across what they've said, but deeply hear what they're trying to say, which is often a little bit different than what they're saying. I have a sense, and this is intuition more than anything else, that that is a thing that we don't learn well how to do in our current culture.

Bo Seo:

I think I agree with you, and part of it is I think we live in a broadcasting culture where the idea is you put your ideas out there and maybe it finds an audience and it feels sometimes like you just talking into the ether and you project a brand, you project a thought. Whereas in debate, you have to be very sensitive to who is on the other side. I'll talk about that at a very practical level and a general level.

The very practical level is, if the other side makes an argument and you don't respond, that is potentially a reason for you to lose the debate. If you are offering something that you think is a critique of the other side's argument, but in fact it has nothing to do with it, then that argument still stands. So we learn as a matter of paper and pen, write down with as much fidelity and accuracy as possible what the other side is saying, and see how different this is to our everyday disagreements, where in our own minds we twist the other person's words and we try and make it sound as bad as it possibly can or as maliciously motivated as we can.

Whereas as a debater, even the fiercest, most aggressive kind of debater engaged in rebuttal, in taking down the other side's argument, when they're writing down what the other side has said, they're as cool and dispassionate and accurate as a neutral party, as a courtroom stenographer. There's a series of tactics and skills and drills that you are taught in debate to help you be able to do that.

These days when you look up YouTube and you look for debate and those kinds of videos, the main genre of it is debate as take down. It's a kind of one-off exchange where someone schools another and then the other person scampers off never to be seen again. It's so the opposite in actual competitive debate of the sort I was engaged in, where you may win, you may lose, but the most important thing is you're going to see the other person again the next week on a different topic, on a different side of the topic in a different setting.

You have to find ways of talking to one another that is sustainable, that's going to keep both sides wanting to stay engaged in this repeat game. I think that has a lot to do with feeling as though you had been heard in the exchange. And that requires all of us to listen before asking ourselves to be listened to.

Jessi Hempel:

We're going to take a quick break here. When we come back, more with Bo Seo.

And we're back. In Bo's book, he talks about something else that feels deeply important to get into here, and that's the nature of boundaries when we're disagreeing or debating. On a debate team, it seems relatively easy to remember that you're debating a classmate or a friend, you're going to ride the bus together or play on the same sports team after you're done making your case. You know you're dealing with someone you care about. But out in life in the rest of the world. Well, it sometimes seems harder to remember that. I asked Bo to share his thoughts on how we manage relationships through conflict. Once again, here's Bo Seo.

Bo Seo:

The smallness of communities in this setting does not mean that it's trivial. When you think about the building blocks of society, of family, of community, of neighborhoods, of school boards where you're going to see the other members again and again, so you can't flip out in one meeting and then expect to continue that dialogue. That is the stuff of democracy. That's the stuff of society. Being able to have that historically small town mentality of, I'm in it with these guys and I have to have some face, some record, some relationship that's going to sustain our living together, I think that's an important thing to recover at this time.

Where it can feel like we're just broadcasting into the metaverse and we're living in the United States as a whole, as opposed to individual towns or streets or communities within. So I think that's important. And very much agree on your point within the family too.

Perversely, it's the case that disagreements in our closest and most important relationships tend to be the hardest. In part because of the reason that I think you're touching on, which is when we decide to share our life with someone, which is just a magnificent, wonderful part of the human experience, we allow a lot of overlap. That's what it means to share a life. There are a lot of things you could disagree about. So what starts with the dishes or the laundry also becomes about the way you looked at me the other day, what your in-laws said to me, so on and so on.

And in those instances, the teaching from debate, which as you said is structured, is designed, is limited, is to say, every disagreement should start with some agreement and not least agreement about what we're disagreeing about. And when we agree that what we're talking about is the dishes and not anything else, that takes off the table for the purposes of that discussion, all these other disagreements that we could be having, but that would be a distraction for the kind of conversation that we want to have now.

Jessi Hempel:

It's such an elegant point, Bo, that it prompts me to want to ask you, as the world-class champion in this craft, do you find it easy or even possible to carry through these principles to your personal life?

Bo Seo:

The romantic consequences of being a world champion in debate are catastrophic. We don't even want to ... I mean, it might be a short segment. We want to-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]

Bo Seo:

A short segment.

We want to stay on that. But the biggest lesson I've taken from all that is you have to choose your battles. I think it's two things. So one is you have to choose your battles. And one of the frameworks I give in the book is to ask before jumping into any disagreement whether some conditions are there for it to go well. And this I call the RISA framework. It's asking whether the disagreement between you and the other side is real. It's not a misunderstanding or a perceived slight. That it's important enough to justify having the disagreement. That it's specific enough, so you're going to be able to make progress in the time that you have allotted to it, so you're not debating the virtues of liberalism in the 15 minutes before you pick up the kids from soccer. And finally, whether the two sides are aligned in their reasons for wanting to engage in the dispute. And it's not that they have to have the same reasons, but can you get on board with the motivations the other side has?

So I think it's about choosing the arguments that you partake in before you jump into it. And the second thing that has helped me is to say, debate is one way to have a disagreement. Just the way that disagreeing is one way in which we can address the challenge of us being different, but having to live with one another. So other ways in which we can disagree include negotiating, just hearing one another out, airing out our complaints. It could be bargaining, give or take, those kinds of things.

And I want to say that debate helps us achieve all of those other things, that it can be a useful tool among many. A useful language of disagreement among many. But the lesson that I've had to try and live out in my personal life is to know the limits of debate and to say, one of the good things about debate is that it ends, sometimes and you use the insights and lessons you've taken away from that conversation to inform all of these other ways of being with others. And it shouldn't take the place of those other approaches.

Jessi Hempel:

One thing I feel like I've learned personally from my youth, I'm in the middle of my life solidly right now, is that in my youth, I thought that agreement was aspirationally where you wanted to land and necessary, in order to be in community with people. And I have come to understand that disagreement, particularly when it's well understood, is a fine and comfortable place to live with the people you love.

Bo Seo:

That's a wonderful way to say that. And I have been seeing more and more, the particular downsides of communities organized just around agreement. And I see it a lot in the political context of, there's a kind of puritanism that sets in when you're just congregated around similarity. There's an intolerance for internal difference. There's a tendency to become more extreme to other those who are not included within the circle.

And so one of the questions that I was grappling with is, where are we at our best? And I think a part of that is when we are in community with those with whom we disagree. One thing that stood out to me in your description is it's a feeling of sitting in ambiguity. It's a feeling of sitting in incompleteness. It's a feeling of sitting in knowledge of your limits and you're reminded of those limits because people say, "We think you're wrong." And I think that's helps.

Jessi Hempel:

I think a lot about how the internet has changed our ways of being in community with each other for the positive and for the negative. And one thing it does very effectively is it splits us into these sort of individual aspects of our identities around which we find similarity. And from which sometimes we extrapolate agreement. And it gets us into trouble and I'll give you an example. I ride my Peloton and I'm in a group of Peloton moms. We use our Peloton mom hashtag. And so those are my people. And then one of them in the comments not so long ago, it was some hot button political issue that was just the opposite of the way that I thought about it. I think it had to do with freedom to carry arms. And if you listen to the show this, I feel like I would love guns to be very limited in our country. And all of a sudden I went from thinking, "We had everything in common." To, "We have nothing in common."

And I was like, "Has she ruined Peloton for me?" Can I still appreciate this aspect in which we agree, which is a great workout on a Peloton is awesome. Or do I need to be in full agreement with her on everything, in order to be in community with her? And by the way, the jury is still out because I'm emotionally uncomfortable about that whole thing.

Bo Seo:

It's fascinating. I worry a lot about, I think it is probably the case that a lot of our day-to-day interactions with disagreement are mediated through technology, if they don't take place online. Because we present only a sliver of ourselves on the internet. And because that sliver is usually the content that's prioritized on the particular websites, which tends to be the stuff that gets the most reaction. That is political organization often or political affiliation, that we lose sight of what I think is actually true about our experiences, which is, we live with those people on the internet in our day-to-day lives.

They might be in our building or they're certainly contributing to the same public fisc, right? Because they live in our state or they vote in the same elections that we do. So we do live together in a way that gets easy to lose sight of.

And another trend that I notice a lot on the internet is the design pushes you to talk past the person that you're talking to. So even though you are disagreeing with some other Twitter user, you are actually doing it for the benefit of the people on the wings who are just the audience, for the benefit of the people who already agree with you. So that if you use some words or some hashtags and you say, "[inaudible 00:23:14] the Libs." Or one of these things, you are just using the other person as a vehicle to talk to the people on the wings to whom you already agree.

And so they become not an actual person in their fullness and complexity, but just the stand in for a conservative or a liberal. And-

Jessi Hempel:

Extensive virtue signaling.

Bo Seo:

Exactly. Exactly. And there's a way in which I think debate at its best is the most human activity. And it requires us to engage all of the faculties that we humans and maybe we uniquely as humans have, powers of empathy, of speech, of meaning making, of symbolism, all of these things. But when we're arguing in such ways on-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]

Bo Seo:

... but when we're arguing in such ways online we tend to be very machine-like. We tend to be almost extensions of the algorithm that we're feeding into. And so-

Jessi Hempel:

The rhetoric goes away.

Bo Seo:

A lot of things go away. A lot of things go away. So I think that's something to be aware of.

Jessi Hempel:

I'm so optimistic about technology generally, and it's my position that we humans need to get more involved in designing the technology to support the best aspects of our humanity. From that lens, I just wonder, do you see things out there that actually make you very hopeful?

Bo Seo:

That's very interesting. On the broader point, I agree completely. In some ways I think debate, the rules of debate, the techniques of debate, the craft of debate, those are forms of technologies too, elementary ones, to give shape and structure to what is otherwise an impossible task of just disagreeing. So design, I think, is really key to what an antidote should be. As we're thinking about designing platforms that are equal to the difficulty of the task, I think hopefully a better understanding of what it is that we want from debate should help with that.

In terms of things that make us hopeful, in writing the book, I reported on two things. So one is a community on Reddit called Change My View, which has been described as the last green space on the internet or something like that. I think the other one by the way, which I know less about, is the ways in which Wikipedia editors resolve their disputes. I think what those two communities have in common is they do tend to be small. That's one thing that should condition just how we think about it. But they have common purpose, often a set of rules, here again, the design element coming in, and importantly repeat play. They have reputations to uphold, and it's usually not their full names, but it's the star systems and points to help us keep track. So there are those pockets, and they may be examples.

Jessi Hempel:

I would go on to say they're communities in which the members of the community derive their sense of belonging by upholding those values and upholding those rules. To that end, I think size matters. When you think about the internet, it's vast, but in its most effective moments, those moments happen out of smallness.

Bo Seo:

That's precisely what we were saying before about, or what I was suggesting before about democracies too. I hadn't thought about that connection. I think it is a question of how do we form identity around those kinds of values? That feels really central to me in this political moment. What does it mean to form common identity around not specific positions that you have, but the ways in which we talk about the different positions we all have.

Then the other thing I reported on was IBM built this AI system, and it was in the vein of the grand challenges they do of Deep Blue for chess, of Go and Jeopardy. This one is a debater and is a competitive debater. It debated a colleague of mine from the debate circuit, and there were some things that it did extraordinarily well, like producing facts. Just an enormous amount of information that it had at its fingertips. I don't know if it has fingers. But on the whole, you saw its limits, and you saw its limits in terms of not only being able to hear, but to listen and the distinction that you made of being able to connect with where the audience is at, what they need to hear. That made me think if we can keep this activity human, if we can maintain that humanity even in technology, online, on social media, that this is a activity in which we have some advantages. I took some from that as well.

Jessi Hempel:

That was Bo Seo. Check out his book, Good Arguments, out now in paperback, wherever books are sold. This week on Hello Monday Office Hours, we're going to be talking about how to disagree effectively, creatively, dare I say beautifully. So my question for you is this. What have you taken away from Bo's framework? What have you learned on your own? We're going to talk about it at 3:00 PM Eastern on Wednesday, just like we do every Wednesday afternoon. We'll go live from the LinkedIn News Page. Now, if you're not sure where to find us, you can send us an email at [email protected]. We'll send you the link.

Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn News. Sarah Storm produces our show with help from Lolia Briggs. It's engineered and mixed by Assaf Gidron. Our theme music was composed just for us by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Michaela Greer helps us frame better arguments. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Coop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jessi Hempel. We'll be back next Monday. Thanks for listening.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:09]

Jessi Hempel:

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday. It's our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing all of us. I hate conflict. I've always avoided disagreement. It's in my nature. I want to be liked. I want people around me to like each other. And the idea of arguing, well, it evokes conflict for me fighting. But this week's guest really pushed my thinking. Bo Seo is an expert at disagreement. He's a two-time world debate champion for the country of Australia and for Harvard, where he got his undergrad degree and where he's currently a law student. Bo asks us to separate disagreement from any ideas we have about conflict. He wants us to think about arguing as an art form. When practiced well, it can help us know and understand each other more deeply.

Bo's most recent book is called Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard. He believes that the opposite of bad disagreement isn't agreement, not at all. It's good disagreement. Bo's book is his exploration of what that can look like. He comes to this position from an early life spent as a Korean immigrant in Australia. In his childhood, Bo tried so hard to be agreeable. But trying to be agreeable all the time just made Bo feel smaller and smaller. We're going to hear from him about his early life, what propelled him into the world of debate. And then Bo will share his thoughts on how we can all learn to disagree better. Here's Bo.

Bo Seo:

So I grew up in Seoul, South Korea, which is a kind of urban jungle, or it felt like that from a perspective. And one thing about Korea is there are a lot of Koreans.

Jessi Hempel:

Funny that.

Bo Seo:

And I'm a dispositionally very shy person, and I thought, "Oh, I would just kind of get through as one of the crowd." And you felt, being a Korean in a big class of Koreans, it's a fairly homogenous society, that that was a sustainable rhythm for me. And moving to Australia, that became unsustainable overnight, that ethic of just going with the crowd and with the flow. So I moved with a handful of English phrases in my back pocket, and I learned that the hardest part of doing that is adjusting to real life conversation, which is an experience that I think a lot of second language learners do when they actually go to the place.

And I learned that the hardest kinds of conversations to adjust to were disagreements. Part of that is just the fear of exposing yourself in that way. Part of it is that I think just linguistically people's speech becomes a lot less precise when they're disagreeing. They're emotional, they speak in fragments. The syncopation, the rhythm jumps around. Even the facial cues become harder to read, I think, when people are upset. So there was the language part, and then there was also the fear that I had of being other. And that drawing attention to my differences would unsettle any belonging I had been able to achieve in this new place where I was trying to make a home. And because of those two reasons, I resolved really that I was going to be very agreeable, that I was going to be the nice person, the nice kid to whom nobody could object.

Jessi Hempel:

What you're describing, for different reasons, for all sorts of reasons, I think a lot of people figured out how to navigate their childhood and early life and into adulthood by being agreeable.

Bo Seo:

Yes. And I have it even now. That kid I don't think has gone anywhere. He's still around. I see him all the time. And that kid comes out in settings where you're not even expecting it. And I relearn the facial expression of just a very mild smile, just nodding and keeping a lot of my thoughts to myself. And that just kind of, "Mm." There's a range of agreeable noises.

Jessi Hempel:

You mean sort of like what I'm doing right now in conversation?

Bo Seo:

No, you're being a good host.

Jessi Hempel:

Well, so that degree, that level of agreeableness is kind of what got you into debate in the first place, ironically, right?

Bo Seo:

Exactly. So I thought I was going to live my life like that, and I think I could've. I think I could've. But then a fifth grade teacher, trying to coax me into doing this activity, made me a promise, which was that on the debate team, when one person speaks, no one else does. And to someone who had been interrupted and spun out of conversation and afraid that I wouldn't be given the time in which to speak, that promise of attention was irresistible. That's what led me to sign up.

Jessi Hempel:

And what did your career in professional debates teach you?

Bo Seo:

Two things come to mind. One is when we're trying to reclaim good conversation, we try to think about all the preconditions that might be required. Good faith, patience, generosity, fellow feeling. And one of the things that I think is unique about debate is before we get to any of that, there is just the practice of disagreeing well, and those practices embody a lot of those virtues. So when I was a kid starting out on the debate team, I wasn't thinking about, "Where's patience? Where's virtue? Where's all of these lofty ideals?" I was just following instructions. They said, "Make your argument this way. And when someone else is speaking, you can't talk because of those are the rules. And you're going to take notes on what they're saying and you're going to try and make your remarks connect with theirs." So it wasn't just that good faith leads to good action, but that it could be the other way around, that good action, good practice, good craft could give rise to some of those virtues. So I think that's the first thing.

I think the other thing, to put it simply and broadly, I think it taught me that disagreeing can be the path to a bigger life. That to present yourself in your fullness means presenting yourself in your difference as well as your similarities. That is not just a you in the world thing, but that allows you to have deeper relationships where you're talking to all of the other person as opposed to walking a tightrope on the areas in which you agree, that through the process of exchange, ideas butting up against one another, experience is butting up against one another, that there's an enormous generative power of new thoughts, new proposals, new pathways forward, that disagreeing need not be a destructive, but that it can be a creative act.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:08:04]

Bo Seo:

?... disagreeing need not be a destructive, but that it can be a creative act.

Jessi Hempel:

Well, you know Bo, as I listen to you speak, I keep hearing you articulate the power of expressing, but really it feels to me like the magic in your theory is that it is a framework and an instruction manual for how to listen well, because it's not enough to express, but in fact, you need to connect your position to the position of your opponent. And the thing that is going to help you best to do that is to listen well enough that you can hear them ... not just sort of skate across what they've said, but deeply hear what they're trying to say, which is often a little bit different than what they're saying. I have a sense, and this is intuition more than anything else, that that is a thing that we don't learn well how to do in our current culture.

Bo Seo:

I think I agree with you, and part of it is I think we live in a broadcasting culture where the idea is you put your ideas out there and maybe it finds an audience and it feels sometimes like you just talking into the ether and you project a brand, you project a thought. Whereas in debate, you have to be very sensitive to who is on the other side. I'll talk about that at a very practical level and a general level.

The very practical level is, if the other side makes an argument and you don't respond, that is potentially a reason for you to lose the debate. If you are offering something that you think is a critique of the other side's argument, but in fact it has nothing to do with it, then that argument still stands. So we learn as a matter of paper and pen, write down with as much fidelity and accuracy as possible what the other side is saying, and see how different this is to our everyday disagreements, where in our own minds we twist the other person's words and we try and make it sound as bad as it possibly can or as maliciously motivated as we can.

Whereas as a debater, even the fiercest, most aggressive kind of debater engaged in rebuttal, in taking down the other side's argument, when they're writing down what the other side has said, they're as cool and dispassionate and accurate as a neutral party, as a courtroom stenographer. There's a series of tactics and skills and drills that you are taught in debate to help you be able to do that.

These days when you look up YouTube and you look for debate and those kinds of videos, the main genre of it is debate as take down. It's a kind of one-off exchange where someone schools another and then the other person scampers off never to be seen again. It's so the opposite in actual competitive debate of the sort I was engaged in, where you may win, you may lose, but the most important thing is you're going to see the other person again the next week on a different topic, on a different side of the topic in a different setting.

You have to find ways of talking to one another that is sustainable, that's going to keep both sides wanting to stay engaged in this repeat game. I think that has a lot to do with feeling as though you had been heard in the exchange. And that requires all of us to listen before asking ourselves to be listened to.

Jessi Hempel:

We're going to take a quick break here. When we come back, more with Bo Seo.

And we're back. In Bo's book, he talks about something else that feels deeply important to get into here, and that's the nature of boundaries when we're disagreeing or debating. On a debate team, it seems relatively easy to remember that you're debating a classmate or a friend, you're going to ride the bus together or play on the same sports team after you're done making your case. You know you're dealing with someone you care about. But out in life in the rest of the world. Well, it sometimes seems harder to remember that. I asked Bo to share his thoughts on how we manage relationships through conflict. Once again, here's Bo Seo.

Bo Seo:

The smallness of communities in this setting does not mean that it's trivial. When you think about the building blocks of society, of family, of community, of neighborhoods, of school boards where you're going to see the other members again and again, so you can't flip out in one meeting and then expect to continue that dialogue. That is the stuff of democracy. That's the stuff of society. Being able to have that historically small town mentality of, I'm in it with these guys and I have to have some face, some record, some relationship that's going to sustain our living together, I think that's an important thing to recover at this time.

Where it can feel like we're just broadcasting into the metaverse and we're living in the United States as a whole, as opposed to individual towns or streets or communities within. So I think that's important. And very much agree on your point within the family too.

Perversely, it's the case that disagreements in our closest and most important relationships tend to be the hardest. In part because of the reason that I think you're touching on, which is when we decide to share our life with someone, which is just a magnificent, wonderful part of the human experience, we allow a lot of overlap. That's what it means to share a life. There are a lot of things you could disagree about. So what starts with the dishes or the laundry also becomes about the way you looked at me the other day, what your in-laws said to me, so on and so on.

And in those instances, the teaching from debate, which as you said is structured, is designed, is limited, is to say, every disagreement should start with some agreement and not least agreement about what we're disagreeing about. And when we agree that what we're talking about is the dishes and not anything else, that takes off the table for the purposes of that discussion, all these other disagreements that we could be having, but that would be a distraction for the kind of conversation that we want to have now.

Jessi Hempel:

It's such an elegant point, Bo, that it prompts me to want to ask you, as the world-class champion in this craft, do you find it easy or even possible to carry through these principles to your personal life?

Bo Seo:

The romantic consequences of being a world champion in debate are catastrophic. We don't even want to ... I mean, it might be a short segment. We want to-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]

Bo Seo:

A short segment.

We want to stay on that. But the biggest lesson I've taken from all that is you have to choose your battles. I think it's two things. So one is you have to choose your battles. And one of the frameworks I give in the book is to ask before jumping into any disagreement whether some conditions are there for it to go well. And this I call the RISA framework. It's asking whether the disagreement between you and the other side is real. It's not a misunderstanding or a perceived slight. That it's important enough to justify having the disagreement. That it's specific enough, so you're going to be able to make progress in the time that you have allotted to it, so you're not debating the virtues of liberalism in the 15 minutes before you pick up the kids from soccer. And finally, whether the two sides are aligned in their reasons for wanting to engage in the dispute. And it's not that they have to have the same reasons, but can you get on board with the motivations the other side has?

So I think it's about choosing the arguments that you partake in before you jump into it. And the second thing that has helped me is to say, debate is one way to have a disagreement. Just the way that disagreeing is one way in which we can address the challenge of us being different, but having to live with one another. So other ways in which we can disagree include negotiating, just hearing one another out, airing out our complaints. It could be bargaining, give or take, those kinds of things.

And I want to say that debate helps us achieve all of those other things, that it can be a useful tool among many. A useful language of disagreement among many. But the lesson that I've had to try and live out in my personal life is to know the limits of debate and to say, one of the good things about debate is that it ends, sometimes and you use the insights and lessons you've taken away from that conversation to inform all of these other ways of being with others. And it shouldn't take the place of those other approaches.

Jessi Hempel:

One thing I feel like I've learned personally from my youth, I'm in the middle of my life solidly right now, is that in my youth, I thought that agreement was aspirationally where you wanted to land and necessary, in order to be in community with people. And I have come to understand that disagreement, particularly when it's well understood, is a fine and comfortable place to live with the people you love.

Bo Seo:

That's a wonderful way to say that. And I have been seeing more and more, the particular downsides of communities organized just around agreement. And I see it a lot in the political context of, there's a kind of puritanism that sets in when you're just congregated around similarity. There's an intolerance for internal difference. There's a tendency to become more extreme to other those who are not included within the circle.

And so one of the questions that I was grappling with is, where are we at our best? And I think a part of that is when we are in community with those with whom we disagree. One thing that stood out to me in your description is it's a feeling of sitting in ambiguity. It's a feeling of sitting in incompleteness. It's a feeling of sitting in knowledge of your limits and you're reminded of those limits because people say, "We think you're wrong." And I think that's helps.

Jessi Hempel:

I think a lot about how the internet has changed our ways of being in community with each other for the positive and for the negative. And one thing it does very effectively is it splits us into these sort of individual aspects of our identities around which we find similarity. And from which sometimes we extrapolate agreement. And it gets us into trouble and I'll give you an example. I ride my Peloton and I'm in a group of Peloton moms. We use our Peloton mom hashtag. And so those are my people. And then one of them in the comments not so long ago, it was some hot button political issue that was just the opposite of the way that I thought about it. I think it had to do with freedom to carry arms. And if you listen to the show this, I feel like I would love guns to be very limited in our country. And all of a sudden I went from thinking, "We had everything in common." To, "We have nothing in common."

And I was like, "Has she ruined Peloton for me?" Can I still appreciate this aspect in which we agree, which is a great workout on a Peloton is awesome. Or do I need to be in full agreement with her on everything, in order to be in community with her? And by the way, the jury is still out because I'm emotionally uncomfortable about that whole thing.

Bo Seo:

It's fascinating. I worry a lot about, I think it is probably the case that a lot of our day-to-day interactions with disagreement are mediated through technology, if they don't take place online. Because we present only a sliver of ourselves on the internet. And because that sliver is usually the content that's prioritized on the particular websites, which tends to be the stuff that gets the most reaction. That is political organization often or political affiliation, that we lose sight of what I think is actually true about our experiences, which is, we live with those people on the internet in our day-to-day lives.

They might be in our building or they're certainly contributing to the same public fisc, right? Because they live in our state or they vote in the same elections that we do. So we do live together in a way that gets easy to lose sight of.

And another trend that I notice a lot on the internet is the design pushes you to talk past the person that you're talking to. So even though you are disagreeing with some other Twitter user, you are actually doing it for the benefit of the people on the wings who are just the audience, for the benefit of the people who already agree with you. So that if you use some words or some hashtags and you say, "[inaudible 00:23:14] the Libs." Or one of these things, you are just using the other person as a vehicle to talk to the people on the wings to whom you already agree.

And so they become not an actual person in their fullness and complexity, but just the stand in for a conservative or a liberal. And-

Jessi Hempel:

Extensive virtue signaling.

Bo Seo:

Exactly. Exactly. And there's a way in which I think debate at its best is the most human activity. And it requires us to engage all of the faculties that we humans and maybe we uniquely as humans have, powers of empathy, of speech, of meaning making, of symbolism, all of these things. But when we're arguing in such ways on-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]

Bo Seo:

... but when we're arguing in such ways online we tend to be very machine-like. We tend to be almost extensions of the algorithm that we're feeding into. And so-

Jessi Hempel:

The rhetoric goes away.

Bo Seo:

A lot of things go away. A lot of things go away. So I think that's something to be aware of.

Jessi Hempel:

I'm so optimistic about technology generally, and it's my position that we humans need to get more involved in designing the technology to support the best aspects of our humanity. From that lens, I just wonder, do you see things out there that actually make you very hopeful?

Bo Seo:

That's very interesting. On the broader point, I agree completely. In some ways I think debate, the rules of debate, the techniques of debate, the craft of debate, those are forms of technologies too, elementary ones, to give shape and structure to what is otherwise an impossible task of just disagreeing. So design, I think, is really key to what an antidote should be. As we're thinking about designing platforms that are equal to the difficulty of the task, I think hopefully a better understanding of what it is that we want from debate should help with that.

In terms of things that make us hopeful, in writing the book, I reported on two things. So one is a community on Reddit called Change My View, which has been described as the last green space on the internet or something like that. I think the other one by the way, which I know less about, is the ways in which Wikipedia editors resolve their disputes. I think what those two communities have in common is they do tend to be small. That's one thing that should condition just how we think about it. But they have common purpose, often a set of rules, here again, the design element coming in, and importantly repeat play. They have reputations to uphold, and it's usually not their full names, but it's the star systems and points to help us keep track. So there are those pockets, and they may be examples.

Jessi Hempel:

I would go on to say they're communities in which the members of the community derive their sense of belonging by upholding those values and upholding those rules. To that end, I think size matters. When you think about the internet, it's vast, but in its most effective moments, those moments happen out of smallness.

Bo Seo:

That's precisely what we were saying before about, or what I was suggesting before about democracies too. I hadn't thought about that connection. I think it is a question of how do we form identity around those kinds of values? That feels really central to me in this political moment. What does it mean to form common identity around not specific positions that you have, but the ways in which we talk about the different positions we all have.

Then the other thing I reported on was IBM built this AI system, and it was in the vein of the grand challenges they do of Deep Blue for chess, of Go and Jeopardy. This one is a debater and is a competitive debater. It debated a colleague of mine from the debate circuit, and there were some things that it did extraordinarily well, like producing facts. Just an enormous amount of information that it had at its fingertips. I don't know if it has fingers. But on the whole, you saw its limits, and you saw its limits in terms of not only being able to hear, but to listen and the distinction that you made of being able to connect with where the audience is at, what they need to hear. That made me think if we can keep this activity human, if we can maintain that humanity even in technology, online, on social media, that this is a activity in which we have some advantages. I took some from that as well.

Jessi Hempel:

That was Bo Seo. Check out his book, Good Arguments, out now in paperback, wherever books are sold. This week on Hello Monday Office Hours, we're going to be talking about how to disagree effectively, creatively, dare I say beautifully. So my question for you is this. What have you taken away from Bo's framework? What have you learned on your own? We're going to talk about it at 3:00 PM Eastern on Wednesday, just like we do every Wednesday afternoon. We'll go live from the LinkedIn News Page. Now, if you're not sure where to find us, you can send us an email at [email protected]. We'll send you the link.

Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn News. Sarah Storm produces our show with help from Lolia Briggs. It's engineered and mixed by Assaf Gidron. Our theme music was composed just for us by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Michaela Greer helps us frame better arguments. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Coop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jessi Hempel. We'll be back next Monday. Thanks for listening.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:09]