You Are Not Arguing. You Are Rebooting.

Here is something that took me an embarrassingly long time to notice: most arguments are not about the thing they appear to be about. Two people are discussing, say, whether a particular management approach is effective, or whether a technology is overhyped, or whether pineapple belongs on pizza. They are each presenting evidence, deploying counterarguments, citing experience. It looks, from a distance, like a debate. It has the structural features of rational discourse. There are sentences. There are pauses while the other person speaks. There is the occasional meaningful pause that is not so much listening as reloading.

What is actually happening, in a significant number of cases, is that each person is running a very old programme whose existence they are not aware of, defending conclusions they reached years or decades ago for reasons they have entirely forgotten, with the confidence of someone who believes they arrived at those conclusions just now, through logic, like a proper adult.

This is not a criticism of other people. It is a description of all of us. Including, with particular emphasis, me.

The Installation Process You Don't Remember

Human beings arrive in the world in a state of considerable openness. We have no opinions about monetary policy, no feelings about which football team represents the correct moral choice, no views on whether a firm handshake indicates character or merely a tendency toward joint inflammation. We are, informationally speaking, a fresh install. The hard drive is empty. The operating system is running. We are ready to receive input.

And then the input arrives. For approximately the first twenty years of life, it arrives constantly, from every direction, from sources we trust completely because we are dependent on them for food, shelter, and the emotional reassurance that we are not, in fact, profoundly alone in an indifferent universe. Parents. Teachers. Peer groups. Whichever fragment of media happened to be dominant during our formative years. The particular economic moment we grew up in. The specific version of history we were taught, which varied considerably depending on which country was doing the teaching and what it preferred to remember about itself.

None of this input arrived with a label saying "OPINION: HANDLE WITH CARE — NOT UNIVERSALLY APPLICABLE." It arrived as reality. It arrived as the way things are, the way things work, the things that decent people believe, the things that sensible people know. And we filed it accordingly, in the part of the brain that stores facts rather than the part that stores provisional hypotheses subject to revision upon presentation of contradictory evidence.

Then, sometime in adulthood, we encountered someone who had received different input and filed it in exactly the same way, with exactly the same confidence, and we called them wrong.

The Debugger's Perspective

I have spent thirty years working with technology and, perhaps more relevantly, with the humans who use it. One of the genuinely useful things that experience in technology gives you is a diagnostic instinct: when a system behaves in an unexpected or irrational way, the first question is not "why is this system wrong?" but "what is this system's model of the world, and what in that model would make this behaviour make sense?"

This turns out to be an extraordinarily useful lens for human beings as well. When someone holds a position that seems to you obviously incorrect, the interesting question is not how they managed to arrive at something so clearly mistaken. The interesting question is: what would the world have to look like, from the inside of their experience, for this position to feel obviously correct? What was the input? When was it installed? What was the environment that made it feel like fact rather than opinion?

This is not relativism. It is not the position that all views are equally valid. Some views are straightforwardly contradicted by evidence, and the evidence does not care about the sincerity with which the contrary view was absorbed. But understanding the origin of a belief is not the same as endorsing it. A debugger who understands why a programme is behaving incorrectly is not endorsing the bug. They are in a considerably better position to fix it.

 

The alternative, which is the approach that dominates most public discourse, is to treat the other person's wrong belief as a failure of intelligence or character, present more evidence, and express increasing frustration when the evidence fails to update them. This approach has a long and distinguished history of not working. The evidence is, at this point, conclusive. Presenting evidence to someone who is defending installed programming is approximately as effective as shouting at a smoke detector. The smoke detector is not wrong. It is responding to the conditions it was designed to respond to. Shouting at it changes nothing about those conditions.

The Comedy of Self-Discovery

The genuinely entertaining part of this, and I mean that sincerely, is the moment you catch yourself doing it. I recommend this experience. It is humbling, occasionally mortifying, and ultimately rather liberating.

I have had strong opinions about management structures, about the correct way to run a technology programme, about what makes a good leader and a bad one. I have held these opinions with considerable confidence. I have, upon reflection, noticed that a significant number of them trace directly back to the first people who managed me, or to the first technology programmes I worked on, or to books I read in my twenties whose arguments I absorbed before I had enough experience to interrogate them properly. Some of those opinions have turned out to be correct, in the sense that subsequent experience has confirmed them. Others have turned out to be the intellectual equivalent of a preference for a particular brand of cereal that I liked at seven and have never really examined since.

The cereal metaphor is doing real work there. A large number of strong adult opinions are essentially preferences formed when we were in no position to evaluate them, maintained by the simple fact that we have never thought to look at them directly. They sit in the background, running quietly, occasionally producing outputs that feel like conclusions when they are actually echoes.

The Practical Upside

Here is the genuinely good news, and I am aware that having spent several paragraphs pointing out that most of our opinions are pre-installed software running on hardware we did not choose, I owe you some good news.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And once you cannot unsee it, it becomes an enormously useful tool.

In a meeting where two senior people are deadlocked on an approach, the question "what experience would make this position feel obviously right?" is more likely to break the deadlock than another round of presenting the same evidence more loudly. In a strategic disagreement that has been running for three months without resolution, the question "when did we form this view and what were the conditions that made it feel correct?" will frequently reveal that both sides are defending conclusions from a situation that no longer exists, about a problem that has since changed shape.

In any negotiation, at any level, the single most useful thing you can know about the other party is not their position but the experience that produced it. Positions are defended. Experiences are understood. And once an experience is understood, it is possible to either address it directly, acknowledge it honestly, or at minimum stop being baffled by why a clearly reasonable person keeps arriving at a clearly unreasonable conclusion.

They are not unreasonable. They have different source code.

The Patch You Can Apply Right Now

There is a small but genuinely effective intervention available to anyone who would like to start running more updated software. It requires no special equipment, no expensive consultants, and no significant rearrangement of your schedule. It is simply this: the next time you find yourself in an argument and notice that you are getting heated, pause for a moment and ask yourself when you first believed this thing.

Not why you believe it. When. Where were you? How old? Who told you, or what happened to you, that installed this particular view as fact rather than hypothesis? Is the source you would rely on today? Has the world changed enough since then that the original conditions no longer apply? Is there a possibility, however remote and philosophically uncomfortable, that the view made perfect sense given the available information at the time and is simply running on outdated data?

This exercise will not always produce a different conclusion. Sometimes you will trace a belief back to its source and find that the source was solid and the subsequent evidence has confirmed it and you were right all along, which is a satisfying outcome and you are entitled to enjoy it. But sometimes you will find the seven-year-old with the cereal. And finding them is not a defeat. It is a system update. It is the most productive thing that can happen in a debate that has been running, unresolved, for longer than it should.

The people on the other side of your arguments have their own seven-year-olds. So does everyone. This is not a reason to dismiss what people believe. It is a reason to be genuinely curious about where it came from, which turns out to be considerably more interesting than being right, and considerably more likely to lead somewhere useful.

 

Most people are not arguing ideas. They are defending years of programming they never realised they received.

The first step is noticing this about yourself. The second step is finding it funny. Both steps are available immediately, and neither requires a software licence.

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