Everything I’ve Achieved as a Writer Came From One Skill: Disagreement

Your battles will shape your life, for better or worse.

We learn about how caterpillars turn into butterflies and what photosynthesis is, but we rarely get one solid lesson on how to be wrong. The average person learns to avoid being wrong (or, just as well, admitting they’re wrong) like they learn to avoid touching a hot stove.

The moment I understood that I should be running toward my errors instead of away from them was during the year that never really ended: 2020.

Around the height of cancel culture madness, I started publishing critiques of ideas like white privilege and censorship, but doing so with the humility of someone who had bought into these ideas until recently.

I accidentally discovered that modeling the epistemic humility required for constructive disagreement while our culture was besieged by censorship, hostility, and hysterics instantly popularized my work.

This could be the part of my story where I made “ex-leftist” a personal brand and spent the rest of my life telling people how I was wrong that one time. But what I learned wasn’t just that “leftism is flawed”—the cardinal flaw I uncovered was how leftism justified shielding my ideas from constructive disagreement.

That lesson is why I published another supposedly career-killing confession: I had claimed to oppose identity politics, but wasn’t holding Jewish nationalist movements like Zionism to the same standard. During the intense tribalism that followed the years after October 7th, I admitted to changing my mind and it changed my life.

The beauty in honest disagreement isn’t just the truth you find outside yourself, but the truth you find out about yourself.

“My people” pulled away with polite frostiness. Invitations quietly evaporated. 2020 all over again. Articulating my disagreement took me off the road to professional partisanship and toward financial independence and friendships that are more than political alliances.

Whether you avoid it or embrace it, your disagreements will shape your life. We’re immersed in a culture with more ideological variety than ever, and yet most people still struggle to disagree constructively about personal preferences in art or dating. And unlike the past, where we primarily practiced disagreement with friends or classmates, more and more people are learning how to disagree from malicious or even fictitious social media users who are overrepresented in dark triad personality traits.

Amid alienation, division, and echo chambers, it’s no coincidence we’ve been collectively losing our ability to disagree well for decades.

Being Grateful For Disagreement

The pitfalls of disagreement are the same today as in the days of Socrates: avoid, attack, perform. Social media subsidizes this pattern: sarcasm is rewarded with likes, certainty is rewarded with followers, and tribal alignment is rewarded with instant belonging.

But constructive disagreement—the kind that expands your capacity to think through different ideas instead of shrinking it—starts with a small, internal pivot:

You see ideological tension as a puzzle instead of a threat.

There’s even research that shows constructive disagreement increases creative problem-solving. And here’s the part nobody talks about: that improvement happens even when your opponent is wrong. It’s engaging in the cognitive friction that matters, not necessarily the accuracy of the opposing view.

Destructive confrontation, the kind we get a front-row seat to on social media, is an attempt to avoid that friction. Since most of us never learn to be wrong with grace, it becomes a monster in our minds, and we can end up living our entire lives on the run from it. Insults, straw-manning, mischaracterizations—anything less than seriously engaging an issue is energy that could be spent on cognitive friction spent instead on avoiding the discomfort it requires.

Your Feelings About Disagreement Will Shape It

Most people agree about the value of constructive disagreement, but here’s the hard part: constructive disagreement is downstream of your emotional response to being wrong.

Most people feel disagreement as a rejection. It feels like a threat that stirs the ancient part of our brain still worrying about whether we’ll be exiled from our tribe and starve to death. But if you can relate to disagreement differently—if you can re-associate it with the sensation of growth, intellectualism, even ego-liberation—then disagreement becomes a rewarding experience, a path to deeper relationships, and a skill to feel pride over.

Three internal shifts make this possible:

1. Replace the reflex of “I’m being attacked” with “I’m being invited to practice.”

It sounds a little cult-y, but cults do know a few things about changing people’s thought patterns. Each time someone challenges you, see it as an opportunity to expand your understanding of the world.

2. Stop treating your beliefs as “you” and start treating them as your projects.

Creating distance between you and your beliefs can make you less defensive about them. Projects are meant to be tested. If you frame your beliefs as works in progress, disagreement stops triggering the same defensive circuitry.

3. Make steel-manning the standard you hold yourself to.

High-quality thinking requires high-quality standards. Steel-manning forces you to fully consider the logic of another worldview. It transforms disagreement from a contest into a collaborative design problem. Straw-manning is a sign that you’re avoiding the intellectual effort required to understand a different viewpoint.

Moving Beyond The Dunning-Kruger Curve

We often describe the Dunning-Kruger effect—the tendency for people with low skill or knowledge in a domain to overestimate their competence because they lack the awareness to recognize their own errors—as a cognitive flaw, but that underplays its social dimension. The original studies show that people become most overconfident when they’re operating in isolation, cut off from feedback, but the effect intensifies inside echo chambers.

Group polarization research shows that when like-minded people talk only to each other, they become more extreme while also becoming more convinced they’re correct.

I lived this reality. I was ignorant, but more than this, I was insulated. It was easy for me to dismiss any opposing views without engaging them seriously because I didn’t have opportunities to do exactly that: engage with opposing views seriously.

This is why genuine expertise requires continuous exposure to challenge. Philip Tetlock’s work on political forecasting shows that the “superforecasters” aren’t the ones with the most knowledge but the ones with the most flexible mental habits and the widest exposure to competing models of reality. Constructive disagreement is what keeps expertise from becoming dogma.

Disagree Better to Be Better

Our culture now incentivizes the wrong kind of disagreement. The platforms that most of our communication now happens on reward slogans over nuance, certainty over curiosity, intensity over synthesis. Constructive disagreement requires courage, curiosity, and maturity—all of which are hard-earned skills that translate into long-term success in the real world, but often at the cost of short-term “success” online.

Apps like Integrally are trying to solve this problem by offering a place where the conditions for constructive disagreement are rewarded. But just as with any kind of personal growth, the individual has to want improvement before they can achieve it.

The Future of Disagreement

I’ve yet to regret a constructive confrontation. Still, I routinely interact with people whose first response to disagreement is tension or hostility. I used to be that person, and on my bad days, I still am. I now see that side of myself as a smaller, primitive self; it’s the same me who loses my temper in traffic or has the extra serving I regret.

A skill issue, but worse: the inability to engage in constructive disagreement robs you of the opportunity to update your beliefs. This is what keeps many people stuck in the quicksand of self-censorship, unfulfilling relationships, or income and career blocks.

It’s hard to put an “aha” moment into words; it’s one of those things you learn through feeling the change happen within you. But if I could describe the change that freed me from being afraid of disagreement, it was similar to realizing all the anxiety I felt in high school was useless because everybody was just as insecure and confused. “Worry less, be yourself, and try your best” is good advice for the first day of school or every day we wake up to navigate a society of very different people with different views.

You may not have mastered the lesson yet, but luckily it’s a skill you can start practicing right now.

💡 Don’t forget to check out our sponsor, Integrally. Whether you enjoy disagreements or find them stressful, Integrally is the perfect app to practice anonymously debating on a platform that finally incentivizes civil discourse without any censorship. Give it a try as one of its founding members.