I think arguing is fundamentally silly most of the time. I think it’s especially absurd when the thing people are arguing about is available information.
There are basically three “levels” of disagreements you can have:
- Matters of pure taste/opinion. This is silly to argue about, obviously. But it can be interesting to discuss – if I think The Wall is the best album of all time and you think it’s something else, we can have a great time exploring music together, even if we don’t actually “convince” each other to change our tastes.
- Matters of philosophy. This is the one area of argument that I think is worthwhile, because debate is how we test out ideas of morality and purpose. However, the number of people who can debate this intelligently is vanishingly small, so I don’t recommend doing so unless you’ve vetted your debate partners very thoroughly.
- Matters of objective fact. This seems to be the most common type of argument, despite being the stupidest! I hear people getting absolutely heated in arguments, fighting for days on end, about something that would take 30 minutes to research, verify, and understand.
“Is Mexican food good,” is a matter of opinion, so there’s no sense in arguing. I’ll treat you to my favorite Mexican place and if you still don’t like it, oh well. “Is it worthwhile to pursue experimentation in our personal diets,” is a matter of philosophy, and therefore good to discuss with the right people. But “are there any Mexican places near me” is a dumb, dumb thing to argue about.
The Opportunity Machine 