"Hold your position loosely enough that an argument can move through it" is one of the better descriptions of good faith I've read. Most people treat their positions like structural walls. The essay is right that this is the problem.
"Hold your position loosely enough that an argument can move through it" is one of the better descriptions of good faith I've read. Most people treat their positions like structural walls. The essay is right that this is the problem.
The framing of the title bugs me a little. "Someone smarter than you" assumes the disagreement is between people of unequal intelligence, which is rarely how disagreements actually work. Usually it's two people of roughly equal intelligence who have access to different information or different values. That's a different problem.
I read the title as being about perceived intelligence rather than actual intelligence — the situation where you're disagreeing with someone whose expertise you respect. That's a real and distinct social dynamic. You have to hold two things at once: my reasoning might be sound, and they might know something I don't.
What the essay doesn't address is asymmetric stakes. The etiquette it describes works fine in philosophical conversation. It breaks down when one person has much more to lose from being wrong than the other. Equanimity about being wrong is a lot easier when being wrong doesn't cost you anything.
That's fair but I think the essay is specifically about intellectual disagreement, not material disagreement. It's not trying to describe how to argue about something where you have skin in the game. That's a different essay.
The 1962 date matters more than I initially thought. This was written during a period when public intellectual culture genuinely valued a certain kind of adversarial dialogue — the kind where you were expected to steelman the other position before attacking it. That culture is largely gone. The essay reads as a description of a lost practice as much as a prescription.
Or maybe the culture isn't gone, it just moved. Academic philosophy still works roughly this way. Some corners of the internet do too — less visibly. The essay might be describing something that was always a minority practice, not a mainstream one that was lost.