The Hierarchy of Disagreement
In course of your career, you may have to come across different kinds of people. In a 360 degree perspective, you will have your superiors, your peers and your subordinates. Maybe you have disagreements with them or maybe they end up disagreeing with you. Disagreement takes skill and there are more ways to disagree than there to agree. In his essay “How to Disagree”, Paul Graham classifies the ways of arguing a point. He suggests that they should form a hierarchy based on their strength and frequency of use. The hierarchy, visualized as an infographic forms a pyramid with the most convincing type of disagreement at the top. The width of the type of argument symbolizes the relative frequency at which each type is used in arguments. hence the most convincing type of argument becomes the least used and vice versa. Not only does it take some skill to identify the central point of an argument and to find how to refute it, this way of arguing also req...