Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement

Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programmer)

“Graham proposed a “disagreement hierarchy” in a 2008 essay “How to Disagree”,^[22] putting types of argument into a seven-point hierarchy and observing that “If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier.”

Although originally written as a simple list, Graham’s hierarchy can be represented as a pyramid with the most convincing form of disagreement at the top, and the weakest at the bottom:

Following this hierarchy, Graham notes that articulate forms of name-calling (“The author is a self-important dilettante”) are no different from crude insults.”

Stephen