Something strange has happened to public disagreement: we've gotten very good at signaling our positions and very bad at holding them provisionally. The 14th-century philosopher and jurist Ibn Rushd — better known in the West as Averroes — drew a sharp distinction between two modes of engaging contested ideas: dialectical argument, aimed at testing beliefs under pressure, and rhetorical performance, aimed at reinforcing the convictions of an already-sympathetic audience. He worried that confusing the two would corrode collective reasoning over time. He was describing medieval theological debate, but he was also describing your social media feed. What we've built, in the architecture of contemporary public discourse, is an enormous engine for rhetorical performance dressed in the costume of argument — confident assertions, applause lines, tribal signals — with almost no mechanism for the honest concession that good dialectic requires. The practical implication isn't to disengage. It's to notice which mode you're in when you open your mouth, or your keyboard: are you testing an idea, or advertising one?

In the last significant disagreement you entered online or in person, did you update your position even slightly — and if not, was that because the evidence genuinely didn't warrant it, or because updating felt like losing?

Drawing from Andalusian Aristotelianism / Philosophy of Rational Discourse — Ibn Rushd (Averroes)