From the holiday dinner table to the Twitter fandom wars, disagreements are inescapable. In episode 120 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk through different types of disagreement (e.g. disagreements online vs philosophical disagreements) and consider why we have such a tough time dealing with those who don’t see things as we do. Is the format of social media platforms to blame for the bad faith disagreements that occur on them? What role do confidence and conviction play in disagreement? Can ...
Hello and welcome to Overthink, the podcast.
Where two experts on disagreeing, that is philosophers, tell you what we and others think about big and important topics.
I'm Ellie Anderson.
And I'm David Pena Guzman.
Ellie, one of our listeners favorite things is when you and I disagree, they find our disagreements really productive.
And we often get comments asking for more of that.
Absolutely.
And it's so funny because we have found over the four years of doing this podcast that we actually find it pretty hard to disagree on the topics that we choose.
Like, we agree on a lot of things, which I guess is unsurprising because we're longtime friends.
We went through the same philosophical training.
I think a lot of our commitments and values are similar.
A lot of what we believe to be true is similar.
So we're often looking for things we disagree about when we're thinking about our episode topics and trying to find ways that we diverge on particular ideas.
Yeah.
Especially on substantive issues, which did happen when our difference became obvious over regret, like the ethics of regret.
And also our debate, our infamous debate over Cancel Culture.
I think it's only infamous for us, but I do think, like, the biggest disagreement that's come up between us, which is related to our old Cancel Culture episode, at least the biggest disagreement between us, philosophically speaking, is whether you can separate the art from the artist.
And we were recently asked to host an online event on philosophical disagreement.
And I had the, might I say, brilliant idea to actually stage a debate between us and then have us pick it apart together in front of the audience afterward to see what moves we had made in the debate.
Right.