If It's Worth Arguing, It's Worth Arguing With Whiteboards

Drake Morrison
Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:56:06 GMT

It's easy to disagree with people. You just say, "That's wrong" and decline to elaborate.

But that's not very interesting. If you want to be making progress — instead of ragebaiting — it usually helps to find a way for your disagreement to be productive.

Productive disagreements start in the place where you are already in agreement. The places where your models of reality overlap. Without any overlap at all, it gets quite difficult to successfully converse. You need to be speaking a language your interlocutor can understand, for starters. That's actually not trivial to establish. Defining your terms before a debate is done for a reason, and it can be quite hard. Especially when the thing you are arguing over doesn't have a good term or definition in the first place.

That's hard enough, but the more difficult thing in my view is to not get a false understanding of your interlocutor's view. Sometimes a friend will say something like, "taxation is theft" and I nod along, as I backfill their claim with a possible set of observations and inferences. Yet when I interrogate the claim, I find the path my friend took to get there — from the observations they make to the inference chains that follow — are wildly different than the ones I constructed in my head. It's actually really easy to think you understand someone in this way, and it's harder to notice when you are going fast and making background assumptions before getting to the real thing you wish to argue over. Those background assumptions hold a lot of your worldview in them.

Going back to basics, I think it's important to sort out your observations from your inferences. When you want to make progress on a disagreement, drag over a whiteboard and have each party make a list of relevant observations. Compare notes. Only then make lists of inferences from those observations, and argue over those. Often people compare entire claims about the world. That's a lot harder to do than to individually compare observations or inferences separately.

People seem reluctant to do this. Perhaps because it means you have to put some work in to it, and it stops being a performance that gets you re-invited to parties. It could be the legibility, writing down your arguments exposes you to enduring criticism down the line. Or maybe it removes the ability to retreat into vagueness when pressed, which makes the lack feel much sharper. It can feel nice to let your friend and yourself off the hook a little, but my stance is this: If your argument is worth having, it's worth having with whiteboards.

When you write down the basic building blocks that formed your worldview, it's a lot simpler to compare them. Sometimes one party has a much longer list and it makes sense for the argument to turn into more of a situation where one person is teaching another. This is a much better outcome than the argument going nowhere because neither side knows how much evidence the other is actually sitting on.

It's easy to disagree with people. But with a whiteboard, you can actually make progress. You may find you agree on much more than you expected, and can learn a little from each other. Writing down your observations and inferences has a tendency to clarify the few links where your disagreement lives.

It's easy to disagree with people. With a whiteboard, you can actually make progress. You may be surprised, once both lists are up, and see that you agree on most of the observations and most of the inferences. The disagreement lives in one or two specific links — an inferential step one of you is taking that the other doesn't see, or observational evidence one of you has been quietly relying on.

If you're trying to clearly communicate, if you want your argument with someone to go anywhere, grab a damn whiteboard and make some lists.

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