Sorting your own argument

What to write

Three columns on a sheet of paper. Across the top: could be looked at, what we think matters, what it costs and to whom.

Then write down every claim you can remember being made in your own argument — yours and theirs — and put each one in a column.

Rules, such as they are:

• Write the claim in the words it was said in. Tidying it up changes its kind more often than you would expect.
• A claim goes in once, however many times it was made.
• If you cannot place one, leave it between two columns. The undecidable ones are informative and forcing them is not.
• Include the costs nobody said. You know what they are. Put them in the third column with a mark against them.

What you will probably find

Four things recur often enough to predict.

The third column is nearly empty and should not be. Almost everybody finds that the costs they know about have never been stated by anybody, including the ones that fall on them.

Your own strongest claim is in the middle column. This is the uncomfortable one and it is nearly universal. The thing you have been arguing hardest for usually turns out to be a value you have been dressing as a finding.

The first column is shorter than the argument suggested. An argument that feels like it is about evidence usually contains three or four genuinely empirical claims, of which one or two are checkable.

One or two of the checkable ones are cheap. There is often a measurement sitting in a system somebody already runs.

What to do with it

Three things, in this order, over the following weeks.

Go and get the cheap measurement. Whichever first-column item is answerable with data that exists. Offer to produce it, including if it might go against you — especially then, because that is what makes the asking credible.

Say one of your middle-column claims as a value. Once, out loud, with the six-word preface. It costs less than it feels like it will and it changes what you get back.

Say one third-column cost, with the figure and no request attached. This is the one that does the most and the one most likely to be put off indefinitely.

What this will not do

It will not settle your argument, and it is worth being clear about that before spending the twenty minutes.

Most of what is in the middle column will still be there in a year. The decision will probably be made by whoever was always going to make it. Three columns on a sheet of paper do not redistribute anything.

What they do is tell you which part of the disagreement is capable of moving, which on most records is a smaller part than it looks, and a different part than people assume.

The last thing

The argument described on this site was not unusual and nobody in it behaved badly. Twenty-four claims, eleven weeks, six sessions, and at no point did anybody ask what kind of claim anything was.

That is the ordinary case. It will not be fixed by anybody caring more, arguing better or reading further, because what is missing is not effort or information. It is a question, asked before answering, that takes four seconds.

The version for two people

If somebody on the other side will do it with you, there is a better version and it takes about forty minutes.

Each of you fills in the three columns separately, then compare. Three things come out of the comparison reliably:

Claims you placed differently. Usually two or three, and they are the most informative items on the page — a claim one of you reads as empirical and the other as a value is a claim that has been generating crossed answers for months.

The third column, which will differ most. Each of you knows your own costs and has guessed at the other's. The gap between the guess and the actual is usually large in both directions.

What is in neither first column. The empirical claims you both thought were settled and neither can name a measurement for.

Why it works even when it does not change anything

The comparison is not a negotiation and nothing has to be conceded. What it produces is a shared map of where the disagreement actually is, which both of you then carry into every subsequent exchange.

On this record nothing like this was attempted. The two people whose exchanges reached a trade did something informally similar in about ten minutes, which suggests the full version is worth forty.

A last note on what it costs

Twenty minutes, or forty with somebody else, and one uncomfortable discovery about your own strongest claim.

Against that: on the only record this site has, seven exchanges out of twenty-four were capable of going anywhere, and the difference between those seven and the other seventeen was entirely whether anybody had noticed what kind of thing was being said.