Productive disagreements

[Danyl Strype]

Kia ora koutou

I guess it would be stating the obvious to say that we Pirates are a
diverse bunch, and we're going to tend to disagree fairly often. So...

"If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well."

This quote comes from an essay called 'How to Disagree' by Paul
Graham. It lays out a number of levels of a '"disagreement hierarchy",
from name-calling (DH0) through to 'Refuting the central point' (DH6).
I strongly encourage everyone to read this essay, and give some
thought as to how our organisational, policy, and strategy
disagreements can be carried out higher up the disagreement hierarchy:
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I found this link in another piece, 'The Universal Rules of Civilized
Discourse', which is about the attempts by the developers of the
Discourse forum software to distil out a simple, but thorough set of
guidelines for successful forums. I highly recommend this too:
http://blog.discourse.org/2013/03/the-universal-rules-of-civilized-discourse/

BTW In posting this, I'm not trying to present myself as any kind of
patron saint of high-quality disagreeing. I'm sure I get grumpy and
fall into the lower levels of the disagreement hierarchy as much as
most people. Hopefully we can help each other get better at this :)

Happy disagreeing,
S

--
Danyl Strype
Orientation Officer
Pirate Party NZ
021 11 77 578

"Duchamp's argument is that the spectator is part of the creative act
and therefore shares ownership - and authorship - of the artwork with
the artist."
- Will Gompertz, "Why Star Wars should be left to the fans"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14944240

"Uncomfortable alliances are not just necessary; they reflect and
speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193

"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree
that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407