The Art of Disagreeing Well: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard
Written by Bo Seo
Bo Seo is a meme amogst competitive debaters. His speech at the grand finals of the World University Debating Championships 2016 is the best known debate meme of all time, and is frequently referred to in jokes a decade later.
The Art of Disagreeing Well is a memoir disguised as a thesis about the role that debate plays in society, told through the lens of Seo’s progression through elementary, middle, high school and eventually university debate.
In the first half, Seo uses a formative experience at each stage of his debate career as a parable to teach principle of debating. In the second half, as Seo retires from debating, the book changes tone and becomes more reflective - touching on the history of Malcolm X, on Socrates and the critique of rhetoric, and on more modern institutions such as IBM’s Project Debater and the Reddit community r/changemyview.
Seo’s frame, the story of learning to debate through the eyes of child growing up, underpins his message well. The message of the book is that learning to argue is a civic duty that enables one to contribute in both personal and political matters, and that bad arguments evoke childish carnality that can make us feel small or angry.
I enjoyed how Seo breaks apart ideas. Several times in the book, he describes ways to break down arguments in order to categorise them. In the first chapter, he segments arguments into descriptive (how things are), judgement (whether one thing is similar to another thing), and normative (how things should be).
Later, he segments types of “debate bullies” (people who use underhanded tactics) in a similar way, and also for the steps to determine whether an argument is worth having.
I’ve participated in hundreds of competitive debates, but this book wasn’t about that. Contrary to the opinions of some Goodreads reviews, I did not find the personal anecdotes dry or unengaging - to the contrary, it made me root for and feel connected to their pedagogic resolutions.
Nevertheless, I think the book is at its best when focusing on a retrospective telling of the the start-to-finish story of Seo’s life, and least engaging in the times when it drifts towards current affairs. Discussion of the 2016 election focuses on resolving disruption to debate, but Seo’s answer feels half-hearted. The final chapter on technology felt the weakest of the book - it felt like Seo believed he needed to wind up with a sweeping thesis about futurology - and this ended up feeling disconnected from the rest of the book.
The Art of Disagreeing Well is a remember well, but not one I’d recommend as foundational for someone wanting to learn how to argue. I would recommend it strongly to anyone interested in the philosophical aspects of how debate and argument influence how people discover their identity. Certainly to a debater, this is a worthy piece of literature.
As a random, useless aside, I wore a custom t-shirt covered in Bo Seo’s face at the European University Debate Championships in Glasgow in 2024. Photo courtesy of Rob Barrie.
