GoKawiilI am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed that if I just laid out the logic clearly enough, the other person would have no choice but to come around. Truth would win.
It almost never worked that way.
Sometimes I won on points and lost the person. More often I won nothing at all: I’d watch someone grow more certain of the very thing I had just disproven, while the room quietly drifted to their side. I would walk away technically right and completely alone.
Over the years I’ve slowly stopped arguing. Not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally understood what an argument actually is, and what it can and cannot do. Here is what changed my mind.
Being Correct Is Not Always Good
The first thing I had to give up was the belief that being correct is always good. As an engineer, this felt like heresy. Correctness is the whole job. But correctness in a fact is not the same as goodness in a moment.
Lao Tzu saw this 2,500 years ago. In chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching:
Being and non-being create each other. Hard and easy complete each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Sound and silence harmonize each other.
Everything exists only in relation to its opposite. There is no “right” without a “wrong” to make it right, and the moment you insist on standing on the high ground, you’ve created the low ground someone else must stand on. Winning an argument manufactures a loser. Being visibly correct manufactures someone visibly wrong.
So being right is not a pure good floating in space. It’s half of a pair, and it drags its opposite along with it. Once I stopped treating correctness as an absolute, I stopped needing to win.
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