Introducing Competitive Sensemaking
The Upgrade to Common Sense on Disagreement is now available
“Public debate is how societies do their thinking. To keep our shared belief systems functional we must know how to disagree constructively, and exactly what goes wrong when we don’t do so. Why and how do communication failures make public discourse incoherent, dysfunctional, and polarized?”
Competitive Sensemaking: An Upgrade to Common Sense on Disagreement is my book. It took almost four years to complete, from inception to publishing, but builds on writing that goes back ten years.
It became more than I had in mind back in 2022, when I first got a grant to write it. I already had a decent number of essays, and I could put them together, add some connective tissue, and presto! It’d be easy and quick, a year, tops. Not so. That thin narrative line connecting everything grew thicker and denser, as putting it together forced me to think deeply about how it all fit. It demanded more of me than the self-contained essays I’d put out before, and that made me work much harder, in a way that gave results. The bits had to come together, and they did, with the resulting wholeness changing the bits in turn. Iteration after iteration until convergence.
It took more work, more rewriting, and more new material than I’d ever expected, but eventually the loose thoughts responded to the massage, lining up into a model for how to think about public debate, on social media and elsewhere, and about disagreement more generally. It even has a thesis, even though it’s one with multiple parts that don’t easily make sense and sound impressive on a post-it note. You’ll have to read it.
It’s deliberately “big picture”, with components ranging from a macro-view of the current predicament of Western civilization in philosophical terms, to the micro of what having and expressing beliefs, or encountering the beliefs of others, feels like for individual people. That necessarily means painting with a broad brush, but still breaking out the fine pen and being persnickety with detail when that’s needed to get the point across.
Check it out here: (print, ebook, non-Amazon epub)! If you like it, tell your friends! (And if you don’t, please loudly hate it while being an obnoxious person people want to spite.)
Do you have anything on jubilee and the chronically online debates? Seriously thinking of getting this and writing a review, I very much enjoyed your piece on the Ezra Klein/Harris exchange, I would probably get a lot out of this book, but would be unable to discuss it with friends.
I bought the book and skimmed it on the strength of your articles from the 2010s. I honestly couldn't figure out if it had any big thesis, or if it was trying to tell me anything I didn't already know. Personally I would benefit a lot from a more concise explanation of what you think you've figured out that isn't commonly known.