I’ve been telling a lot of people about this recently, so I thought I’d put up a link to the source.

Paul Graham has written an excelent guide to levels of didagreement, and by understanding these it makes it easier to upgrade your responses.

The general idea is that you can clasify disagreement into

  • DH0. Name-calling.</li>

  • DH1. Ad Hominem.</li>

  • DH2. Responding to Tone.</li>

  • DH3. Contradiction.</li>

  • DH4. Counterargument.</li>

  • DH5. Refutation.</li>

  • DH6. Refuting the Central Point.</li>

    I won’t go into the details, you can see them worked out with much greater clarity here

    I recently commented on a BD article, Concern as English Heritage cites Wikipedia in listing submission, and Verity Bird rebutted me. I’ve submitted a response, so hopefully that will be moderated soon and if it hasn’t fallen off the radar we’ll get a bit of a debate going!

    My response level is currently about a DH4 though, so hopefully i’ll get to DH6 in the not too distant future!