I grew up in a house where two people were always right.
Not stubbornly. That would have been easier, and it would have been a shorter education. They were right the way weather is right — each of them standing inside a set of facts that held, that accounted for what they had lived, that would have produced the same conclusion in anyone who had stood there. I could follow either one to the end and arrive somewhere reasonable. That was the problem.
A child in that room learns to pick a side, or learns to leave. I did both for a while, and neither worked, because picking meant deciding one of them was stupid and they were not stupid, and leaving meant the argument continued without me in a house I still had to eat in.
So I did the third thing, which I want to be careful not to make sound wise. It was not wise. It was what was left.
I stopped listening for who was correct and started listening for <em>what each position could see that the other could not</em>. Not what they said — what the shape of their standing let them notice. One of them could see the cost of a thing. The other could see the cost of not doing it. Neither could see the other’s cost, and neither was lying, and the argument was not actually about the thing they were arguing about. It was two true instruments pointed at different parts of the same object, each reporting accurately, each reporting something the other had no gauge for.
Once I could see that, I could not stop seeing it.
It is the most useful habit I have and I have never been able to explain it at a job interview. In a design review, when two engineers are dug in, the disagreement is almost never about the code. One of them is protecting against a failure they have personally survived. The other is protecting against a different one. Ask either what they are afraid of and the room changes, because fear is specific and opinions are not. The architecture that comes out of that question is better than the architecture either of them brought in, and it is not a compromise. Compromise is what you get when you average two positions. This is what you get when you refuse to.
The trick — if it is a trick — is that you have to actually believe both. Not tolerate. Not concede the other side has a point, in that way people do just before they explain why it does not matter. You have to be able to argue either position well enough that its holder would nod. If you cannot, you have not understood it yet, and whatever you build on top of your understanding will have a hole in it exactly the shape of what you dismissed.
I have made a whole set of books out of this, though I did not know that was what I was doing at the time. The most common question I get about them is which side I am on. People want the author to settle it. I think they want it settled because an unsettled thing is uncomfortable to hold, and holding it is the entire practice — the moment you resolve it you have thrown away the instrument.
What I do not say, when I am asked, is that I learned it before I could have told you I was learning anything. I learned it at a kitchen table, badly, under pressure, as a way of surviving two people I loved who could not both be accommodated.
I would not recommend the curriculum. I would defend the finding.