49. Claim: We can usually learn much more from people whose views we share than from those whose view contradict our own.Reason: Disagreement can cause stress and inhibit learning.

How much we can learn form others can be quantified by many factors, such as deepth our ideas can reach and the frenquency we introspect about some problems. Hence some people may say we learn more from people who share same ideas with us since we learn to think deeply from them, while others maintain that people who have opposite ideas are more worthy learning.

On the first place, there is no doubt that we can learn much from people who share the same idea with us. By exchanging thoughts with them, we have a more thorough understanding of the problems and we would know how to think about problems in creative ways. For example, inspired by the quantified energy assumption of de Broile, Einstein explained the photonelectric effect by setting up the simulation in which light was regraded as a kind of new particle-photons, rather than electromagnetic waves. Furthermore, the disagreement always questions, stresses us even prevents us from thinking further and deeper. On the one hand, the opposite ideas, which are sometimes plausible, make us suspect ourselves and suspend to work along the original way, which may be right however. On the other hand, for some sensitive people, too much disagreement may make them lose their confidence. To some extent, disagreement should be neglected since self-confidence is pretty significant when the outcome is obscure and ideas are proving.

However, disagreement sometimes can motivate us to think about the problem from the other perspective. The opponents always point out the flaws in our views, which complements our theory in some degree. By modifying these flaws, our knowledge frame becomes more perfect and more unexceptional. Moreover, after talking with those opponents, we should learn how to deal with problems in an objective way and by supposing what the opponents may think about the problems, we can ameliorate the theory independently without their questions and disagreement. For example, the greatest philosopher, Socrates, loved walking around the streets and debating with pedestrians. Once he was beaten, he would be cheerful because he knew about the flaws in his theary and methods.

Another issue should be considered is whether the stress and inhibition caused by disagreement prevent us from learning more from opponents. What would happen if everyone agree with our views and say it is so assailable? it would be precarious because brings us the sense of self-absorbtion even the fantacy that we are saint. Thus, disagreement is dispensible to prevent us from complacence and it provides us motivation to think deeper and more frequent to make our theory more perfect.

In conclusion, although we would learn much from those who have same ideas with us, we cannot deny the opponents and disagreement motivate us to learn as well.