What if disagreement isn’t conflict, but incomplete compression?

We usually treat disagreement as a failure: someone is wrong, or the models don’t match. But in information theory, compression fails when patterns aren’t aligned yet — not when they’re meaningless.

So here’s the thought:
Maybe disagreement isn’t noise. Maybe it’s a sign that two models are each locally efficient but globally incompatible.

If that’s true, then “arguing” isn’t about winning — it’s about discovering the missing variables that let both compress into a shared structure.

What variables do you think are most often missing when smart people talk past each other?