How many think tanks or prestigious authors have a discussion forum? How many have an online community set up where people can request debates about their claims and debates actually happen on a regular basis? How many communities had (or wanted) ten debates in the last year?
The world as a whole has some debate.
I liked reading a summary of what debates are being had in the world. I liked the topics you talked about in this article.
What about in person debate panels? Thatâs something thatâs harder for low status people do, but intellectuals do them some. You could bring up how intellectuals should have debates instead going through the hassle of organizing an in person debate. If the standard for serious debate was textual, and such in person were seen as entertainment, intellectuals would probably debate more because itâs more practical.
What about academic debate through peer-review or writing papers back and forth, like I kind of expected existed? I think maybe you should address this in a topic with this title.
There exist debating societies but thatâs different than using debate as part of real truth-seeking in fields like physics or philosophy. Debate clubs tend to focus on things like impressing audiences within time limits, not trying to reach an objective conclusion.
At debate clubs, people often debate a specific narrow issue out of context of other ideas, and they donât want to connect things to philosophical and scientific premises, and they may say contradictory things in different debates.
Why not use âsophistryâ to describe this type of debating and contrast it with the behavior of Socrates? I like thinking about Socrates and the sophists when thinking about you advocating debates. I think the imagery/associations would be effective for convincing people of our idea of what debates should be like.
I could see it possibly being tribalist rhetoric just because weâre labeling one group pejoratively. But I think itâs objective and deserved.
I think itâs fine to do such ad-hoc debates for practice though. But sophistry is for being effective in debate, so that is what youâre doing in those kinds of debates, and you should progress beyond it after some time (or do both). If you donât progress to truth seeking debates, all you did was become a sophist.
Debate ought to work more like an imaginary boxing league (that resembles reality somewhat): Itâs reasonably easy to challenge people who arenât very successful. If you win, you can challenge people a bit higher up in the hierarchy. If you keep winning, you can work your way up to the top.
I like this comparison.
Also, in my experience, a lot of fields actually have a lot of missing literature where things arenât written down as thoroughly as people might assume. Finding fields with big gaps in the arguments in their literature is important to organizing human knowledge, truth seeking, and debating which schools of thought are actually right.
People have blind-sides. It would be beneficial if people with different perspectives could point out to you that there are gaps that youâre unaware of. And having an intellectual culture more open to debate would help make that happen.
Schools of thought that just ignore other schools of thought that contradict them are irrational.
Would you generally say that intellectuals know too little about their contradicting schools of thought?
Just off the top of my head I donât think many do have forums.
I think specifically requesting debates is probably super uncommon.
I think a few probably wanted debates. Not good/productive/rational debates, but I think some groups probably do like debating.
Also, from my very very limited experience, I think smaller groups are more likely to have things like discussion forums. I canât imagine and definitely have never seen prestigious think tanks like the Brookings Institute or something to have a discussion forum.
That makes sense. Also their public intellectuals. Their job is related to debating. I think itâs a bit difference for someone who has a certain set of ideas but doesnât claim to be a public intellectual (a fictional example would be Rearden in Atlas Shrugged I think).
That sounds like a cool idea. I think some podcasters would be wary of doing it because they may be more intellectually shallow than their fans. Thats besides the point. I think that kind of thing would give motivation to debate people.
Huh. So its not just you theyâve mistreated.
Also their usually just circlejerks (is there a better term to use here~?).
Or getting caught up in nit-picky(?) rules. Something like this has rarely ever happened but in the debate club I did officially the saying was, âIf they say pigs fly, and their opponent doesnât rebut it the first chance they get, it stands for the rest of the debate.â I get it as a rule, but as a truth-seeking principle I donât think its helpful to say something like âYou didnât address that argument in time, therefore it stands.â
Yes. Or they want to connect it to those things to win the debate (to seem smart and stuff) but they donât want to actually think about the philosophy and science too deep.
They also donât care to know/want to know.
Yes but there are two common versions of this.
Many fans of The Sovereign Child are prepared to argue with people who are in favor of punishing children. Thatâs the alternative they want to argue with and think they know how to beat. Arguing with Popperians who disagree with them is totally different and they arenât prepared for it.
Many fans of Deutsch would argue with inductivists but wouldnât be prepared to argue with CFâs binary epistemology.
Many fans of Dawkins would argue with creationists but if you tried to argue evolution doesnât take place because of solipsism, most of them wouldnât know how to deal with that and wouldnât want to debate it.
Lots of mainstream philosophers have studied several views but if you want to debate another position they arenât familiar with then they wouldnât want to deal with it.
Lots of scientists are ready for several objections but not for their epistemological premises to be questioned.
Of course. Why would it be just me?
I donât have the source but years ago I looked over their moderation info and they were saying they almost never banned anyone. But the small number of people they banned didnât include spammers. Fair enough if they mean gambling website ad bots. But theyâd categorized someone who was obviously a human in the spam category, not the banning a person category, just because he was a bad culture fit who didnât communicate like a smart Bay Area person. His posts werenât great but it was obviously a person who was being treated poorly, not spam.
Thatâs absurd. And what are you supposed to do when someone makes multiple errors? You canât address all of them immediately. In general, the reason I didnât address an error yet is because I was busy with other ones. People can often say enough errors in five minutes that I could talk for over an hour without getting to every one. How are you supposed to deal with that?
Idk if you were just saying that, but the thought process is that you shouldnât make too many points in a debate/you should make your points easier to follow. Hereâs a related thing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreading\_(debate) :
Spreading (/ËspriËdÉŞĹ/; a blend of âspeedâ and âreadingâ)[1] is the act of speaking extremely fast during a competitive debating event, with the intent that oneâs opponent will be penalized for failing to respond to all arguments raised.
For the debate I did spreading wasnât allowed (it is allowed in other formats though which I think is odd). People still did it and it was rarely, if ever, penalized, but thereâs the idea.
My debate format was something like this
6 minutes for the affirming side to argue their case,
(3 minutes of questioning)
7 minutes for the negating side to argue their case and rebut/attack the affirming sides case
(3 minutes of questioning)
4 minutes for the affirmation to defend against the attacks on their case and attack the negations case
6 minutes for the negation to defend and then present why they should win this round
3 minutes for the affirmation to explain why they should win
So during the negations first speech, the affirmations second speech, and the negations last speech all points have to be addressed. You are supposed to write your case, and speak, in such a manner that things can be followed in that time frame. That really doesnât happen. Most judges feel reluctant to say that someone lost because they made âtoo many pointsâ (even though they fail to keep up with all those points themselves). So they just usually let making too many points slide.
I looked up high school policy debate (which is a specific type of debate, different from the LD debate I did) where spreading is allowed.
The kid is talking really fast. I donât see what kind of intellectual value someone thinks their getting from that. I guess, from when I did debate, they treat winning debate as being smart. If youâre someone who wins debate youâre smart. Doesnât really matter how that happens.
Hmm. I donât know. I think my thought process was something like you have particularly not mainstream intellectual views so they donât like that. But my view was related to how unique CF is. They hate that uniqueness I thought. Versus most other people who come on their that may not like are probably not unique in how they think and stuff. So I assumed, for them at least, they get better treatment.
Yeah that didnât seem truth seeking to me. And how does he even get points for that? I didnât understand what he was saying. Does the judge actually follow all that? Also was he reading it?
Idk. Iâm not too familiar with that style of debate, so out of curiosity I went ahead and looked at a guide published by the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA). Some things from it:
Policy debate is a very research-intensive activity. Unlike traditional writing where the author may briefly quote or even paraphrase evidence, Policy Debate relies on the use of cards, or pieces of evidence directly quoted word-for-word from the source.
The expectation in Policy Debate is that cards are read verbatim, so the paraphrasing of evidence as it is being read for the first time is discouraged.
Ok. So I can kinda see the need for spreading and why its allowed. You canât say something like âThe Department of Labor said unemployment is up 15%â. You have to read the entire card of evidence.
I feel like thats unnecessary. Ignoring the issue of whether people can follow the details when people are talking fast, even if they were talking at a normal pace the biggest takeaway I would get after all that rambling is âThe Department of Labor said unemployment is up 15%â. Unless I had a reason to care about extra details I wouldnât pay attention to that.
Going back to the question about points, while I couldnât find a resource from the NSDA about how to judge a policy round I found something else from a different website:
- Quality of the Affirmative Teamâs Plan: Does the plan solve a real problem within the resolution without creating disadvantages that outweigh the advantages? See the Decision Table for an Affirmative Case (below) for help with this.
- Quality of Reasoning: Which team made the best logical connections between key arguments and the issues in the round?
- Quality of Arguments: Which team presented the best quality and depth of arguments in favor of their position?
- Clarity: Which team was easier to follow and understand?
- Quality of Support: Which team provided the best support for critical points? When debaters support their arguments by referring to expert sources, look for a verbal citation and direct quotation so that you can judge the quality and accuracy of the evidence.
- Alternative Approaches: If one of the teams used a non-traditional approach to the debate round, did they convince you of the validity and soundness of that approach
- Conduct: A debater or debate team who plainly behaves in a deceitful or rude manner toward an opponent should not be granted a win.
So it seems like a mix of stuff is followed when seeing who won.
He kinda follows all that. Maybe one can train themselves to follow all that and some judges Iâve been around claim to be able to do that. Other judges, however, have openly admitted in the judges room that they had no clue what was being said. Though, again, debate where I did it wasnât super serious(?)/professional(?) in a sense. I could imagine some richer/better schools maybe having judges who can follow all that.
And yes, he was reading it. All of your constructive/initial arguments are usually written. Its your rebuttal, the more âdebateâ side of things, thatâs off the top of your head or whatever.
Besides being weighted epistemology, I noticed that none of the judging criteria were about which conclusion is true. Itâs just âhow high quality were the arguments?â not âdid the arguments convince me this side is the correct conclusion?â
Does the judge get a written copy of whatâs being read?
Whatâs the point of having your arguments in writing but then reading them out really fast instead of doing written debate? It didnât seem like the verbal aspect was pleasant or was resulting in good, productive engagement between opposing debaters.
~yeah. Judges are trained to really focus on who argued better. In one sense, I think that helps handle judges biases. The debate I did, called Lincoln-Douglas, was supposedly about morality. You would argue something like âThe United States ought to have Universal Healthcare.â. For some judges the morality of Universal Healthcare is taken for granted. They wouldnât actually accept something against that. However, they are more willing to accept that the guy who is arguing against Universal Healthcare was better at arguing then the guy who debated for it.
Some other thoughts in no particular order:
No. I can request, after the fact, for them to show me their laptops or, in rare cases, their papers, but its not a requirement and I never have a copy to review or anything. At best I just have a chance to read their case first hand to verify something.
If controversies arise I can escalate to a coach to give me a copy to verify/check stuff. Usually this will happen with stuff like falsifying evidence or something.
Idk. One thing I can think of is time management. For example, Iâm supposed to mark you down (mentally, no strict points here obv) for going over your clock. I think that has to do with what I mentioned about debate focusing on who argues better. Your ability to manage your arguments in time or whatever is part of that skill-set. Your ability to follow those arguments, in a fast-paced environment, is part of the skill-set of a good âarguerâ.
~yeah, hereâs a video of the debate I did (Lincoln-Douglas):
The first speaker begins around 2 minutes with his case (heâs thanking his coaches and stuff at the beginning).
The talking is at a much more reasonable pace (partially because the rules/partially because thereâs less weight given to evidence here, so no reasons to inundate you with evidence). I think LD debate is an overall much more pleasant debate. Though idk how productive it is.
That video seemed way better than the other one but still didnât seem very truth-seeking to me.
Should most intellectuals accept debates on topics they arenât very familiar with? Maybe mostly just when it has impact on their field or is a foundation for their field? They could defer to some other intellectual who specializes in that field and take responsibility for their position, like youâve said people can do generally.
I kinda understand intellectuals would want to debate outside their expertise for live voice debate. With text debate it would give time to research some. Maybe theyâll use research to find someone to defer to.
Do you think your LD debate experience will help you in future truth-seeking debates?
For example, if youâre an inductivist and someone has a criticism of induction that youâve never thought about before, maybe you should careâŚ
Lots of stuff is obviously relevant if true and people just dismiss it and assume itâs false before they understand it or can cite any refutation of it.
Nah. I donât think so.
While I do think LD debate is a more comfortable debate and more reasonably paced debate, I donât think itâs valuable for truth-seeking. The goal is to get someone to agree with you, not to be correct. As an example, I (and many many others in debate) would just ignore the uncomfortable arguments in a debate round. Just pretend they didnât say something super bad and shift the focus to something else.
I wonder if most people think competition debate has a value for truth seeking. The goal of competition debate is the ability to argue any side. I think people would see that as good because its open-minded or something, but idk.
My point is though that I think most people have the view that they have the right opinion already. The goal of the average debater is not to truth seek. The truth is already known to them. I think most people who participate in modern debates are not trying to truth-seek. Theyâre trying to convince an audience. Theyâre trying to get people to agree with them, theyâre not trying to learn more about an opposing side or trying to get corrected themselves. They just want to win.
Hmm. You know this makes me wonder: with all this debate policy stuff I wonder if the attitude towards debate should be that youâll debate people without an audience. An audience is nice, sure, but that shouldnât be your reason to debate right? If someone has no audience, you should still debate them (well, depending on other stuff obv).
I wonder if thats part of the reason not many people do text debates. Whereâs the audience to impress and wow? Actually, thats another thing: I donât think people would like text debates because thereâs no audience to easily appeal to. Thereâs no chat to tell âThis guy is an idiotâ or to make you feel good over a bad argument that chat agrees with you on.