Ok, I think when your debate partner is not good enough thats probably cuz they were irrational. Is that when they disagree about the debate’s conclusion? I think yeah cuz they were not good enough to realize you were right. Is you being right different than the debate’s conclusion?
You could make your own objective case. If that’s on the debate topic, is that the same as the debate’s conclusion? Also, if you do make an objective case does that make the debate objectively conclusive? What does “such” mean in the quote? It’s like if you make the case it also makes the condition true that the debate is conclusive. It seems thats what the goal of making the case is.
I think it’d probably be good to look up the word “conclusive” and conclusion. Those are big words. Their meaning is intuitive but not sure if it’s right. Also, “topic”, “case”, and “objective” would be good to look up.
I’ll read that when I can. It’s interesting that there’s a lot to debates. Like, for them to go well. I thought you could kind of do debates nilly willy, but it’s a skill.
That makes sense to me intuitively. There’s a difference between the answer to the debate and the debate being conclusive. I think u can conclude tht the answer is unknown and that counts as conclusive. Conclusive isnt so much about there being an answer. I think it’s more to do with conducting the debate.
I already read ahead of @ActiveMind’s reply but what’s something that’s unknown? I think tht has to do with the best current knowledge. Like, even with our best knowledge we still haven’t figured a problem out. Idk.
What about knowledge you haven’t aquired yet like you just gotta learn it. Can the answer to the debate be unknown there too? Like, it takes too long to learn to get to the answer. I think it’d be nice to learn more about concluding an answer to a debate.
The topic being hard to figure out is like a problem that’s hard to solve. Cuz the stuff is at the frontier of our knowledge, I don’t think we could just learn to figure it out. What happens when you’re at the frontier of knowledge? You gotta start inventing stuff?
I see that the words “The debate” are used. That’s the debate in the last quoted sentence where the answer is unknown and it counts as conclusive still. The quote above describes the debate more. The answer to the debate can be unknown cuz the topic is at the frontier of our knowledge. I think it’s unknown cuz we literally have to think of new knowledge for it. We don’t know the answer yet. Idk.
So debates are used to establish conclusions about a topic, but sometimes we don’t have an idea that’s literally the answer to the topic. If that’s the case then the answer to the debate is unknown. We don’t have the knowledge for it. Maybe at that point we can have debates about what epistemology is best to find the answer. That’s where CF could come in and one can argue for it.
When I wrote “establish” I was thinking about finding what’s the best answer already for topic. I think I was thinking kind of in terms of degrees of truth idk. I wasn’t thinking that maybe you can literally figure stuff out about the topic in a debate. Does that happen? It’s similar to when you’re problem solving on your own, and it can help to write out your thoughts. You might find a solution like that. Can that happen during a debate? I imagine that you could be debating about something you don’t know too much about and then right there you figure more stuff out. I think the following quote is related:
That’s interesting you can debate before you can know. Debates can be used to find answers. Does it happen that debate participants don’t know what kind of topic they’re getting into? Like, they end up finding out midway through they haven’t found an answer to the topic. Maybe debate helps with finding out what we already know so we can make conclusions about the topic. Like, we know for one topic we need to do further research and for another topic we have an answer…Ok, I think I kind of get the conclusions to a debate thing.
When the quote says this:
“either way” is referring to the both sides of the debate? Like, even tho there’s two arguments in a debate, we still don’t know the answer to the topic yet? What I’m wondering still is what is an answer to the debate? Is that what we can best find in the moment? Like, maybe we can debate about it so we can find an answer in the debate. But if we gotta do more research or thinking outside then there’s no answer? Is there like some kind of constraints holding back the participants from finding an answer? What if their epistemology is kind of bad or maybe they’re making serious errors. They gotta fix that.
Yeah, I think I’d like to know what a conclusion is. Cuz even tho you don’t know the answer, you can still make a conclusion. I looked up the definition of conclusion on MW and found this:
2: the last part of something
The team was exhausted at the conclusion of the game.
I don’t know if this is the definition, but I liked that conclusion is defined as a result. When you make a debate’s conclusion, it’s about the things that resulted. If there’s no answer to the debate, then you conclude that for now. That’s what resulted and I think you used reasoned judgement to make the conclusion.
I think I see that too now. Like, the fact that the debate was inconclusive means you could learn more to conclude it. For example, maybe you can make some improvements, but you still don’t conclude the debate. That means there’s still ways you can do better.
What’s “losing a debate”? Is that socially losing a debate? Like, the crowd doesn’t cheer for you? Or losing cuz of judges? How objective are the judges? Or is that when you’re having a cooperative truth-seeking debate?
If it’s the last one then losing means that the opposing side made a good argument. I think that refutes your argument. There’s mistakes in it. That means you can postmortem. How were you wrong? Why did you make a mistake?
Can you postmortem when you don’t lose? I think that’s when the debate is inconclusive or you win. When it’s inconclusive, you and your partner didn’t arrive at a conclusion. That was up to you two to do—well, at least one person. There’s mistakes that were made there.
How about when you win? Does that mean you already concluded the debate? I think you have to claim you won cuz otherwise how do you know? How did you judge you won? That’s different than just having the debate.
I think I need to look up more about concluding a debate, but I would ask the same question. Why didn’t you do better? You could do better to conclude the debate. Reaching a conclusion is the debate’s goal. If that’s a project you took on then there’s an error you’re making to prevent you from completing.
Is asking why you didn’t do better related to postmortem investigation? Like, you’re asking about the issues. You can learn that you have an issue with assessing arguments. That or you got an issue with cooperating with your partner. Idk how that would look like tho. Maybe you get hostile with them.
Why is it “No doubt” there were errors? Do debates involve communication and ideas to conclude? I don’t think “No doubt” means you’re very inexperienced that of course you would have mistakes. Idk. I think the no doubt is like narrowing the kinds of errors you would have. Since there’s communication in debates it’d make sense that’s the component that would contain a mistake. Not too sure.
If there were errors in your communication and ideas, then it’d make sense it wouldn’t for sure be else where. Idk what other category of errors there would be, but is that what the quote is getting at? I think it makes your postmortem easier. Like, you can expect the errors to be in those categories. Now you can investigate them. These are the errors tht lead to the debate’s goal to fail.
Yes, and that would be called adversarial debates. It would have to be trying to win at the expense of truth-seeking. In cooperative debates it will at some points look like you’re trying to win because you’re trying to put forth good arguments and criticize your opponents arguments. But you’ll also do things which make you more likely to “lose”. Some of those things are: suggesting improvements to your opponents arguments, bringing up criticisms of your own ideas if they occur to you, being helpful in your explanations of your ideas rather than being confusing to make your opponent commit mistakes, not appealing to the emotions of the audience.
Yes, all those would examples of how people might evaluate a winner.
Another form is to say that the one who originally held the belief declared to be correct is the winner.
An example: a capitalist and a socialist debate which is the better system and capitalism is declared to be the better system so the capitalist is declared to the winner of the debate. Let’s say there was an audience and the people in the audience don’t agree about who was more convincing. In the minds of the ones who found socialism more convincing, the socialist won, and vice verse with the capitalist.
People recognize from experience that it’s pretty much impossible to agree so they give up on this way of deciding a winner. Instead they will rather do things like count points, despite the points not necessarily adding up to single conclusion about the truth status about the ideas. You can get points for being more eloquent, for using better rhetoric, for making more points, etc., and you lose points for being clumsy and awkward, for initially being wrong on some point (despite you revising position and thus improving it, which would be good thing in cooperative debates), or for offending the judges, etc. All that means that the debate has become more concerned with the skill of the debaters rather than the truth of the ideas. And so that kind of debate turns into a sport rather than a truth-seeking activity.
People will sometimes recognize that they treat debate as a sport rather than a truth-seeking activity, but at other times they’ll muddle the two conceptions of debate together. One reason is that they want the prestige of being viewed as the pursuer of the noble goal of truth-seeking.
There is a lot of that. If you win the debate you’ll likely be viewed as more intelligent than the other debate participant. People don’t like being proved wrong and don’t like admitting it. Sometimes they change opinions so much they have to admit, and then they might try to turn it into social points by pandering to the tribe belonging to their new positions by socially attacking their old tribe and explaining how they were confused and wrong.
It’s always something new. But that can mean new details. Perhaps you knew biological evolution is how animals came to be, but then you learned that evolution works through genes.
There’s also automating ideas. So the ideas are not new but I think you can say there is something new about their application or there is something new to your subconscious.
You learn about new details. You correct some smaller mistakes. You take an approximate thing and make it more precise. You learn to express the ideas in different forms. You think up new metaphors and analogies for the idea. You understand how it applies to more contexts. You automatize it. You improve your speed and precision when applying it. You use the idea to build up new ideas. You connect it with other ideas.
Yes, things that are related but are different issues. Like you can debate capitalism vs socialism and then you end up learning about Objectivist rational selfishness vs altruism, or about Romantic literature through Ayn Rand’s books.
I’ve heard of a term similar to adversarial debates. That’s creative adversaries. Idk what that is but they have the same word in a different form. Adversarial sounds like you’re against each other like there’s a conflict and one side is trying to win or something. It also sounds like the other side would lose cuz it didn’t win.
I looked up adversary on Merriam Webster:
: one that contends with, opposes, or resists : an enemy or opponent
It’s interesting that if an adversary is opposing someone that means that they don’t want the other side to win. In Resolving Conflicting Ideas, you try to find win-win solutions by taking into account all the good points raised by all sides(need a refresher on this topic). An adversary does the opposite I think. If the other side makes a good point, what would the adversary do? I think sometimes when someone is being adversarial they still accept a good point by the other side cuz it wouldn’t make sense not to.
They may try their hardest not to. Because they don’t want to seem dumb for having been wrong. Or they have a political goal which relies on this point not being good. Or they might have some debate about a personal matter like who should inherit some property and they’ll argue anything to be the one who will inherit it.
They may still strategically concede some points because they realize that if they don’t then people will realize that they’re not interested in reason at all and so they wouldn’t want to cooperate at all, but they need some level of cooperation.
I heard a story of someone (whom I call “our storyteller”) who had a debate with a family member who adopted the other position, but then tried to gaslight our storyteller that he always held this belief and that he won the debate over our storyteller, whom he claimed always held the opposite belief. I think the storyteller cut contact with the family member, at least I think that’s what should be done in most cases like these.
While I would categorize this as an adversarial debate, it’s not the typical kind I’m thinking of when I think of adversarial debates. Adversarial debates can be much more civilized and productive than this. I just brought it up to showcase how averse some people can be to admit to have ever been wrong.
If you’re trying to win at the expense of truth-seeking then I think a part of winning isn’t truth-seeking. Like, if you’re truth-seeking, then at some point in the debate you wouldn’t figure out the truth. I got an intuitive idea about truth-seeking here.
What does it mean when you do something at the expense of something else? I saw on Merriam Webster expense means:
: a loss, detriment, or embarrassment that results from some action or gain :sacrifice
Everyone had a good laugh at my expense.
—usually used in the phrase at the expense of
acquired power at the expense of relationships
A loss makes more sense to me and idk what detriment means. The definition is similar to that of error. An error is a thing that leads to the goal failing. I think the proper definition is " something that results in failure at a goal." If I compare that definition to the definition of MW, can I say that failure results from an error? Idk if that’s right. That sounds like the error caused a goal to fail. Can you say the definition of error is “something that causes failure at a goal”? Idk. Is there a difference between what results vs. what causes?
If I apply the definition from MW, I could say: Not finding the truth resulted from trying to win in a debate. Again I don’t have a good sense of the word truth-seeking. A part of me doubts I know it.