Debate is a pointless waste of time.
The competitive form (like debate club) is gish gallop turned up to 11; painful to listen to.
The political form, as in organized debate or “panel” programs is a time-share platform for distributing talking points.
The internet debate is a venue for pendents and logocentrics to play semantics, moderated and scored by partizans.
The good-faith platonic ideal kind of debate doesn’t exist. If people who disagreed could be honest and listen to each other, that’s called conversation. Debate is adversarial like a game, because it is one.
I always wanted to start an overmoderated forum for debating on various topics, bringing it to the “ideal” debate as close as possible. Basically the Venezuela scene from Parks and Rec - you use an ad hominem? Believe it or not, banned. Personal attack? Instantly banned. Arguing in bad faith? Banned. Ignoring everything the other side said and just ranting? Also jail.
At some point people will be too afraid to start a debate in the first place, and you’ll end up with a circlejerk club.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the idea of holding super civil debate, but at some point people will - at least unintentionally - use some of that. It might be better to raise a culture of catching them on that - and, potentially, issuing a warning.
Yeah, I think a warning/increasingly long temporary ban system could make this work. Any time a fallacy is used, a comment is added describing why it’s a fallacy and a warning is issued (and temporary ban depending on how many warnings you have recently). Maybe it tracks which fallacy was reported and the sentence is harsher if you repeatedly use the same ones, and some are worth more than others. Idk. I think it could work.
I don’t quite agree with this. It seems like you’re focusing on the worst types in each scenario.
Competitive debates aren’t (in my opinion) debates at all. They’re rhetorical competitions where you need to know how to talk convincingly/manipulatively, but don’t necessarily need to know anything about debating.
Political debates come in all shapes and forms, but of course the ones that will be focused on and remembered are there worst examples that seem the most silly.
You’re kind of right about internet debates. Especially the “scoring system” can be very biased depending on the community, but if you ignore the scores there can still be valid points to be found in some debates. Of course, being the internet, there will also be overwhelming amounts of spam/trolls that can be hard to ignore.
Conversation is a broader term that includes debates. Debates are conversations, but not all conversations are debates. The issue with the word debate is that it sometimes gets misused (like competitive debate) which makes its meaning a bit unclear. Although all of this is just my opinion, so take it with a huge scoop of salt.
So what you’re basically suggesting is that political debates are wholesome friendly conversations, right. And please don’t get any more hysterical, I’m just asking questions
Then there’s science and the law. Both are partially resistant to these problems
I was going to say: I’m not aware of debate settling science, but I’ve seen science settle debate. But then I remembered that debate doesn’t need evidence or truth value to thrive and it often isn’t settled by science.
As far as law, I don’t know if you mean debate in a court or debate in a legislature, but I can’t imagine a good faith argument to defend either and I don’t want to strawman you.
In any case, the idea that debate is a method to discover truth value is based on the fallacy that being presented with evidence and reason is how humans form belief. Believing that evidence is persuasive is itself a denial of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
#notallstrawmen
Brilliant.
If someone calls themselves a ‘gadfly,’ you know you are talking to the worst kind of devil’s advocate- the kind who thinks he’s funny.
There are people that call themselves that? Why would anyone want to compare themselves to a gadfly of all things?
Fox News “comedian” Greg Gutfeld has described himself as a gadfly if that tells you anything.
I mean, can someone really call themselves a “devil’s advocate” if they’re really just arguing for their own position that just happens to be unpopular with the people around them? My understanding was that the term was supposed to mean something more like arguing for a position that one disagrees with, to ensure that the arguments against that position hold up and strengthen them.
They won’t actually say it’s their position on issues unless they get enough support. It’s pretending to play devil’s advocate.
12 other ways:
joke
