this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Isn't it just a competition to see who can talk the fastest? I watched a video of it once and it seemed so dumb. It's like the entire thing is just finding loopholes
Pretty much.
What I find most problematic is that this culture teaches younglings that there's no such thing as truth. It's just rhetorical trickery and gotchas.
That's because that's how politics works. If you can get enough people to believe that what you say is true and act on that belief, it doesn't really matter whether it's actually true or not.
That's not the WHY. Debate isn't trying to be like politics, but having formalized competitive rules for arguing is pretty difficult so there are a lot of ways to game the system. It's not trying to model a broken world.
Is it not? I was under the belief that official political debates have a large influence on the format and rules of these debate clubs.
If not, it shouldn't be that difficult to verify whether competitor's statements are backed by evidence, or if they're made up, or if they're really opinions disguised as facts.
What's an "official" political debate? The government runs no such thing.
Also in general, many debates on TV are jest talking, no winner is declared. It's the opposite of a competitive format.
Yes, fair correction. Perhaps that is a point itself, the way debates between political opponents are presented as formal and official when in fact they are entirely at the whim of the broadcaster and the politicians involved.
And that's at least in part true, because people are taught that there's nothing true, ever.
The media also react on that. All those "debates" between candidates for example. Most politicians would have to be interrupted every five seconds, because they tell obvious lies. Instead all the commentary focuses on debate style, which is utterly useless as a metric.
Of course it does. The problem with truth is - it’s often nuanced, complex and difficult so knowing how to communicate is important
This is only the case because we allow it as a culture. If we chose to value truth and intellectual honesty then that wouldn't be how it works
Rhetorical tricks and gotchas aren’t necessarily in opposition to the truth. You have to be able to communicate effectively to get the truth across, so knowledge of rhetoric is important for countering compelling bullshit.
My point is, that the debates never even get down to a level were truth has any meaning. It's the simulacrum of a discussion, were the actual problem is just a backdrop for these rhetorical tricks. And that's problematic.
Think of them exercises or essays - they are designed to let you practice skill, not actually solve climate change.
Practice for what? Arguing against your own standpoint?
That's exactly where my problem is. You're not exercising reasoning and coming to a conclusion, you're exercising that nothing has meaning and it's all about show. That might not be the intention of the practice, but it's the result.
What makes you say that’s the result? It’s practicing in making a logical argument to support a proposition. That’s not about “shoe” it’s about exercising and practicing a skill.
Do you get similarly outraged by people who do weight training because “they didn’t actually need to pick up those heavy things”
The point of any debate is to find "truth" (loaded term, so in quotes). If you're not arguing for truth, you're a showman - one might even say a lier. "Practicing" that is practicing to lie.
What these debates do is the opposite of searching for truth, they are only searching for cheap points. They operate on a completely different plane. Even though they claim to be super logical, they are not.
And that's a bad analogy. Really bad. My point is not, that the exercise is the (root) problem, but the tournament, if we want to stay in that flawed analogy. Seriously, show me only a single instance of a debate in the larger public sphere where there was an actual search for a deeper truth and not just cheap shots. You won't find any. Why? Because both sides were trained to only use a ton a rhetorical devices to deconstruct the sentence structure of the opponent, and not to even think about the problem behind it. To create a proper analogy: Debating is like a ChatGPT, ChatGPT will happily deconstruct your argument why fnortification is superior to parallex zonkowskication, even though both concepts don't exist. Why? Because is doesn't care for anything even thruth like, it's objective is to deconstruct a string of words - not more.
The entire practice of this type of debate is finding psychological tricks to create the illusion of knowledge, and I find that deeply unsettling.
Why? School debate clubs are practice sessions, excercises in debate. They are tests of skill They aren’t designed to get at objective truth any more than Olympic fencing is about trying to kill your opponent.
In the UK, I would point to many of the House of Lords debates, quite a few of the Commons debates (not Prime Minister’s’ questions- which are pure theatre). Then there are the areas which aren’t debates but involve forensic questioning, such as you would find in select committees, public enquiries and the courts.
Is what we are doing here, in the realm of cheap psychological tricks?
I remember them being a lot more interesting to watch, and you got a real feel for the candidate's positions (at least their public persona). But for the last ~8 years, it's been just gish galloping.
E.g., Obama vs. Romney was honestly pretty interesting to watch.
In my mind, that was the last real debate. They addressed their opponents comments and added their own. It wasn't an endless stream of buzz words.
There was actually a college debate team who argued about this. There was essentially no rules saying you had to follow the stated topic so they argued about racial prejudices in debate clubs and how it’s really a competition to see who talks the fastest. They ended up winning nationals if I recall correctly