this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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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?