If rhetoric is the dark arts, then rationalists need a defense against the dark arts.
I’ve always seem debates as a missed opportunity for rationality training/testing. Not for debaters, but for the audience.
When you have two people cleverly arguing for an answer, that is an opportunity for the audience to see if they can avoid being suckered in. To keep things interesting, you could randomize the debate so that one, bother, or neither debater is telling the truth. (Or course in the toughest debates, the debaters are both partially true and the audience needs to find out what is the real answer.) And if we want to keep the students from compartmentalizing what they have learned, we probably need to make the debates a mix of real world and abstract debates. We might also have easy, medium, and hard difficulty debates, but you don’t tell the audience beforehand.
I think that this would be useful thing, because lots of place already have debate clubs and public debates. All we would need to have an audience game running in the background.
I think that the most helpful part of the lesson would come after the debate and after the audience has been scored on their confidence intervals. If we can get the debaters to explain the rhetorical tricks they used, so the audience can recognize them in the future and hopefully not fall for them a second time.
I suspect you are right. But still, lying and tricking people is a skill, and I know where I can learn to practice it. (Debate clubs) Are the courses for the skill of detecting lies and tricks? All I can think of offhand is those fbi courses on micro expressions and maybe playing lots of poker. It feels like they off a currently unfilled market for defensive techniques.
I remember one leftwing person who was in favor of Barack Obama before the presidental debates but switched to being against him after seeing Barack Obama because of body language that indicates lying.
In my experience the amount of people who have body language reading skills that are developed to that degree that they make actual decisions like this is quite rare.
In that case it’s not only exterordinary skill of reading bodylanguage. It’s also a skill of not getting mindkilled at all. It took me till Barack Obama announced Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff to understand that Barack Obama wasn’t planning on creating real change. That happened to be the week after the presidential election.
I know from talking to people with political experience that people decisions are very important and thus could use this signal to detect the tricking in which Barack Obama engaged.
In both of those cases special knowledge to interpret a signal that most people wouldn’t perceive and the confidence in trusting that signal allowed the conclusion that Barack Obama isn’t the person as which he presented
himself.
Apart from knowledge not getting mindkilled and entangling yourself is hard. If you care hard about the outcome being a certain way you are less likely to spot errors.
I remember (but unfortunately have no source) that the US Secret Service is best at detecting lies. A Secret Service person who guards an important figure has to assume that most of the people he comes into contact with are no threat but he still has to check them for being a possible threat. That’s better for learning lie detection than the setting of a policeman who interrogates a person he believes to be lying.
But still, lying and tricking people is a skill, and I know where I can learn to practice it. (Debate clubs)
Debating don’t focus on the skill of changing the mind of other people but on training the skill of saying something that a judge judges to be correct. That’s a different skill. Trained debaters talk fast. Trained hypnothists talk slow to allow for emotional processing and changes in beliefs to happen. Oprah talks slow and then repeats a statements that has an emotional effect to further that emotional effect. From a debating perspective that’s wasting time.
I thought the Secret Service was pretty notorious for considering everyone who reports a threat to be a threat, with the advice being that you should never inform the Secret Service of anything. If anything, their lie detection is askew.
This is from Ekman’s work on lie detection. He thinks that this comes from dealing with crowds—the SS spends much more time looking at different faces trying to detect emotions / intent to harm, and thus actually has practice at distinguishing faces, rather than considering one person for extended periods of time (like normal interrogations). It isn’t a commentary on how they respond to reports.
If rhetoric is the dark arts, then rationalists need a defense against the dark arts.
I’ve always seem debates as a missed opportunity for rationality training/testing. Not for debaters, but for the audience.
When you have two people cleverly arguing for an answer, that is an opportunity for the audience to see if they can avoid being suckered in. To keep things interesting, you could randomize the debate so that one, bother, or neither debater is telling the truth. (Or course in the toughest debates, the debaters are both partially true and the audience needs to find out what is the real answer.) And if we want to keep the students from compartmentalizing what they have learned, we probably need to make the debates a mix of real world and abstract debates. We might also have easy, medium, and hard difficulty debates, but you don’t tell the audience beforehand.
I think that this would be useful thing, because lots of place already have debate clubs and public debates. All we would need to have an audience game running in the background.
I think that the most helpful part of the lesson would come after the debate and after the audience has been scored on their confidence intervals. If we can get the debaters to explain the rhetorical tricks they used, so the audience can recognize them in the future and hopefully not fall for them a second time.
I don’t think your model of the nature of debate is good. Most rhetorical strategies aren’t tricks in the sense that they have no basis at all.
I suspect you are right. But still, lying and tricking people is a skill, and I know where I can learn to practice it. (Debate clubs) Are the courses for the skill of detecting lies and tricks? All I can think of offhand is those fbi courses on micro expressions and maybe playing lots of poker. It feels like they off a currently unfilled market for defensive techniques.
I remember one leftwing person who was in favor of Barack Obama before the presidental debates but switched to being against him after seeing Barack Obama because of body language that indicates lying. In my experience the amount of people who have body language reading skills that are developed to that degree that they make actual decisions like this is quite rare.
In that case it’s not only exterordinary skill of reading bodylanguage. It’s also a skill of not getting mindkilled at all. It took me till Barack Obama announced Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff to understand that Barack Obama wasn’t planning on creating real change. That happened to be the week after the presidential election.
I know from talking to people with political experience that people decisions are very important and thus could use this signal to detect the tricking in which Barack Obama engaged.
In both of those cases special knowledge to interpret a signal that most people wouldn’t perceive and the confidence in trusting that signal allowed the conclusion that Barack Obama isn’t the person as which he presented himself.
Apart from knowledge not getting mindkilled and entangling yourself is hard. If you care hard about the outcome being a certain way you are less likely to spot errors.
I remember (but unfortunately have no source) that the US Secret Service is best at detecting lies. A Secret Service person who guards an important figure has to assume that most of the people he comes into contact with are no threat but he still has to check them for being a possible threat. That’s better for learning lie detection than the setting of a policeman who interrogates a person he believes to be lying.
Debating don’t focus on the skill of changing the mind of other people but on training the skill of saying something that a judge judges to be correct. That’s a different skill. Trained debaters talk fast. Trained hypnothists talk slow to allow for emotional processing and changes in beliefs to happen. Oprah talks slow and then repeats a statements that has an emotional effect to further that emotional effect. From a debating perspective that’s wasting time.
I thought the Secret Service was pretty notorious for considering everyone who reports a threat to be a threat, with the advice being that you should never inform the Secret Service of anything. If anything, their lie detection is askew.
This is from Ekman’s work on lie detection. He thinks that this comes from dealing with crowds—the SS spends much more time looking at different faces trying to detect emotions / intent to harm, and thus actually has practice at distinguishing faces, rather than considering one person for extended periods of time (like normal interrogations). It isn’t a commentary on how they respond to reports.