It may be a good tool for conscientious, rational people with a common goal of reaching truth or of outlining an argument. But as a crowdsourced website trying to actually come to consensus about specific arguments and refutations, it’s mostly GIGO, which is to be expected from any website whose user community isn’t strongly pre-selected.
If you look briefly at e.g the most heavily commented page on the site, for “there is no such thing as global warming”, which lots of people evidently spent time on, you’ll mostly update in the direction of “there’s a big and very complicated argument about this with lots of points on both sides which the other side then claims to refute, ad nauseam”. And if you take the time to actually read some of it, you’ll realize it’s a colossal waste of time that doesn’t deserve the name of “argument”.
It may be a good tool for conscientious, rational people with a common goal of reaching truth or of outlining an argument. But as a crowdsourced website trying to actually come to consensus about specific arguments and refutations, it’s mostly GIGO, which is to be expected from any website whose user community isn’t strongly pre-selected.
If you look briefly at e.g the most heavily commented page on the site, for “there is no such thing as global warming”, which lots of people evidently spent time on, you’ll mostly update in the direction of “there’s a big and very complicated argument about this with lots of points on both sides which the other side then claims to refute, ad nauseam”. And if you take the time to actually read some of it, you’ll realize it’s a colossal waste of time that doesn’t deserve the name of “argument”.
Sad truth about most arguments IRL too