Adversarial debates are not without their usefulness, such as in legal and political processes. It’s true that they are generally suboptimal as far as deliberative truth-seeking goes, but sometimes we really do care about refuting incorrect positions and arguments (“killing soldiers”) as clearly as possible.
I agree. I think it’s really important to be able to support a point when you really do have one. That some people were able to win debates—which takes a lot of skill—was required for humanity to progress. How else would we have left behind our superstitions? The problem isn’t trying to win the opponent over to the truth, the problem is trying to win the opponent over for other reasons. If a person was very good at debate, how would you make the distinction? Especially if everyone else is trying to win for the sake of ego? It’s not easy to tell the difference between a person who wins because they have more of the truth or are clever in the way they defending it, versus a person who wins because they’re more tenacious than their competitor.
A person who does have the most complete understanding of the truth can be attacked to the point of tedium with logical fallacies until they get bored and wander away. A group of people who are all debating for the sake of ego will not only be likely to insist that the debaters who are best at defending truth are wrong, but they will project their own motives onto that person and insist that they, too, are debating for the sake of ego. Add to that the fact that nobody believes something that they think is wrong, which leads to everybody thinking that they’re right, and it can get to be a pretty big mess.
Adversarial debates are not without their usefulness, such as in legal and political processes. It’s true that they are generally suboptimal as far as deliberative truth-seeking goes, but sometimes we really do care about refuting incorrect positions and arguments (“killing soldiers”) as clearly as possible.
I agree. I think it’s really important to be able to support a point when you really do have one. That some people were able to win debates—which takes a lot of skill—was required for humanity to progress. How else would we have left behind our superstitions? The problem isn’t trying to win the opponent over to the truth, the problem is trying to win the opponent over for other reasons. If a person was very good at debate, how would you make the distinction? Especially if everyone else is trying to win for the sake of ego? It’s not easy to tell the difference between a person who wins because they have more of the truth or are clever in the way they defending it, versus a person who wins because they’re more tenacious than their competitor.
A person who does have the most complete understanding of the truth can be attacked to the point of tedium with logical fallacies until they get bored and wander away. A group of people who are all debating for the sake of ego will not only be likely to insist that the debaters who are best at defending truth are wrong, but they will project their own motives onto that person and insist that they, too, are debating for the sake of ego. Add to that the fact that nobody believes something that they think is wrong, which leads to everybody thinking that they’re right, and it can get to be a pretty big mess.
This gets very confusing.