Matt Yglesias thinks "debate" is a waste of time, because 1) debating is a skill that has little relationship to being right, and 2) it never changes anyone's mind. And this:
Most people who disagree with you have no idea what they’re talking about.
They’re generally pretty dumb and haven’t spent much time interrogating their own views, and they certainly haven’t bothered to form even a minimally coherent intellectual or moral approach to the world. They may invoke particular principles to defend their specific commitments, but those principles are so inconsistently applied that it almost feels like bad faith.
This is all completely true. But it’s easy to forget that it’s also true of people who agree with you.
1 comment:
Formal "debate" is a sport, and has been for a long time.
I learned this at a young age, when my school forced me to take part in a debate about nuclear energy, and forced me to be on the anti-nuclear side. I knew from the start that this was the losing side. So did the entire class - the students randomly assigned to the pro-nuclear side literally cheered aloud to learn their assignment, and the ones assigned against it groaned. I complained to my teacher that this was an unfair debate, with one position obviously favored to win (separate from it being the correct position), and I was told "It's not about who wins, it's about making a good argument". I protested that there was no good argument against nuclear power, and was told "Well, make the best argument you can."
My team did indeed do our best, thinking up various rhetorical tricks (and I mean that quite literally) to try to "convince" (read: manipulate) our audience into thinking our position was correct. We unsurprisingly failed. And driving home the stupidity of it all, we then all received worse grades than the victors. It was not remotely the school system's intention, but they proved to me that day just how idiotic and senseless "debate" is, and just how frustrating it is that so much of how you are treated in life depends not on whether or not you are correct, but rather on how good of a show you put on for people - how well you jump through hoops and fulfill arbitrary goals with no connection whatsoever to reality.
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