Debating is a Waste of Time
Modern-day debates give us a distorted impression of what rationality is and how truth is derived
Debates make amusing headlines and clickbait clips for sure. The following should sound familiar by now.
“This person … DESTROYED that person with … FACTS!” or “This person left a professor … SPEECHLESS!”.
Such headlines seem to monopolize public discourse, giving us the impression that this is what rationality looks like. That this is the defacto way we figure out what is true and what is false. On what is a good argument and what is a bad one.
It is true that ideas have to be tested somehow in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. To be able to talk about everything and ruthlessly point out bad ideas. Not to silence them but to either improve them or let them dissolve through time by their obvious incoherence. A tradition of criticism and error correction is absolutely essential for our collective growth so debate seems the most effective way to do that.
In the past, going through a period of superstition and religious authorities, a debate would be the shining light pulling us out of these illusions and introducing a habit of practicing rationality.
But modern-day debates don’t serve this purpose anymore. The debate format is broken. It has been transformed into something that 1) doesn’t really do justice to good arguments and 2) affects how we go about finding truth in our everyday life. So no tradition of fruitful criticism arises and errors don't get corrected. We just end up abusing our intellect trying to win stupid argumentative battles.
The setup
You’d like to believe that in a debate, each side brings forward a representative specimen who knows their stuff inside out, with all the latest arguments and refutations available on demand. But there are two problems with this.
The first one is the subject of debate. You usually see subjects being debated that are too complex for one person to navigate through, let alone deliver a solid conclusion. The complexity is intentional, partly from the media. Because the media is primarily concerned about viewership and numbers, the debate must be entertaining and current at the same time.
So there is an incentive to promote topics where you can’t get a definitive answer by the end of a two-hour debate. Ideally, they should go on forever and only be dropped if there are more pressing hot topics to debate about. Take Evolution vs Creationism for example, or God Doesn’t Exist, or Communism vs Capitalism, or Is Climate Change the End of the World? and so on.
Topics like tax reform or specific policy issues are deemed “too specific” for a large audience so you rarely see such conversations. But hey, mainstream media thought that the average attention span is only suited for five-minute, dumbed-down, sensationalist clips only to discover that people can easily devour long-form conversations like The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tim Ferriss Show and The Lex Fridman Podcast.
Debate topics that sell are bound to be too generic, complex, and tribal. So the “who knows their stuff inside out” part is out. You can only hope for “someone who knows a lot about a tiny specific chunk” on things you can indeed debate and others who recite narratives in order to steer public opinion on things that can never be settled.
How about the “representative specimen” then? That is the second problem.
If you found a topic that can indeed be settled within a reasonable timeline, and choose world experts to defend their position, good arguments inevitably will be overshadowed by the stage performance of the participants. But this is unfair. A renowned professor with decades of experience in research doesn’t really practice debating. It is not what they do day to day. It is stupendously different actually. They will most likely critique ideas on a piece of writing in a quiet room rather than performing in a packed arena. It is like taking an economist and expecting them to be good at Monopoly just because “it has to do something with money”. And not only that but judge their whole knowledge of economics based on how well they played Monopoly, on one particular day. Experts are not trained, nor do they have to, in debating on a live stage, with thousands of people looking, that goes on to live online forever as some 3-minute, out-of-context clip on YouTube. We shouldn’t expect some flawless performance just because “it has to do something with words, arguments, and logic”.
To be effective in a debate you have to be trained in doing just that. That is why we have systematized it and developed many styles and guides to follow resulting in viable careers as professional debaters. Styles like the quite famous Oxford style of debating(it’s really boring, don’t read it) or the Impromptu style of debating(it’s really boring, don’t read it) or the Cambridge style of debating(it’s really boring, don’t read it), and many many more.
A debate inherently promotes performative qualities. Traits like having a deep voice, making witty elegant cheap shots, and being able to articulate just about anything even if it is a fancy word salad, score higher points than good arguments. If you happen to be a bit more introverted, with an awkward personality but real insight and with great points you won't be as much fun to watch and seem unpersuasive.
The debate medium is for rockstar intellectuals and not so much for actual original thinkers. Although these types of rare species that bring forward both good arguments and flawless on-stage presence do exist in the wild.
(This debate is a great example of this where you can see plenty of bad and good behaviors alike)
You the everyday debater
So what is the harm to all this? Can’t we just indulge in it a bit just for entertainment?
Well yes, but this affects us far greater than we are capable of admitting. It’s like drinking. You think you have it under control until you don’t. And then there is no easy way out. The damage didn’t occur all at once, but unnoticeably, little by little everyday. Even modest drinking still alters your behavior and mood but it is simply not as evident.
Similarly, by being exposed to the spectacle of modern debates we adopt this mentality in our own lives, where we implicitly use the same techniques and behaviors to find truth. Little by little. Everyday. Instead of engaging in a good-faith conversation where the goal is to understand the other side and then critique their ideas, our objective becomes to win the battle from the get-go. Instead of asking a question because we might have missed something, we try to corner our “opponents” till they admit their ignorance, even if our arguments are made-up shit of the moment.
Just like professional debaters who have to deliver persuasive responses in a debate, we start to do the same in our heads so we can be ready to jump in a heartbeat to correct the world. In the same way, one would practice playing the violin before performing in public, we practice debating in our fantasy land with fictional scenarios and slick responses that conveniently mark us as glorious winners. We do this over and over again. Little by little. Everyday. But this is mentally exhausting. And over time, we become muddle thinkers where our ability to make good quality arguments lessens significantly.
Ok, I get that but how are we supposed to figure out what is right or wrong? Isn't this what debates are for?
Spotting a constructive debate is hard because in such a case the debate becomes a good-faith, less formal conversation, which doesn’t carry much of the “bread and circuses” taste of formal debates.
One arguing method that aligns pretty well with civilized conversations is known as Rogerian rhetoric, proposed by psychologist Carl Rogers around the 70s. This method proposes an alternative to the Aristotelian method where you state your assertion and try to prove you are right with a deductive approach. In such a method there is a winner and a loser whereas with Rogerian rhetoric the goal is to reach that squishy middle ground in a non-confrontational way. There is no battle to win. The only win is how well you understand the other side.
And it is not to say that we should become passive and settle with “agree to disagree” or “everyone has their own point of view” and never challenge anyone or anything. On the contrary. But that has to come as a natural progression, organically, after we have gone through listening and understanding the other side, dropping the need to win the battle. “Agree to disagree” and “everyone has their own point of view” are responses that can act as placeholders till we think things through and form our opinions. Then we can drop these too.
One example of this is when Lex Fridman had Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin on his podcast for a “climate debate”. Here I saw no debate but rather an interesting and civilized conversation where tons of common ground was found. This episode was a ✅ in my Rogerian rhetoric checklist. Lex is a great example of this and that is why he is so popular.
You in the playground
In a previous piece, I wrote about how smart people inhabit these spaces where they keep their minds occupied, thinking they are using their intellect to find truth when in fact they are consuming more sophisticated propaganda. I called them intellectual playgrounds. But I didn't mention the most engaging one, which is debating. It is without a doubt an intellectually demanding activity. But the skills you are getting good at while doing it can easily destroy you.
If you are smart you can easily rationalize every possible argument and argue for every possible position even if it's plain wrong. That is why you see undeniably intelligent people with PhDs advocating for obviously ridiculous things like censoring people we don't agree with or that we should give communism another try. If the package is wrapped around rationality, even the smartest and most educated among us will fail to touch base with reality.
So if you are a good debater you can easily fall into the trap of practicing motivated reasoning and a myriad of other biases, sleepwalking your way into being more wrong in a clever way.
Idea Laundering: How do "kind" falsehoods like "sex is a spectrum" and "obesity is healthy" go mainstream? Activists with PhDs use academic journals & scientific jargon to disguise ideology as knowledge, which is then cited as fact by media & Wikipedia. - Gurwinder
The alternative
There is a better way. And it is done in the only place real thinking happens. In the solitude of your own head. This can be done with writing where you can take your time and critique an idea more in-depth, without having to keep track of a moving goalpost and deflating personal attacks in real-time. By doing so you will have more time to do research and formulate your own thoughts without the glitter of on-stage charisma or lack of it.
With writing you are not really against someone in a literal sense, but rather you are against yourself. How well you understand and how solid your thesis really is. You can't really yell at a piece of paper or a screen as you can at another human.
People change their minds in a safe psychological environment and a debate is anything but that. With debaters prioritizing winning over truth and with audiences implicitly forced to pick a side, we lag behind in fostering such a culture. A safe psychological environment is being aware of what we share in common and that the common occupies much larger space than the differences. This is the basis of a good-faith conversation and a necessary prerequisite of it. Then you can go on and argue over important details since only then do they reveal themselves. In writing, there is room for all this.
You have the solution right in your hands, starting today. You can opt out of this system and look at it for what it really is. Modern-day debate is not a truth-seeking mechanism but rather an intellectual playground that divides smart people into two camps so their behaviors are more predictable.
On a personal level, I don't know if I'll ever get to break free from this internal dialogue, but I have no other choice other than to try to accept a profoundly obvious fact. That people are different and that the web of events that made them think and act as they do is infinitely complex. You can't reverse engineer a brain and tweak a tiny parameter so you can have a different person in front of you, from what they were a minute ago. You can't reach their brain through their ears but by understanding them a bit better, and where they came from, you can reach your own brain. And potentially change something instead of snapping back to the automatic responses that make you a socially well-functioning puppet.
The health of your brain depends on understanding all of this. And I can debate you on this too.
Or rather “I'll … EVISCERATE you into OBLIVION using ... FACTS and LOGIC!!!“.
Great read, John.
My take on this is that ideas, much like genes, are antagonistic by nature. They seek domination over other ideas and, ultimately, survival (as in passing on to the next host). The validity of an idea is measured on how well it resonates with other people or, to put it in another way, how well it describes their perceived reality.
For that fact, solely “inner” debating is not sustainable long-term but is crucial for eliminating inherently bad ideas and fortifying the good ones. The end goal, though, remains the same: put them out in public and see how well they hold together.