It seems like there should be a way to center truth-seeking more than the debate framing does. Your last couple of theories seem promising in that direction.
Debates seem like a good idea: they should surface all of the good arguments and evidence. They have a subtle but powerful down side: they foster motivated reasoning in both the participants and audience.
They’re not putting truth-seeking as the primary goal. That might be fine if motivated reasoning wasn’t such a powerful effect. My impression is that public debate is usually net-negative for spreading truth. It gets people to dig in their heels on the positions they already hold, more than it exposes people to new arguments and evidence. They mix too much of the charisma, character, and skill of the participants with the objective merits of their positions, and human brains mix all of the perceived merits of associated arguments far more than we’d like.
Your attempts to remove the reputational effects work against this. But I like your last two suggestions best: carefully select the debaters who will have a truth-seeking discussion that happens to be called a debate, or change the terminology and drop the adversarial framing entirely.
Having someone just explain their view of a field is great, but we get that a lot already on podcasts already. What about having the goal being something similar to passing each other’s ideological turing tests, a cooperative not competitive objective?
Or perhaps the goal could be to have the moderator be able to restate both positions and their principal reasons for holding them.
I’ve been watching discussions in science with interest for a long time, and I think they often become an argument, in which participants become more emotionally activated and more combative. This looks to me like it actually reverses progress toward the truth; it emotionally engages the onlookers too, and causes everyone to start looking for excuses to support their chosen position/debater. instead of carefully following the complex logic. Removing the debate framing is one way to reduce this tendency.
Anyway, kudos to you for doing experiments!
It’s a separate issue, but I LOVE your one more thing! Having a way for non-speakers to weigh in on when the discussion is boring them seems ideal. Anonymity seems better than the lights on hats. I want an app for this, so I can gently nudge my friends off of dumb or argumentative conversation tracks without looking like a jerk.
It gets people to dig in their heels on the positions they already hold, more than it exposes people to new arguments and evidence.
I think there is some merit to this claim. But there is also a counterpoint, which Destiny (one of the debaters mentioned by the OP) talks about here. In the interest of saving readers from clicking on the video, here is a cleaned-up version of what he says:
“I think that the only way that you can break people out of these bad media environments, I think it actually has to be (this sounds so self-serving, I’m so sorry) through debate. I think it’s the most important thing that you can possibly do. [...]
Because as I’m arguing with people, I realize what’s happening. What’s happening is they’re getting a whole bunch of horrible information from whatever commentator they’re listening to. And I can argue with them and I can pummel them and destroy every argument and become the debate god or whatever, but it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, they can go back and listen to that person.
But I think it does something to your mind (and this is feedback I got a lot back in the past) when you see your information god (i.e., the commentator himself) be forced to actually confront something he said but can’t defend when he’s actually challenged on it.”
It seems like there should be a way to center truth-seeking more than the debate framing does. Your last couple of theories seem promising in that direction.
Debates seem like a good idea: they should surface all of the good arguments and evidence. They have a subtle but powerful down side: they foster motivated reasoning in both the participants and audience.
They’re not putting truth-seeking as the primary goal. That might be fine if motivated reasoning wasn’t such a powerful effect. My impression is that public debate is usually net-negative for spreading truth. It gets people to dig in their heels on the positions they already hold, more than it exposes people to new arguments and evidence. They mix too much of the charisma, character, and skill of the participants with the objective merits of their positions, and human brains mix all of the perceived merits of associated arguments far more than we’d like.
Your attempts to remove the reputational effects work against this. But I like your last two suggestions best: carefully select the debaters who will have a truth-seeking discussion that happens to be called a debate, or change the terminology and drop the adversarial framing entirely.
Having someone just explain their view of a field is great, but we get that a lot already on podcasts already. What about having the goal being something similar to passing each other’s ideological turing tests, a cooperative not competitive objective?
Or perhaps the goal could be to have the moderator be able to restate both positions and their principal reasons for holding them.
I’ve been watching discussions in science with interest for a long time, and I think they often become an argument, in which participants become more emotionally activated and more combative. This looks to me like it actually reverses progress toward the truth; it emotionally engages the onlookers too, and causes everyone to start looking for excuses to support their chosen position/debater. instead of carefully following the complex logic. Removing the debate framing is one way to reduce this tendency.
Anyway, kudos to you for doing experiments!
It’s a separate issue, but I LOVE your one more thing! Having a way for non-speakers to weigh in on when the discussion is boring them seems ideal. Anonymity seems better than the lights on hats. I want an app for this, so I can gently nudge my friends off of dumb or argumentative conversation tracks without looking like a jerk.
I think there is some merit to this claim. But there is also a counterpoint, which Destiny (one of the debaters mentioned by the OP) talks about here. In the interest of saving readers from clicking on the video, here is a cleaned-up version of what he says:
“I think that the only way that you can break people out of these bad media environments, I think it actually has to be (this sounds so self-serving, I’m so sorry) through debate. I think it’s the most important thing that you can possibly do. [...]
Because as I’m arguing with people, I realize what’s happening. What’s happening is they’re getting a whole bunch of horrible information from whatever commentator they’re listening to. And I can argue with them and I can pummel them and destroy every argument and become the debate god or whatever, but it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, they can go back and listen to that person.
But I think it does something to your mind (and this is feedback I got a lot back in the past) when you see your information god (i.e., the commentator himself) be forced to actually confront something he said but can’t defend when he’s actually challenged on it.”