I think there is a difference between (1) people who enjoy verbally competing to be correct, (2) people who enjoy such competition and have formally trained, studied, and practiced it, and (3) people who have trained, studied, practiced and come out disillusioned with strategic communication. When I was 10 I was the first kind of debater. I think many law school students, by stereotype, are the second kind. Having spent two years in college on a policy debate team and later coached a high school debate team I find myself feeling kinship with the third group.
I think formal competitive debate experience plus philosophy can help to calibrate people in very useful ways. Of a proposition Q you can ask what P(Q|H) is for various values of H if you’re sticking to pure Bayesian rationality. You can also have a sense of how difficult it would be to go aff (or neg) on Q (or not-Q) in front of different audiences.
Among skilled debaters where both sides have a research library and knowledge of Q in advance and skilled debaters are the audience, whoever goes aff and controls the content of Q should generally win.
But a good debater should also be able to take a large number of “open questions” as Q, and win in all four scenarios (aff/neg x Q/not-Q) with an arbitrary audience against an unskilled opponent. Watching this second thing happen, and learning to do it, and teaching other people to do it has given me relatively little respect for casual debates as a truth seeking process, but a lot of respect for formal debates as an educational process.
If anyone reading this is picking colleges, I recommend looking for one with a CEDA program and spending a year on the team :-)
I agree that casual debate isn’t so great as a truth seeking process.
What I was saying was that some people seem to have trouble (or dislike) thinking propositionally; I’ve had conversations where I’m proposing an argument and the other person seems to think that I just want to be cheered up or something, and doesn’t realize I actually want to discuss the substance.
I think there is a difference between (1) people who enjoy verbally competing to be correct, (2) people who enjoy such competition and have formally trained, studied, and practiced it, and (3) people who have trained, studied, practiced and come out disillusioned with strategic communication. When I was 10 I was the first kind of debater. I think many law school students, by stereotype, are the second kind. Having spent two years in college on a policy debate team and later coached a high school debate team I find myself feeling kinship with the third group.
I think formal competitive debate experience plus philosophy can help to calibrate people in very useful ways. Of a proposition Q you can ask what P(Q|H) is for various values of H if you’re sticking to pure Bayesian rationality. You can also have a sense of how difficult it would be to go aff (or neg) on Q (or not-Q) in front of different audiences.
Among skilled debaters where both sides have a research library and knowledge of Q in advance and skilled debaters are the audience, whoever goes aff and controls the content of Q should generally win.
But a good debater should also be able to take a large number of “open questions” as Q, and win in all four scenarios (aff/neg x Q/not-Q) with an arbitrary audience against an unskilled opponent. Watching this second thing happen, and learning to do it, and teaching other people to do it has given me relatively little respect for casual debates as a truth seeking process, but a lot of respect for formal debates as an educational process.
If anyone reading this is picking colleges, I recommend looking for one with a CEDA program and spending a year on the team :-)
I agree that casual debate isn’t so great as a truth seeking process.
What I was saying was that some people seem to have trouble (or dislike) thinking propositionally; I’ve had conversations where I’m proposing an argument and the other person seems to think that I just want to be cheered up or something, and doesn’t realize I actually want to discuss the substance.