Just over three years after this post was published, I returned to it and switch to a strong upvote from a regular upvote. The post is well written and engaging, and it recently appears to me that it continues to be highly relevant. The proximate cause was the post over at the EA forum about an EA debate competition; there was a lot of well-articulated and popular concerns about debate as an activity, the most excellent of which had, if I understand it correctly, the following true concern:
Methods of communicating that are not truth-seeking compete with methods that are for our mastery. Which is to say, by spending time on symmetric weapons like rhetoric, we are forsaking time spent on advancing the truth.
I think this is a mistake, and that the value of rhetoric spoken-or-written to pursuit of the truth is being neglected. I publicly register my intent to write a post on this.
Just over three years after this post was published, I returned to it and switch to a strong upvote from a regular upvote. The post is well written and engaging, and it recently appears to me that it continues to be highly relevant. The proximate cause was the post over at the EA forum about an EA debate competition; there was a lot of well-articulated and popular concerns about debate as an activity, the most excellent of which had, if I understand it correctly, the following true concern:
Methods of communicating that are not truth-seeking compete with methods that are for our mastery. Which is to say, by spending time on symmetric weapons like rhetoric, we are forsaking time spent on advancing the truth.
I think this is a mistake, and that the value of rhetoric spoken-or-written to pursuit of the truth is being neglected. I publicly register my intent to write a post on this.