I guess generally, ideally, there’d be lots of events generally falling under “really good debates trying to innovate on having good debates”, and they could try different things. Personally I wouldn’t want to enforce a strict, totalizing schedule in most events, because I think some really important value when one or both interlocutors get frustrated with the discourse and then jump out of the loops and are like “wait stop, stop everything, let’s clarify THIS” and then you might make progress.
That said, I like the idea of having some timeboxes thrown in, but I would do them somewhat more like Congressional hearings or cross-examinations. Each interlocutor gets one or two turns to cross-examine the other. During that 20 minutes, they have total control, in the sense that they can cut off the other speaker, speak as much or as little as they want, and ask questions / direct the conversation as they like. (But importantly it is of course symmetric, i.e. they take turns.)
I guess generally, ideally, there’d be lots of events generally falling under “really good debates trying to innovate on having good debates”, and they could try different things. Personally I wouldn’t want to enforce a strict, totalizing schedule in most events, because I think some really important value when one or both interlocutors get frustrated with the discourse and then jump out of the loops and are like “wait stop, stop everything, let’s clarify THIS” and then you might make progress.
That said, I like the idea of having some timeboxes thrown in, but I would do them somewhat more like Congressional hearings or cross-examinations. Each interlocutor gets one or two turns to cross-examine the other. During that 20 minutes, they have total control, in the sense that they can cut off the other speaker, speak as much or as little as they want, and ask questions / direct the conversation as they like. (But importantly it is of course symmetric, i.e. they take turns.)