It’s been over a decade since I have been debating but I did have a year where I regularly did BP Debate and once was traveling to a bigger tournament.
This one is simple but important; there are other ways to get this, but debate is a good one. Debate helps you build a feel for something which feels like “what evidence would I have to adduce to change the mind of someone I regard as an intellectual equal.”
Debate puts you in an environment where nobody makes arguments that should convince someone who’s a rationalist about questions of real importance. Changing one’s mind of questions of importance should usually via grounding a conclusion in empiric evidence.
If you have the question of “Should minority populations be given disproportionately more representation in legislative bodies?”, rationalist truth-seeking would favor to ask “What are the actual consequences that happened when people passed regulations that gave minority populations be given disproportionately more representation in legislative bodies?”
Another hideous aspect of debate is that it prepares you well for a corporate environment where the company does not care about the truth of whether or not it’s products poisons a large number of people. It’s easy for the trained debater to just take it as another debate where he got assigned the role of the corporation that employs him, so he needs to feel less cognitive dissonance for the horrible positions he advocates.
To use your terms, debates helps with memetic vaccination against memes such it being bad for corporations to let a lot of innocent bystanders die for their profit. It’s good for training people to have the mental flexibility to not be attached to values or empiric truth but to whoever employs them or the social environment in which the person operates.
There are not many public fora where one could advocate violently establishing a repressive military dictatorship to a handful of slightly-left-of-center white-collar workers and probably still be welcome at drinks after. This is a fragile and beautiful thing.
From on aspect it’s beautiful but from the perspective of someone in a repressive military dictatorship ruled by people who did BP Debate in Oxford or Cambridge, it seems less beautiful.
As far as making you a “good scientist” debate teaches you the equivalent of p-hacking. It makes you ask “Can I find arguments for this thesis that are strong enough to pass peer review?” instead of “Is my thesis actually true and matches the empiric facts well?”
It’s been over a decade since I have been debating but I did have a year where I regularly did BP Debate and once was traveling to a bigger tournament.
Debate puts you in an environment where nobody makes arguments that should convince someone who’s a rationalist about questions of real importance. Changing one’s mind of questions of importance should usually via grounding a conclusion in empiric evidence.
If you have the question of “Should minority populations be given disproportionately more representation in legislative bodies?”, rationalist truth-seeking would favor to ask “What are the actual consequences that happened when people passed regulations that gave minority populations be given disproportionately more representation in legislative bodies?”
Another hideous aspect of debate is that it prepares you well for a corporate environment where the company does not care about the truth of whether or not it’s products poisons a large number of people. It’s easy for the trained debater to just take it as another debate where he got assigned the role of the corporation that employs him, so he needs to feel less cognitive dissonance for the horrible positions he advocates.
To use your terms, debates helps with memetic vaccination against memes such it being bad for corporations to let a lot of innocent bystanders die for their profit. It’s good for training people to have the mental flexibility to not be attached to values or empiric truth but to whoever employs them or the social environment in which the person operates.
From on aspect it’s beautiful but from the perspective of someone in a repressive military dictatorship ruled by people who did BP Debate in Oxford or Cambridge, it seems less beautiful.
As far as making you a “good scientist” debate teaches you the equivalent of p-hacking. It makes you ask “Can I find arguments for this thesis that are strong enough to pass peer review?” instead of “Is my thesis actually true and matches the empiric facts well?”