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Politics philosophy and religion: serious business.

If anything, internet debating is far more egalitarian than most other forms, with the time frame and easy access to Google and Wikipedia it's not just for experts anymore. What can't be faked is compelling argumentation and adherence to logic and reason, the emotional appeal loses much of it's power in the online arena. What I also like is having a built in audience that can participate and choose to join in at any moment, and possibly offer some opinion changing insight, or call you on your BS if that is all your position is constructed of. Putting your beliefs out there in a forum like this is one way of putting them to the test, since we have such a diverse group of strongly opinionated people here, if there is a gaping hole in your philosophy you are going to hear about it.

I know that I personally have a tendency to go for the throat when arguing politics, probably a remnant of going to an alternative school where I was one of the few non-vegan, non-socialist, coldly logical people there, and I wasn't shy about it either. Be that as it may, I try to moderate that tendency in myself, with mixed success depending on the subject and the opponent. My general rule of thumb is to let my opponent set the tone, if they want to make it personal I can do that, but in general I try to keep it clean. Not only is a clean argument polite, it's more convincing to any third parties who may be following along, always something to keep in mind on a public forum. I will admit to seldom being able to pass up a particularly good joke at my opponent's expense, particularly if the joke happens to further my argument, don't ask me why, but having a sense of humor seems to enhance one's credibility.

respeck mah logic B*tch!

Nonsense I said most of you and not all of you. Therefore I am only passing judgment on a subgroup of the entire group.

And we have already established that your "shoot until you hit something" method of debate is lacking in a certain... je ne sais quoi. Which is fine, we can just debate with other people. But running into every question of your beliefs or discussion or request for clarification like it is the end of the world and you are prepared for a nuclear holocaust, Twinkie showdown and zombie attacks, is just... stupid.

Some discussions are just... discussions. And some debates can be had non-dogmatically... Not everything is a Battle Royale.

Passing judgment on the majority of this group, which means at least about half of the forum is being judged, and likely more.

in bickering over the words you are missing the point... which is proving my point. That you are spending too much time arguing to understand the argument.

I agree with Shiggily.

Again, Shiggily has a point. A good point.

I can think of two situations in which the adversarial approach often fails. If you define winning as persuading your opponent, the adversarial approach is more likely to harden attitudes.

If you define winning as persuading your audience, Kent Hovind shows that can be done despite being totally wrong. His strategy is to fire off a lot of claims that are demonstrably wrong, but they are easy to understand, superficially plausible, and selected so that an honest answer is complicated. An audience mildly sympathetic to Hovind will then find him very persuasive, and he wins by that definition.


You are right for this scenario. I had something else in mind. I think the second, learning-oriented approach creates a better debating climate, with a better chance of a good decision at the end. Think of two equally qualified groups of doctors discussing the same difficult diagnosis. The groups differ in their debating cultures. One is adversarial, with each doctor trying to coerce others to agree through force of logic. The other group has a culture of looking for something worthwhile in each others' contributions. Do you think the average quality of consensus diagnosis in the two groups would be the same or different? If different, which group's decisions would you trust more? Let's say both groups advise you on an important medical procedure, and they give you different advice. Remember the members of both groups are equally qualified. If you trust one group more than the other, which one do you trust more?


But does that winning lead to a better decision? If you are a lawyer and the other side has a complex but logically rigorous argument (insider fraud cases are usually complex) and you are convinced the evidence is correct and the witnesses reliable, what do you do? You can still exploit the complexity of the argument to try to confuse the jury, you can try to cast doubt on the evidence and attack the credibility of the witnesses. If you get the result your client wants, you have won the argument. But is that a good decision?

Perhaps where the stakes are high, we can't expect anything else than an adversarial attitude. In that case, if the decision is made by an audience and we can't prevent one side from being adversarial, it may be better to let both sides be adversarial. But I still see this as a special case, not the model for all debates. The "winning is everything" approach only serves to justify dirty tricks. It buries the signal under more noise.

Here is an example of noise: I could have appealed to emotion in my example of the court case by saying you could attack a witness who is socially inept or member of a less trusted minority. A WP audience would likely be sympathetic to a witness so attacked, and so sympathetic to my argument. If I can slip in my spin deftly enough that it doesn't backfire by being blatantly self-serving, I am more likely to persuade my audience, and it has nothing to do with how good my argument is. The spin is just more noise, but if done well will help to to persuade an audience.

That is your position. Any time you state a claim, you take a position.

See how easy it is? Now my position is at odds with yours.

Break out tha badgers and machetes!

I still wouldn't like to sacrifice the entertainment value of this forum though. for the sake of what? rationality and good manners? eeeeeek.

anybody who disagrees with me is a delusional terrorist anyway

I figured it's just Aspies. They tend to be emotionally extreme.

And to be honest, I uphold the matter of bickering over words as an important part of discussion. If language represents thought, and philosophy's purpose is to clarify thought, then bickering over words is an essential part of philosophy, and in any case, I am not being that bad.

As for your point, um.... I didn't quote the section where you made the argument in that response, thus I prove a point I didn't even care about, thus I don't really care.....

Well, I actually disagree with your definition of winning, nor do I see the hardening of attitudes to be problematic. I think that knowledge best advances through disagreement and dissent.

As for issues with people such as Kent Hovind, I don't see how such disagreements as the one that he presents could be dealt with other than an adversarial system, as in the end his goal will be to win no matter what system is upheld, and I would not be surprised that people will have an adversarial mindset about their views no matter what system is upheld. In any case, I consider superiority(in arguments and/or knowledge) to be more essential than convincing people, and I think that superiority will tend to win in the long-run, as I think most people do.


Well, if the adversarial culture is a good adversarial culture then I'd trust it more, and think that it would on average do *much* better than the other group. Now, it could be argued that adversarial cultures can be more variable, however, I think that an adversarial culture will tend to have a better average ability, and would be able to best find the most knowledgeable person on a particular subject(if you argue that group knowledge is homogeneous then the example is questionable and seems to leave reality). In any case, a relatively adversarial approach seems to pervade a lot of our system, and certainly good adversarialism will involve effective use of new knowledge and adaptations discovered problems.


Well, if you are a lawyer, then you have to defend your side, and the logic of our justice system is based upon the notion that adversarialism will lead to the correct solution. Now, obviously I would disagree with confusing the jury, as I do not see that as winning the argument, I see that as confusing the jury, but if you can legitimately cast down upon the evidence and the witnesses, then I would see this as legitimate, as that is what the defense is *supposed* to do. If the prosecution's case cannot hold against this, then they don't have a case as strong as it should be. In any case, I would think more complex legal cases are more likely to be settled outside of court anyway due to the large amounts of resources required to deal with them.


I don't think there is a means to prevent adversarialism from occurring, particularly in this subject matter. I also don't see a real difference, as any talk where I think X and you think Y will quickly lead to me trying to prove the truth of X, and you the truth of Y, and thus leads to at least a moderate adversarial relationship. The only way I can see to avoid an adversarial relationship is either not to care about the truth of X or Y, and low intensity seems *less* likely to result in improvement, or to have one side submit to the other, and this also seems less likely to result in improvement. I hold to a marketplace of ideas, and thus I hold to a competition between ideas, and thus I hold to somewhat adversarial relations between holders of ideas, another model does not seem to make much sense in this context.

And I don't care about noise. Noise is noise. If a person cares about noise, screw them. The big issue then becomes defining noise against a lot of other non-noise things, as I think you are referring to noise as things that interfere with a legitimate argument, but other people will stretch this to mean something else. I would just call this fallacious reasoning and be done with it.

You have to get used to it Shiggily. Where else will you find such a diverse group of thinkers except for the back alleys of Chicago maybe. I like bantering with bums too.

Seriously, there are a lot of intellectuals here. The anger is just passion.

Here's a thought, have you ever stopped and asked yourself WHY people react to you in this way, instead of just assuming it points to EVERYONE else being flawed in some way?