Great Debates can be–and at rare times is–a forum that enlightens issues and tests ideas through careful, reasoned debate. I realize that this is not everyone’s vision of GD. Many see it as a forum to engage other people in verbal battle, not expecting to learn anything or persuade anyone. But I also know that there are at least some, perhaps even a majority, who would like to see it as a forum in which to learn from the opinions of others.
I think that it can be the lofty forum some want it to be. I think it just takes a critical mass of posters behaving in a way that prevents all of the things that degrade the forum. To that end, I am going to embark on an experiment and I encourage you, gentle reader, to try it as well. As best I am able (and I’m sure I will fail at times), I am going to try to follow these ten commandments for my posts in GD:
[ol]
[li]Spend time responding to the well reasoned arguments of those with whom you disagree, rather than the least reasonable, most polarizing, or most obviously wrong. Ignore those who are insulting, wholly unreasonable, or acting in bad faith.[/li]
[li]Presume the mistaken statements of others, including their mistaken statements of your position, are unintentional.[/li]
[li]Avoid posts that are more about what has happened in the thread than what the thread is about.[/li]
[li]Do not use sarcasm.[/li]
[li]Explicitly praise reasonable and well-founded disagreement.[/li]
[li]Trust the other thread participants to identify obvious dishonesty without pointing it out.[/li]
[li]Add nuance and knowledge, rather than nitpick errors.[/li]
[li]Take hijacks to other threads, and stay on the announced specific topic of the thread. Do not inject fundamental critiques that apply to many or most GD threads (i.e. anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-religion, anti-Obama etc.) into every thread to which they apply.[/li]
[li]Do not play games, or attempt gotchas, or focus on the identification of hypocrisy.[/li]
[li]Practice intellectual charity: read the best possible argument into the language of those with whom you disagree.[/li][/ol]
There are maybe a handful of posters who already consistently do all of these things. For the rest of us, I think it would be interesting to see if the quality or tone of GD can change by trying very hard to do all of these things for a month or so. Who’s with me?
[Given the audience to whom this addressed, I hope the mods will consider it witnessing and keep it in GD.]
But seriously, I totally agree with you on point 1. People come up with some stupid arguments here, which some people just can’t seem to ignore. In my opinion, there’s no better refutation of a badly made argument then to completely ignore it, leaving it sitting alone, unaddressed and unwanted.
I would further add that posters should make their best efforts to respond to arguments in toto. Avoid breaking up arguments into long rehearsals of quote stichomythia. This helps to maintain the integrity of arguments, makes it easier for newcomers in the threat to participate, and enables the aforementioned intellectual charity.
[li]Presume the mistaken statements of others, including their mistaken statements of your position, are unintentional.[/li][/quote]
That strikes me as foolhardy. A certain number of people are always going to lie and distort.
[quote=“Richard_Parker, post:1, topic:502486”]
[li]Trust the other thread participants to identify obvious dishonesty without pointing it out.[/li][/QUOTE]
We have no choice in the matter, since you aren’t allowed to say that you think that someone is lying.
I know people do lie and distort, Der Trihs, but I think that our overall discourse might be better served by presuming–even in the face of evidence to the contrary–that such people are not intentionally deceiving.
I second Maeglin’s suggestion as well. One problem with the in toto approach is that it usually requires us to summarize an argument and then respond, which gets people into straw man troubles. But I think it can be avoided if we practice intellectual charity.
It’s so much harder to argue against the well prepared and well articulated arguments than it is to pick apart a casual shoot-from-the-hip poster. The former end up being debates about what the meaning of “is” is, since when the logic is sound, the arguments all end up balancing on definitions.
I think your paradise GD would be stale pretty quickly. We need room for people to argue rationally AND emotionally.
Why ? Willful gullibility doesn’t seem likely to me to result in anything very interesting or productive. You’d just end up with a GD full of liars, and people who just chime in agreement with every lie no matter how blatant or contradictory of the previous lie it is.
I’ve read and participated in some very good debates between well prepared people that have been enlightening (at least to me) and not turned on semantics. And, sometimes, semantics are important.
But I don’t think you’re alone in finding unemotional debate stale. Maybe GD is a big enough place for both kinds of threads. I’d just like to see more of the reasoned discussion kind.
The reason is that I think we (humanity) tend to be unreliable judges of others’ intentions, especially in the context of a faceless message board. Given the likelihood of mistaken judgments about intentions–which I see happen all the time in GD–I think we are better off assuming the best. Also note that I said if you think someone is acting in bad faith, I think the best approach is to simply ignore them.
In any case, I guess you won’t be following that principle. I encourage you to give the other ones a shot (to the extent you don’t already).
Give the most egregiously flawed arguments a free pass? No. Heck, in some threads you wouldn’t be able to rebut anything if you did this.
And honest mistakes invite correction. No seriously - if I was ambiguous, I need to correct and clarify my position. And if they make “misstatements” about objective facts - what’s the tagline of the Straight Dope again?
Agreed.
No - but be VERY obvious when you do. (Do not rely on “tone of voice”, and apply smileys if necessary.) And be aware that it is a form of ‘mockery-lite’ and should be used with equal care.
I’m not opposed to this - but I’ll only rarely remember. Around here, the usual praised for reasonable and well-founded disagreement is a lack of reply…which is a main reason not to fai to respond to unreasonably and poorly-founded disagreement.
Naw. We’re already limited in how we can respond, and it’s fair game to rebut the truth (or what you *think *is true, anyway).
I’d prefer if people just refrained from slicing and dicing so much. Often the “error” is explained in the next sentence of the paragraph.
In my opinion it’s okay to reput error, while providing additional context.
I agree.
Depends - sometimed the hypocracy is a fundamental flaw of the position. Then it merits underscoring, as a rebuttal of the irrationality of the postion itself. Games and gotchas, though, are never good.
I prefer to attempt to read their original intent out of posts, to the best of my ability. If I think they’re trying to slide something under the table, I will address that directly. I do agree that it would be nice if people didn’t make up positions and attribute them to others based on misreading single lines out of context, though.
This is something I get called on in real life, and it isn’t something I used to do back in my old debating days. I think it is something a lot of people are guilty of, in particular those of us who have a legal background.
It is where legal argument differs - if the other person has to prove 15 elements, you can focus in on the one element they are weakest on. They can’t simply walk away and say they are right on everything else.
But most issues in the world aren’t legal arguments, made up of must prove elements.
So, in short, I think this is definitely a fair critique, and would benefit people to hold in mind. I don’t mean give logical flaws a completely free pass, but the meat should address the meat, if that makes sense.
I’ll choose just one to quarrel with you on (for now).
A free pass to what? What are you the gatekeeper of? If GD is about verbally sparring, then this makes sense. But if GD is about learning more about an issue or to test your own ideas, then that goal is often hampered by focusing on the weakest arguments.
Yes, the Straight Dope is about fighting ignorance. And sometimes fighting ignorance means addressing weak or unreasonable arguments. Thus, in a thread about whether the Holocaust happened, one would expect all of the deniers arguments, regardless of how silly, to get shot down.
But in the majority of threads, focusing on the weak arguments hampers the fight against ignorance. Consider a thread about wind power. It doesn’t take the debate anywhere to spend two pages arguing with the guy who thinks windmills are a terrible idea because of all the jetliners that will be smashed out of the air. Maybe you fight that guy’s ignorance, and even that is doubtful. But the hundred other participants who might have actually learned something from your knowledge of wind power miss out.
In short, it’s often a trade-off between possibly educating one ignoramous (and often the ones making the weak arguments are the least likely to be receptive to your rebuttals), and educating many more people by having the best arguments presented by good faith debaters.
That some threads consist only of bad arguments seems to me evidence of the need for the principle, rather than evidence against it. If bad arguments–the low-hanging fruit of GD–get all the attention, the good ones get crowded out. And that exact pattern happens in countless threads.
I find it much easier to read responses broken into reasonable chunks, especially long ones. The responder does have a responsibility to have read the entire post first, so as not to use an argument refuted after he makes it.
My preference for broken up responses might just be due to my rapidly shortening attention span.
I agree in the sense that someone should respond to an entire argument, not just a tiny piece of it - and especially not a response of the sort “that law passed in 1911, not 1912, so your whole argument is invalid.” If you agree with the rest, say it. If you don’t but don’t have time to respond to everything, say that also. But too many posters, on all sides of issues, ignore the best arguments against their position and go after a weak but unimportant response as if that made them right.
Hmm, perhaps I misunderstood you. I address all arguments - giving each as much attention as I feel they deserve. To me, letting an argument pass is agreeing with it, as a general rule. So I don’t see why I should stop addressing the weak ones - that’s “giving them a pass”.
However if you were focusing on the cases where people just pick out the one flaw (or percieved flaw) in a long, reasoned post, and harp on that - that sucks, and I agree with you 100% that that’s bad form.
And with things like two-page dumb hijacks - well, we also have to respond to what’s there. Once the dumb topic takes over, it’s a little hard to bring things back to something sensible.
Attention and threadspace are limited resources, and they both get diverted toward the low-hanging fruit. I know the “letting an argument pass is agreeing with it” mentality. I just think it is counter-productive for the purposes of education and enlightenment.
If a one-sentence reply is sufficient to feel like a bad argument has been addressed, all the better. My concern is with how rebuttal of bad arguments seems to dominate threads to the exclusion of interesting and useful arguments.
I somewhat agree - but not enough to go less than the one-line response. And peronally I tend to instead take those as opportunities to recap relevent parts of my argument in my rambling, long-winded style anyway - but that’s just me.
Heh. I can see I haven’t persuaded you on the value of nine of the points. But I got one!
I think sarcasm in GD can be hilarious. And it would be a sad day if, say, Vinyl Turnip stopped posting sarcasm. About 10% of the sarcasm is funny and brightens a dull thread. But about 90% of GD sarcasm is unfunny dismissal opposing views, phrased sarcastically by habit or to provoke another poster rather than comic sense. It also leads to misunderstandings pretty frequently. So, as a matter of style as much as principle, I’m gonna try to abandon it for the period of my attempt to live up to these principles.