Damn, that beagledave knows his shit!!
Works like a charm.
Great question, great responses. Thanks.
Except for beagledave’s answer, which had no cites and a lot of logical fallacies. Nothing personal.
Crusoe and AHunter had some exceptionally valuable points (not to slight the other contributors). Some things I’d highlight:
[ol][li]Think things through first. Why are you taking the particular stand you are on this issue? What might convince another that it’s the right stand to take? Don’t worry about covering every aspect of your reasoning – you’ll be questioned about it quickly enough, and time enough then to clarify your ideas and explain the context of what you said.[/li][li]AHunter’s third point. For every person that responds, there are going to be thirty readers who either won’t have anything to add or are true lurkers – and who will pay attention to your points and may even be convinced by them. Just because beagledave has a stick up his fundament on that issue doesn’t mean that you haven’t reached a bunch of others who see your point clearly, even though he doesn’t! ;)[/li][li]Keep your cool. If necessary, get up and walk away from the computer, sing two verses of “My Favorite Things” or “I Wish I Were an Oskar Meyer Wiener” or whatever will dispell your funk, then address that maddening idiot calmly and dispassionately. As Crusoe said, “Be polite and reasonable, no matter how utterly repellent the other position is.” [/li][li]The object is to learn from each other. I do not expect to convince anybody that my precise way of thinking is right – but to give them a different perspective in which to understand their own way of thinking. Libertarian is particularly adept at working this satori experience on me; others will have other posters that do it on them. When you or others say, “I never looked at it in that way before,” that’s a successful thread, even if we never achieve a consensus.[/li][li]Opinion and anecdote are definitely valuable – but do not constitute proof (except as disproving a universal negative – if you know one X who is Y, then JustAnotherPoster’s assertion that “No X are Y” is invalid). They do, however, constitute strong support for an issue. The old “is being gay a choice?” is definitely answered for me by the plethora of gay people who insist that they did not choose to be gay and could not choose not to be gay – their combined testimony constitutes something as close to proof as is possible using anecdote.[/li][/ol]
Well of COURSE beagledave knows his shit. After all, he’s got his head crammed so far up his ass, what else is he supposed to know anything about?
[sub]I kid, I kid![/sub]
As for how to jump into GD, who cares? Find a topic you’re interested in and join the conversation. If somebody asks you to back up what you’re saying, provide some evidence. But on the whole, just have fun. We don’t eat babies around here. 
[ul][li]Know what you’re posting about. Know the limits of your knowledge. If you’ve developed an expertise on riparian rights while studying the watersheds of the Clinton, Rouge, and Huron Rivers, you can probably join in a discussion of the riparian rights of the Mississippi–but the fact that the Mississippi travels through/between ten states and is navigable may mean that there are riparian rights or obligations of which you are unaware since your rivers are non-navigable and confined to one state. [/li][li]Don’t call people names.[/li][li]Don’t make fun of peoplewho are at a disadvantage (e.g., poor skills of expression or emotionally distraught)[/li][li]Don’t assume that other people are lying (they may have information sources that are worse–or better, or just different–than you have).[/li][li]Don’t assume that people are racist/sexist/ageist/elitist/reverse snobs/whatever. They may have been making a point and failed; they may have used a phrase that was innocent to them (although charged to you). They may be from another culture/nation/neighborhood/class where the expression is innocent.[/li][li]Don’t carry feuds between threads. The poster who was your harshest critic and bitterest foe when debating the nature cinnamon in applesauce may be your best ally in a debate over whether the fork should be held in the left or right hand at a formal dinner. [/li]Don’t assume that a snarky remark was intended to inflict pain–a lot of us are just smartasses who cannot pass up straight lines.[/ul]
I’m puzzled by this claim. Could you clarify? It seems to me that questions that lack a definitive answer will often involve the weighing of conflicting evidence.
Is an “evidence debate” one where posters argue about what cite is the better authority? In that case, I would mostly agree.
Weirdly, I’ve never seen an argument with these 4 necessary conditions laid out explicitly (or even implicitly as far as I can tell) outside of high school forensics.
- Starting out, keep you points subtle and well informed. Theres nothing worse then saying something only to be shot down because your misinformed. Don’t make any huge proclaimations. Just come into a thread, state your opinion and add whatever extra information you can.
- No ones infallible. If your wrong, admit it, learn and move on.
- Leave emotions out of it. Just because you feel strongly that you are right, it doesn’t mean others are wrong.
- beagledave knows his shit.
- “My mom/dad/brother/friend said” is not reasonable ground for an argument. You probably won’t see this on the SDMB but in real life I’ve heard it was to much.
Who else can see this beagledave thing becoming the next Hi Opal?
Way to much rather…
You mean way too much?
Then the debate isn’t settled by evidence, is it? See what I mean? Worse yet, you’ve now just added a debate to the debate. Now, a factually incorrect argument, boom, bring it on, but once you get a cite war going or an argument inside the argument the whole thing is useless.
Cites are way, way, way more useful in GQ than they are here. At least: it takes a whole lot more than a chart to change my mind about something worth debating. MHO.
Sometimes. I mean, my general idea is just that if a debate can be settled with evidence, then it isn’t a debate and it should end right there. If evidence is only a step, then once the cites start flying the whole thing is lost, most of the time it never leaves that point (and it would have to as that is only one part of the decuctive chain).
Of course there will always be situations where cites are questioned and resolved in a page or so, but I’ve got to say I’ve seen a whole lot of gun debates that consisted of more cites than I could shake a stick at, and in fact no one was ever saying anything substancial because of it. Everyone wanted to be credible, no one wanted the credit of saying something. :shrug: Maybe my view is prohibitively selective, there are a lot of threads I don’t read in here all the time. I can live with that conclusion.
erislover said:
Should is the key word there. But often it doesn’t. How many creationism threads have we had here? Well, if evidence settled that debate, there would be no more of 'em because all of the creationists would have recognized how wrong they are and moved on. Same with a number of other topics I won’t go into because we have threads on them hanging around right now and I really don’t want this to go off on a tangent.
David’s right. Even though materialism, for example, has been shown by the evidence to be mystical and untenable, there are still those who cling to a materialist philosophy.
I think that debating is all about trying to settle whether a point of view is relative or absolute. There would be few debators taking a position that premeditated murder of infants is morally acceptable unless it was their position that, say, God had been the murderer and had a good reason to murder.
Then, too, there’s my classic song and dance, which I should probably trademark and collect royalties on, on the subject that different people will weight evidence differently, and hence come to different conclusions on the same evidence.
I think that getting a firm grasp on that idea is one of the key ones to debating level-headedly here – that somebody else may look at exactly the same array of evidence as you, and yet h sound mental powers and in good faith come to quite different conclusions than you.
One additional point: “The dictionary says…” is not sufficient grounds for evidence here. Yes, the dictionary says that “such and such” is an acceptable meaning of that word, but it says that because it’s descriptive, saying how people use that word in common speech, not because it’s perfectly acceptable to use any of a word’s definitions to refute someone else who is using the word in a technical sense to explain a train of thought. “Theory” in the scientific-method use and “myth” in the anthropological use are two such words that have surfaced recently; that “the dictionary” allows ‘theory’ in the sense of “unsupported hypothesis” and ‘myth’ in the sense of “made-up story, lie” prove nothing except that the person pointing it out is likely to score very low on the “written comprehension” section of the SAT. 
Poly wrote:
That’s what I mean about arguments having relative frames of reference.
Cite?
…sorry, so sorry, my fault, sorry…
Welcome to the center ring, EVERYONE gets their ass handed to them once in a while.
I am relatively new to the world of debate, and find it very educational. Personally I think the best way would be just to wade in and take a shot. You will get metaphorically slam dunked a few times and will learn how to structure your opinons into a proper debate point. Read what others have written, look at the style its written in, look for flaws in the reasoning or evidence, then attack those flaws. Then read what you have written like it was written by another, try to pick it apart like you did the target debater. I have written some pretty long posts and then deleted them because I wandered off onto some weird tangent that in retrospect had little relevance to the topic at hand.
And most importantly, HAVE FUN!!
I have never had my ass handed to me here, thank you very much. I come in here with both my hands firmly placed on my ass - saves time later.
- Think about what you’re writing. I find that I use a similar approach to debating as I do writing news stories in this case. If you’re making a contention as fact, ask yourself “who says?” and if you can’t back it up, don’t say it. For instance, if you’re telling someone “George Bush only wants to invade Iraq to prevent the public from finding out about his illicit affair with Saddam Hussein,” to explain why you’re against the war on Iraq, then you’d better be able to back it up, otherwise it’s a pretty worthless position.
Also, think about what arguments people will make against your points. This helps you to not say stupid things, trimming the fat from your post and resulting in a toned, muscular, robust post.
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Don’t neglect your writing skills. A debate is just as much about being able to communicate your ideas as it is having them in the first place. (However, considering you’ve got 6000+ posts, I’d expect you know how to construct an eloquent post)
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When you’re just starting out, try to add to a position that a few people already agree with. There’s nothing less fun than being at the receiving end of a pile-on, and if you’ve got people agreeing with you, you don’t have to cover and respond to everything, but instead can focus on what you feel is important or are interested in.
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There are certain “go nowhere” issues, such as abortion, the death penalty, religion etc. that have been done to death and aren’t much fun for anyone. If you’re going to start a thread on these topics, look at an aspect of the issue rather than the entire issue. A good example is MEBuckner’s recent thread: Should abortions performed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy be a crime? Because of the specific nature of the OP, it’s a far more interesting discussion than “Abortion - right or wrong?”
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Don’t witness. I know the forum description says you can, but don’t. It’s never a successful venture for the witnesser, and it just tends to result in a pile-on.
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Read your cites. It’s terribly when you post a cite that ends up supporting what your opposition is saying.
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Read the thread you’re posting to. Don’t jump in at the end of a 3 page thread with your ideas unless you’ve read the thread first. In IMHO you can get away with it, but you can’t in GD.
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Have fun, remember it’s all a game, and always, always, always keep pitworthy stuff for the pit.
(alot of this stuff is probably obvious, but I thought make a handy how-to guide anyway)
I like epistemology (great thread, Persephone).
eris:"Then the debate isn’t settled by evidence, is it?
See what I mean?
Worse yet, you’ve now just added a debate to the debate. "
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Um, nothing gets definitively settled in GD, because the topics are ones that don’t have factual answers. The issue (I guess) is the relative strength of various analytic tools, one of which is evidence weighing and collection.
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No, or not yet. (But thanks for the clarification).
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[And I encourage Persephone to show us the door if this becomes too much of a hijack.]
eris: “I mean, my general idea is just that if a debate can be settled with evidence, then it isn’t a debate and it should end right there.”
And I guess my point is that other analytic tools are not more likely to settle a debate than evidence is. (In fact, I would say they are less so, but I must confess that my stance is mostly a manifestation of my taste for empirics. Interestingly, this problem could be evaluated, IMHO. Take 100 GD threads, have their “degree of resolution” ranked (by more than one person - gotta take into account conflicting views!) then assess what led to that resolution).
Furthermore, I would say that the relative temperature of gun debates is a function of something else, specifically [deleted for reasons of muddled thinking and the desire to avoid embedding a contentious hijack within a possible hijack].
More generally, I would say the temperature of the debate is proportional to the players’ emotional investment in the outcome. Caveat: People often take the strongest positions on issues that are fundamentally uncertain. Although I suppose lots of people care whether the sun rises tomorrow, there are few heated debates about it, because there is little disagreement about whether it will happen. Apocalyptic forecasts regarding the next couple of years notwithstanding.
Polycarp: “…different people will weight evidence differently, and hence come to different conclusions on the same evidence.”
Agreed. But distilling a particular policy position to its more fundamental and person-specific values and perceptual tendancies (biases?) can be instructive.