This was an entire subplot in Ender’s Game, wasn’t it? Where Ender’s two siblings took on internet personas the opposite of what they believed, and they were so good at it that they became very influential?
I thought the idea preposterous then, I still think it now.
There are some points that are based on opinion that you could do that with. A debate as to whether cats or dogs are better, while I would say dogs, I could make a compelling argument as to why cats are better.
Others that are based on facts are harder. Could you really argue an anti-vaxx position, a 9/11 truther position, a scientific racism position, or a flat earther position without resorting to distortions of facts?
So, it would depend on what type of topic you are going with. I could see abortion or gun rights as something based enough on opinion to make reasonable arguments for the other side, as the foundation that it is built upon is an opinion as to what priorities you have. You can change your opinion for the sake of the debate, and build up facts to support it from there.
But not every debate has two viable sides to it.
Yeah. A lot of it comes down to which facts you prioritize as the most important facts.
Consider the current dumpster fire conversation about transgender women & women’s prisons. While there are some questions about “cite please, did this actually factually occur?” or “what is the actual rate of…”, most of it is about what aspects of the entire complicated situation deserve higher priority than which other ones, and ideally we’re all learning more about how the issue looks to people whose priorities are a bit different than our own.
In college (freshman English) my instructor would often start us writing on some “controversial” topic, by asking us to identify as, say, pro-abortion and anti-abortion, and then organize a debate but making us take the opposite position from the one we wanted to defend.
My classmates had a very time doing this.
I loved it, because I thought the purpose of the exercise was to force us to articulate contrary arguments that were the most effective, which in turn would force to devise effective counter-arguments.
I thought my instructor was often disappointed with the difficulty my classmates had following her instructions. To me, this was great fun, and intellectually challenging, but most of my classmates complained about her forbidding us from taking the side we believed in.
And the two sides of the argument are what your opinion is towards transgender individuals, so I can see how changing your opinion can allow one to make a compelling argument for the other side.
Which is one of the reasons why I don’t find this exercise to be too compelling. Either it’s a factual debate, where one side takes on the factual side, and the other takes on the counterfactual side, which is kinda pointless, or it’s an opinion debate, and trying to change someone’s opinion with facts is even more so.
I also worry about the Gordon Gekko effect. People use quotes from Wolf of Wall street as justifications for their actions, completely ignoring that Gekko was the villain, and his speeches were self serving tripe that the writers assumed the audience would dismiss as the rationalizations of a greedy unethical criminal. But, Michael Douglas put on a good performance, and those compelling speeches worked to shape the opinions of some of those who watched it, and they came away with exactly the opposite message as was intended.
I would be concerned that if I were to write a compelling piece against my own position, it would be used to convince people of the rightness of that position, and undermine my own.
Sounds like a good idea as long as it’s not used as a backdoor for “race realist”, red-pill, or other bigoted bullshit that’s (thankfully) disallowed.
I’d argue he wasn’t really the villain in that movie.
Michael Douglas thinks he was.
Like I said, a compelling argument with a grand delivery can make some people sympathetic even to criminals who ruin people’s lives to satisfy their own greed. They take the exact opposite message as was intended.
ETA: slight self correction, I called it “Wolf of Wall Street”, but that’s the sequel/remake, I meant to say “Wall Street”.
No, I meant that he wasn’t even in Wolf of Wall Street.
Fair enough, as I said in my self correction, I did in fact get the title wrong.
Anyway, point stands that people take the wrong message away, and I would hate to see an argument that I made used to convince someone of a position that I disagree with.
This goes back to what I was saying earlier - who would we be arguing against?
This approach has merit - a cultivated “Reverse Skate” debate, where someone (a mod, maybe?) selects a topic and sets the stage, and those who join the thread can stake-out a position to defend, while others can take the opposite position. The problem with the old thread was there was no one topic, so there was not much to discuss.