Together with A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs and Missing the Trees for the Forest, this post sheds some light on the nature of mind-killing properties of adversarial debate. If adversarial debate is about status, and status-arguing is done by the signaling subsystem of the mind, in the far mode, this explains why the debate is often so myopic. The signaling system of the mind is optimized for deceiving a small group of people to one's advantage, as opposed to making actually good decisions and making accurate estimates where it's possible. It's just bad at seeing the truth, and so the truth gets ignored, while the fight goes on.