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Vaniver comments on [LINK] Two Modes of Discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport - Less Wrong
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Agreed! It's helpful to have strong models of all three varieties, and be able to switch between them / know which one is most appropriate for the situation at hand.
My impression is that the adversarial mode is significantly closer to deliberation than the anti-offensive model; there's still the underlying goal of "find out what's the case," but it's much more aggressive about it (which is sometimes beneficial and sometimes detrimental).
I'm not sure. The adversarial mode is much more about convincing someone that something is the case rather than actually trying to find out if that is actually the case.
The anti-offensive mode is generally about burying what is the case; the adversarial mode lets it at least have a day in court.
If you're interested in finding out what is the case, I would argue that the anti-offensive mode doesn't work, the adversarial mode works as a system, but not individually, and the deliberative mode works both as a system and individually. There are situations where the adversarial mode works better; in particular, specialization of labor in research.
Only if one of the participants champions the 'true' case.
Yes, this is a big problem. This failure mode is nonetheless fairly easy to detect: a rationally-trained person can easily tell when uncritical duckspeak (I favor this term as clearer and less controversial than other related terms such as "political correctness" or "groupthink") has replaced cogent arguments.
But then, even though I do advocate a tensegrity of the two styles of debate, I'd never think that this is a good idea. What I do favor about the "anti-offensive mode" is that it makes it easier to establish and rely upon a common ground of shared notions and terminal/instrumental values; and yes, one way it does this is by promoting empathy. This cannot generally be expected to occur when debate is radically factionalized.
I'm not sure that I agree that this is the case. Yes, the anti-offensive mode works when everyone involved has a common ground of shared notions and terminal/instrumental values, and so I agree it relies on that. But it seems to me that when values diverge, it's not clear to me that that mode will create that; it seems like taking offense leads to factionalization much more easily than debate as a sport. People swapping sides on an issue in a debate team setting seems natural, but people swapping sides in an anti-offensive discussion seems rare.
Unfortunately, "people swapping sides" basically never happens in highly factionalized debates: at some point, the adversarial mode degrades into "debate as war/struggle", with no redeeming sportmanship. I think this is something that the sensitivity mode might be able to guard against. Even "taking offense" is not wholly unproductive after all: we should keep in mind that there are many issues that people physically fight over. Even leaving the issue of shared notions/values aside, the sensitivity mode seems to be much more open to "political" mitigation efforts such as mediation, compromise and conflict de-escalation.