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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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Comments (61)
That's the issue under discussion, isn't it? The assumption of the adversarial mode is that if the other person loses their temper, it's because their position is weak. When presented with "Jesus is an invisible, magical, wish-granting friend," if the Christian doesn't have either a serious response or a clever quip, then they lose. It doesn't seem so much "I don't respect you" as "I disagree" and not so much "I wish you would go away" as "put up or shut up."
The idea that whoever loses their temper first is wrong is one of the most idiotic, backwards notions I've seen taken seriously on this site. Should we just find the calmest person on earth and give THEM the keys to our AI development, because they never get angry and thus can't possibly be wrong?
P.S. If you mind my flippant response, you're clearly in the wrong!
P.P.S. Please have a sense of humour :)
It's not that the one that gets angry is wrong, it's that if anger or offense is all you've got to refute the argument against, you lose.
"The assumption of the adversarial mode is that if the other person loses their temper, it's because their position is weak."
Seriously, at least TRY to demonstrate reading comprehension.
"When presented with "Jesus is an invisible, magical, wish-granting friend," if the Christian doesn't have either a serious response or a clever quip"
Emphasis added. I hardly think a clever quip is a more worthwhile refutation! Anger at least suggests that there is, on some non-conscious level, an actual objection.
P.P.S. Please continue having a sense of humour ^_^
Thank you for the demonstration; I considered doing it myself but decided it might not be obvious.
The "clever quip" bit strikes me as rather telling; it's very much a case of arguments as soldiers, rather than actually trying to find the truth.
In the case where the argument is over whether a non-mainstream person, group, or position should be taken seriously, that person/group/position often has more at stake. That means they're (a) more likely to become flustered by such a statement, and (b) more likely to be judged harshly for responding in kind. However, it doesn't mean they're less likely to be correct.
It is also impermissible to point out the subtext; if you say, "are you saying you have no respect for me?", you lose. And that's true even if pointing that out would be a true statement.
As JoshuaZ points out, there is a third way, and it's much better.
For many non-mainstream issues I am associated with, (a) is false, but (b) is true. If anything, since in most every ideological issue I am extremely non mainstream, (a) is false, because I'm accustomed to much worse than a "clever quip".
I'd say instead it's when those that spend most of their time in an ideologically homogeneous subculture interact with some other ideological subculture that they will get flustered. It's a matter of acclimation to taking a hit.
Consider this discussion. Is Pauli's statement "unsporting"? (I find it really odd that you used that word to describe the adversarial mode; it sees debate as a verbal sport, engaged in for both fun and profit.)
Pauli's statement in a debate would be somewhat unsporting, yes. But it seems that the context was instead a discussion among friends, where a joke like that would be seen as funny by all, rather than being seen as point-scoring.
I used that word deliberately, since the title of the article includes "debate as sport". Perhaps some people think the sport in question is more like fox hunting than basketball?
Sure, but the foxes are ideas and arguments, not people.
That's the issue under discussion, isn't it?
Indeed! :D
I think that weighty issues have the potential to crush people; that's why they're weighty. But I think that's a property of the issues, not the way that people discuss them.
For example, suppose that we are in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the US. A proposal is made to quarantine people diagnosed with AIDS, and a related proposal is to tattoo them (someplace private, that potential sexual partners will see but the general public won't).
Obviously, the impacts of such a policy vary heavily throughout the population. Many groups are at basically no risk for AIDS, and so the proposal won't impact their health, but will impact their neighborhoods. There's also the contingent of people who already have it, who will be massively affected, and several groups that are at very high risk for it, who will be affected in multiple ways. Their health would be improved, at the possible decimation of their friends and communities.
Whether or not the quarantine or tattooing happens, people will be crushed: people who die in quarantine rather than surrounded by their communities; people who have to see the tattoo in the mirror, reminding them of something they would much rather forget; people who catch AIDS from carriers allowed to roam. The question of which approach is best is a hard one that seems difficult to settle without numbers and lengthy, open discussion. Settling the issue for identity reasons- opposing quarantine because it is 'repugnant', say- seems like negligence at best.
And yet, such proposals are almost never made about high-status people (recall that in the early 80s, AIDS was almost exclusively a gay disease, and that gay people were then significantly lower-status). And even without AIDS, many people then (and some now) would prefer not to live around gay people. So there is a reasonable suspicion of motivated cognition. Another example of status-based quarantine would be the differing treatment of American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII (vs that of citizens of Italian or German descent).
Improving the status of gay people (in part via emphasizing identity) seems to have somewhat improved the level of motivated cognition about homosexuality (see the General Social Survey for numbers).
In debate-as-sport, that doesn't matter; a quip can score a point even if some thought would reveal it to be nonsensical. Nonesense claims in general can be examined and rebutted, but a quip gets a laugh before the examination can kick in. If fear of causing people offense causes people to either make fewer such quips, or to think harder before laughing, that can actually improve the level of the debate.
You're forgetting the other 3 Hs, though none of them are high status.
Right, but the point of the adversarial mode is that you have a clash of ideas instead of just dismissing a proposal because the person putting it forward doesn't like you, or because they're biased. Sometimes biased people have good ideas, and dismissing an idea because of suspicion of bias rather than because the idea fails a cost-benefit analysis is negligent. With AIDS in particular, the primary beneficiaries of a quarantine would be the people who are at high risk for AIDS and don't get it because of the quarantine; America has six times the per-capita AIDS infections of a country that used quarantine. Perhaps it was worth it- I'm not sure where I would put the reduction necessary to justify a quarantine, but I'm pretty sure a sixfold reduction is more than sufficient- but that there wasn't a numbers-based public discussion about that horrifies me.
Upvoted for the link.
Why stop at quarantine? Mandatory testing for everyone, and euthanasia for everyone who tests positive. If a sixfold reduction is worth concentration camps, a near-infinite reduction should be worth murder.
The numbers-based public discussion didn't happen because the number of people that believe that the expected benefits are on the same scale as the costs are a tiny minority.
You seem to believe that such a cost-benefit analysis is possible when there is a level of bias that is that pervasive. It is often not possible. The full costs will simply never be recognized. The US court system is supposed to work on the adversarial model, and yet only one non-Christian group has ever won a free exercise clause case at the Supreme Court. Why would anyone play a basketball game when they're sure the refs are crooked?
The number that the 1980s American public would put on a gay man's freedom of movement, is much less the number that the 2012 public would put on that same man's freedom. That difference is, at least in large part, caused by the strategy chosen by 1980s gay men. It's hard to argue that the 1980s number is more likely to be correct, given the high level of bias in the 1980s (see the GSS for details on this bias). So, the strategy chosen by 1980s gay men seems to have paid off in producing a more rational discussion.
In favor of the "sport" decision is that it uses rational-sounding terms like "cost-benefit analysis". But using rational-sounding terms does not actually make any guarantee of a more-rational discussion.
Wouldn't this reward trolling?