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malcolmocean comments on Rationality Quotes November 2013 - Less Wrong
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Julien Smith
Corollary 1: Always try to be that person.
That doesn't sound like a debate I could learn anything from listening to.
Corollary 2: If they are on offense or defense, check with yourself what you expect to gain from continuing with the debate.
Disputed. Some people are naturally on the defensive even when debating true propositions. Defensiveness though is more often a bad sign, since somebody defending a false proposition that they know on some level to be false, is more likely to try to hold territory and block opponent progress. Many advocating true propositions very commonly go on the offensive, nor is it clear to me that this is always wrong in human practice.
Nitpicking, but the quote stated that people who are on neither offensive nor defensive are people you can learn from - it didn't say that people who are on the offensive or defensive are necessarily wrong to do so.
I'm not sure that's just a nitpick. It's a mistake so common that it should probably be listed under biases. It might be a variation on availability bias-- what's actually mentioned fills in the mental space so that the cases which aren't mentioned get ignored.
And I'm not sure it's a mistake. If you're getting your information in a context where you know it's meant completely literally and nothing else (e.g., Omega, lawyers, Spock), then yes, it would be wrong. In normal conversation, people may (sometimes but not always; it's infuriating) use "if" to mean "if and only if." As for this particular case, somervta is probably completely right. But I don't think it's conducive to communication to accuse people of bias for following Grice's maxims.
I also dispute this- obvious cases include partial disagreement and partial agreement between parties, somebody who is simply silent or who says nothing of substance, and someone who is themself trying to learn from you/the other side.
(In particular, consider a debate between a biologist and the Pope on evolution. I would expect the Pope to be neither offensive nor defensive- though I'm not totally clear on the distinction here, and how a debater can be neither- but I would expect to learn much more from the biologist than the Pope.)
One reading: "offense" as "trying to lower another's status" and "defense" as "trying to preserve one's own status". The people you can learn from are the ones whose brains focus on facts rather than status.
I'm not sure if this is relevant.
In a technical sense, of course you can learn from people on offense/defense, since they are giving you information.
I agree, besides which, if there is a popular rule, sign, or proxy for determining who is on the better side of a debate, you can bet that the intellectually dishonest fellow will start waving the "I'm right" flag.
The set of people who hold and argue for accurate beliefs about a given issue, and the set of people from whom it is possible to learn about a given issue, may often overlap but are not at all the same.