How big of an impact would cleaner political debates have on society?

Biff Wiff

How big of an impact would cleaner political debates have on society? — LessWrong

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There are definitely people who have spent orders of magnitude more time thinking about the topic of debate than myself; but I daresay the majority of folk have thought about it less than me. From my particular vantage point and life-experience, it seems clear that publicly arguing about a topic is a really poor way of raising the level of discourse and understanding on that topic. Imagine if, in science, instead of papers and conferences we had public debates, where scientists were expected to engage in a ceaseless half-thought out back-and-forth superficial point-scrabbling style policy debate. It would be a nightmare - I mean, I hope that's obvious. For some reason this is a preferred mode of political dialogue.

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Yosarian212y00

It's not really expected for people to base their opinions on major issues just on what they hear in a debate. But as a source of information for citizens to use to help them improve their decision-making process about which candidate to vote for, it seems reasonably effective to me. Both candidate give their stances on all the major issues, and it communicates to the voters where the candidates stand on them all, a little bit about why they think that and what some major arguments are, and also what the major issues are thought to be in the upcoming ele... (read more)

-1mwengler12y

In science you are primarily trying to figure out what is true. In politics, you are primarily trying to gain support for preferences which are neither true nor false. It is a much harder problem. At least in science, there is a single standard for truth external to the participants. In politics, pretty clearly different people have different preferences.

0Stefan_Schubert12y

Good point. I think, though, that even in the academia there is too much focus on oral communication. It's often easier to get away with vague ideas in seminars (if you're confident and respected) than in written communication. Of course there is a place for talks and debates in the academia but I think what I'm pointing to is too often neglected. So what you say holds true of academic oral discussions as well, though to a lesser degree. For this reason I've sometimes played with the idea of replacing the seminars with online written texts on chats or fora. I think, though, that most academics would find that less fun - for much the same reasons people would find written political debates less fun. People are very social and like to interact irl, and see others interact irl.

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