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Lumifer comments on How big of an impact would cleaner political debates have on society? - Less Wrong
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It's interesting to which degree our views differ.
I would call watching a 90-minute debate to be among the least useful, never mind time-efficient, ways to learn about the political stances of the candidates.
Interesting.
I view it as a useful way to find out what the currently stated political stance of a candidate is. Once you know that, then if it's an issue you care about, you can take some time and look into the candidate's background and see if his record matches his current political stance. It's also worthwhile to use to keep track of a candidate's positions and see how they change over time based on the next state to have a primary election or from the primary season to the general election season; every politician has some issues he is firm on and some issues on which he is willing to bend on in order to get votes or political support, and it's useful to know which are which.
It not useful for me. An hour and a half of frantic signaling at the stupider half of the electorate, a popularity contest driven by the necessity to pretend to be the BFF of everyone? I can get a much better idea of a candidate's political stance after spending 10 minutes with Google, compared to cringing and feeling my brain cells atrophy for 90 minutes X-/
Fair enough. There certainly are plenty of things in those debates that are cringe-worthy.
After the 2012 debates, I half-jokingly suggested that there should be a set of referees at each debate fact-checking each statement made by each candidate, who then blow a whistle and throw a flag when a candidate says something that is just factually untrue. "15 yard penalty- roughing the constitution." ;)