[LINK] Two Modes of Discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport

Vaniver

A blog post by Alistair Roberts, as curated by Steve Sailer. (Steve's version is shorter and more targeted; the original blog post is the fourth in a series on triggering and suffers for its reliance on the particular issue.)

It seems like a very useful dichotomy, and strongly reminds me of Ask and Guess.

There's a better mode than either of these: Discussion and discourse as a mutual attempt to find out what is actually the case.

There's a better mode than either of these: Discussion and discourse as a mutual attempt to find out what is actually the case.

My intuition agrees, but it has been known to output crap on similar topics. Know of any way to test this claim?

1Vaniver13y

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).

12bogus13y

Yes, this is usually called deliberation, e.g. as in "deliberative democracy". But adversarial-style debate can be expected to persist for the foreseeable future, so it is important to be aware of its properties.

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[LINK] Two Modes of Discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport

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[LINK] Two Modes of Discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport

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