The anti-offensive mode is generally about burying what is the case; the adversarial mode lets it at least have a day in court.
Yes, this is a big problem. This failure mode is nonetheless fairly easy to detect: a rationally-trained person can easily tell when uncritical duckspeak (I favor this term as clearer and less controversial than other related terms such as "political correctness" or "groupthink") has replaced cogent arguments.
But then, even though I do advocate a tensegrity of the two styles of debate, I'd never think that this is a good idea. What I do favor about the "anti-offensive mode" is that it makes it easier to establish and rely upon a common ground of shared notions and terminal/instrumental values; and yes, one way it does this is by promoting empathy. This cannot generally be expected to occur when debate is radically factionalized.
What I do favor about the "anti-offensive mode" is that it makes it easier to establish and rely upon a common ground of shared notions and terminal/instrumental values
I'm not sure that I agree that this is the case. Yes, the anti-offensive mode works when everyone involved has a common ground of shared notions and terminal/instrumental values, and so I agree it relies on that. But it seems to me that when values diverge, it's not clear to me that that mode will create that; it seems like taking offense leads to factionalization much more easi...
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.