This is a current topic of debate in debate...

https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205

> Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate.

> This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.

I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.

Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side.

Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.

This presuppose that I even have a position to begin with ...

I don't understand why anyone would adopt a position before the discussion/debate - the whole point of which is to decide what is the factually correct position.

you presuppose there is a factually correct position to begin with. For the kinds of topics debate prepares you for, there often isn't.

How does one know when they completely understand the best possible case against their own belief? Or know for sure that they’ve arrived at the best possible case against it? Seems like an unattainable bar.

What I wrote was for people who truly think there's some one truth they want to argue; to explain to them why this is valuable. The real value is that this method teaches you to see all sides, and gives you both compassion and the ability to determine and assert what you think is right in circumstances you haven't encountered before - to think on the fly without judging prematurely.

> Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs

I should stipulate though that you can arrive at about 99% of your beliefs and know them thoroughly enough to know why you believe them, while still being willing to change your mind if you're given new evidence.

No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions.

This might happen when you imagine you truly hold some other position, but it is clear from the structure you describe (mostly unstructured talking to an opponent) that this is incidental learning and not the focus of the exercise.

What you describe is plainly a exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.

I disagree with this.

It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but for sure mathematicians often engage in similar ways of learning. Almost always, you'd learn something new, like a new definition, by considering other ways to define the same thing and see how that affects things.

And at the high level of maths, there sometimes are actual debates about which direction to go with certain axioms/etc.

> What you describe is plainly an exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.

Hard disagree. Being able to switch sides is essential to being able to understand why one side is better than the other. If you're trying to decide which ice cream flavor to order, but literally cannot see one of the options, it is meaningless to say you chose not to take that one. Only by actually seeing it, tasting it, and deciding against it, have you actually made a choice that one flavor is better than another.

Ha! Seeing you use a literal non-sequitur to as a counter is a perfect illustration of why rhetoric exercises aren't an automatic pathway to sound logical reasoning.

(Explicitly the argument by edanm goes: "I hold the proposition 'A does not do B' is not true, because A does C")

The goal here isn't to find truth, because sometimes the truth doesn't exist. It's to understand and be ready to counter-argue conflicting stances when necessary. Knowing what your opponent will say lets you better strengthen your own argument.

But if we challenge our opinions, we can make better decisions. If we challenge and they hold, we are more confident in them. If we challenge and they don't hold, maybe there's a better idea to explore.

In short, what I believe is: you can aim for the truth, and you will be better for it, but you will never reach it.

Tame example: say that we know that objectively 100% of the time that browsing Facebook leads to depression. Okay... what do we do with this? Do we force facebook to change, maybe even ban it from a country? do we strongly regulate people using Facebook? Maybe only regulate minors? How does that information affect Instagram or any other Meta product? One "truth" doesn't answer these questions.

Second of all: debate is ultimately communication, and communication is about being able to express your own thoughts, often while trying to appeal to other person's thoughts. These core factors of society are important no matter the topic. It should also ideally teach one to consider multiple points of view and make for a more well rounded understanding on comlpex issues, but well... here's the article talking about modern debate.

On the other hand they were talking about religious training, and religions are pretty clear that they do teach (some sort) of truth.

In math, proof by counterexample is pretty directly what you'd call "both-sidesing" above; you make a thorough, detailed, and compelling argument for a case against your hypothesis, then demonstrate why it can't be true.

If you can't do the work of the making such a detailed counterexample, then the proof of your actual hypothesis falls apart too.

Being able to make the strongest argument against your beliefs is necessary for you to hold your own beliefs most strongly.

A proof by counter-example can get even more terse, you simply have to construct an object which breaks a hypothesis. You don't need to consider the incorrect arguments either. Sometimes these proofs are only a sentence long.

"You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do."

It seems to me that your post doesn't make the point you think it does and you ascribe a viewpoint to the post you're responding to which is not in evidence.

Anyway, that seems a distinct debate from the one you opened with, that you were trained according to: > Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind.

Truth can only be found if both sides share axioms. Very often they don't, and the point of a debate us to detect and outline that dufference, and show it to your audience, if any.

The exercise is exactly to detect and pick a set of axioms that a particular character used to have, and then honestly think along those lines. It's a hugely important exercise, and not merely for disputes. It teaches you to think in terms of logic of somebody else, see their reasons, understand their feelings. That other party is not necessarily your opponent in any way; it could be your teacher or your student, your business partner, or even your spouse.

Great many people are never taught how to leave the "my truth is the self-evident truth" point of view, and this results in a lot of suffering, theirs, and those who have to interact with them.

The point of the year long effort, in my opinion, has nothing to do with any particular topic. It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. It is so that you can spot the problems when Trump tries to sell you hogwash or when Biden tries his pitch. It is to help you stay protected when your school district or home owners' association or even you yourself use faulty reasoning to justify a bad policy. So you can not be persuaded by things you should see through.

These are skills sorely lacking in most of the world where I live.

This is right on the money. That's why it's a shame to short-circuit any debate by conflating the person taking a side with the side they're taking. Come to think of it, that's also a great reason why it's good to force debaters to take both sides... because neither can be held liable as it's not "their" opinion, and they're free to use their minds without fear of being judged.

But you do this automatically when you are trying to discern the truth - invalid arguments are to be eliminated.

The whole, now argue for the other side is kind of ... frankly, telling the anyone to argue for any side is ridiculous IMHO. You are pretty much putting the cart before the horse - i.e. picking a position before the arguing has even started.

The whole point of discussion and debate should be to decide which position to pick (because it's the factually correct one).

The point of this exercise could be to learn that "nine out of ten dentists" arguments are flawed and why. It could be to practice listening skills to be able to "flow" the points of discussion.

These practices might not be to get at the truth of any particular argument, but to learn methods to get at the truth of any and all arguments.

If you are in a courtroom, say, serving on a jury, you will be presented with carefully crafted discussion and debate which will make you think the best and worst of both sides. The lawyers presenting those cases could switch at any moment and present to you the opposite side's case. Does the opposite side not deserve representation? How many false convictions resulted in the death penalty because a lawyer failed to argue their client's case well enough? How many pagans were burned at the stake, or Christians crucified and fed to lions, because people were taught that argumentation was to decide which position to pick? Discussion is to open your eyes, not close your mind.

The world would look a lot different if this were something people do "automatically". No, it is laborious and emotionally difficult, and even smart and intellectually honest people who try hard fail at it often.

> The whole point of discussion and debate should be to decide which position to pick (because it's the factually correct one).

Something in this formulation reminded me of those times at university - I was going through some sort of crisis during the first year. In my country at the time, elementary school and even high school approached things kind of like "there are things you don't know yet and once you learn the facts, you will know the truth". University destroyed this for me. I started to realize how flawed our brains are and how complex reality is. There are facts that are and always will be beyond our grasp and we can only have approximations of approximations, simplified models that hopefully work well enough to be useful. It was surprisingly emotionally difficult for me to accept that fundamental insecurity and un-discoverability of some ultimate "truth".

When you are forced to argue for things that you disagree with, you will quickly come to realize that some of the things that your opponents say are true!

That does not mean that their conclusion is ultimately correct, but doing the exercise helps you get out of common mindset that anything said by your opponents is wrong.

Truth, if it exists, when held in the absence of justification, is attack surface. If you're willing to believe something because it's true even when you can't summon ample justification for it, then you're a high value target for manipulation. This is because unlike a skeptic, whatever programing gets past your is-it-true filter is permanent.

Whether or not they exist, absolute truths are not pragmatic for use outside of religious talk. Let argument be sufficient.

Which is a huge problem. It reduces politics to a high school popularity contest which excludes discussions of substance.

Real experts lose the debate because they're not trained in rhetorical manipulation, and they can easily be demonised.

The idea that experts with PhDs and decades of experience may have more skill and experience than an ordinary person offends the ignorant. ("You don't tell me what to do.")

The result is popular support for disastrous self-harming policies.

I don't think the rhetorical appeals to anger, hate and fear that are the hallmarks of genocidal leaders are learned in a debate class. They're low-level schoolyard bully stuff. They're exactly the sort of thing that's tempered by the conscience you develop if you are exposed to new ideas or have to argue something that's strange to you. Hateful rhetoric drives, and is driven by emotion. So is loving rhetoric. If you find you have to defend some group of people you previously had a loathing for, there's a fair chance you'll start to see things from their point of view, if only because it's human nature to become emotionally invested in what you're arguing about. (Check out any stupid bar fight where both sides know they're wrong, but are completely emotionally invested).

Yes, speech is a tool and a weapon. We should call out arguments made in bad faith; but we need more people who can identify them to do so.

My argument wasn't that rethorical training is harmful, my argument was that the specific debate club version of it can be harmful if it isn't accompanied by education that developes the character of those who learn it (my personal opinion is that education that doesn't develope the character does not deserve the name).

There is a reason why such lessons are commonly used at "elite" schools like Eton¹. Getting clever at arguing your way into (and out of) things is undeniably a helpful skill for any position of power in society. But ultimately we should remember it is a two-edged sword: The better you make people at arguing, the easier it will become for them to lie to themselves. This is what will happen as a side effect, if they don't learn why they want to avoid lying to themselves, how to spot it when it happens and how to deal with it when it happens. This is not just a character-thing, but something that has to be tought as a core value.

¹: https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally...

I'm legitimately not sure whether by "this is an attempt" you're referring to critiques in debate or the article.

In practice, for better or worse very few of the people who use critiques in debate are true believers. Even if they're leftists taking a generally leftist approach, a Marxist is likely to take up an Afro-pessimist position or vice versa for tactical reasons. Exactly the sort of "have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor" you commend is involved - only rather than just two sides, the sides include "X would have good consequences", "X would have bad consequences", "you're doing good/harm by talking about X", "X is on/off topic for this year's resolution", etc.

As for the article - it may be attempting to defend the virtue of being able to effectively defend opposing points of view, but it's doing so in a confused way at best. Just to give a couple examples:

> Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles

It is indeed often more effective in debate to respond to a critique by denying or reversing the (often tenuous) link to what you actually proposed than to try to refute an ideology wholesale, but that burden is entirely consistent with the mentality that learning to "defend the opposite side" is valuable. And even so the premise here is wrong - at least when I was doing this <redacted> years ago, it was by no means taboo to simply counter-critique at the ideological level instead.

> This drives out students who don’t want to learn about critical theory

It's true that competing at the national level in high school or college debate demands quite a lot in terms of research and preparation. It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.

> High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds

This is silly hyperbole that suggests (a) Slow Boring could use better editing and (b) the author would have benefited from actually trying to engage with substance of some critiques, such that they might be able to distinguish Karl Marx or the afropessimists from Nick Land or the e/accs...

I was referring to the article.

>> It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.

Well, both students are unwilling to engage with the material they need to deal with, as unpleasant as it is. I personally don't think one is worse than the other on its face. But if the ground rules of the debate have shifted in a way that forces you to frame everything in a way that implicates the speaker as agreeing with the position they're arguing unless they use a particular category of argument to undermine that position while they're arguing it, then it's not a matter of learning to refute that category of argument but rather being forced to embrace it. Rejecting that artificial requirement to salt your own speech seems rather honorable in the "purest" sense of debate; whereas refusing to play by the rules and do the work of arguing something you don't agree with shows an unwillingness to engage with the subject matter - which is not the topic of debate, but the ability to debate.

It's akin to "winning" a debate by showing up with a baseball bat and daring anyone to challenge your point of view. That is often called debate in a totalitarian system, but that's precisely why such systems are so brittle and inefficient at coping with and responding to policy challenges. My point is that such a "win" is not, in fact, a win, either in the rhetorical sense of changing anyone's mind, or the utilitarian sense of finding the best way forward on an issue, because everyone can see you merely bullied people into silence - hence there was no debate. Thus suppression of the opposing side under threat of censure or harm has no lasting power to override the speech you don't like, and usually backfires.