This video is brought to you by Curiositystream. Get access to Curiositystream and my streaming service, Nebula, when you sign up using the link in my description and the promo code SarahZ! If you’ve ever been on the Internet and
expressed any kind of opinion at all, you’ve probably had some commenter you’ve never
met before demand you debate them and prove your worth in the free marketplace of ideas. And if you’ve ever been on YouTube and followed
your recommended tab for a couple videos, you’ve probably landed on some kind of streamed
or televised “debate”, often with millions of views and provocative titles. Our society places a lot of value on free
and public debate. Part of our emphasis on this, I think, comes
from our romanticized ideas of ancient Greek parliamentary systems, wherein people would
come together and debate various policy and philosophy topics for hours on end. This idealized concept of a democratic and
facts-based approach to policy founded upon healthy discussion is the same idea
upon which many folks now base their ideas of public discourse. Debates are considered integral to determining
who should represent a country as its president or prime minister, many popular public intellectuals
are lauded for their abilities to debate others, and one public figure refusing or ignoring
a request to debate another is considered by many evidence that they’re afraid of
their beliefs being challenged. This is particularly interesting to me, since
besides making video essays, I’m also a competitive university debater. For the last two years, I was the president
of my university’s debate society, and I’m now in an administrative role in my country’s
national university debate organization. I’m just gonna say right now- I love it. Within my university debate society, my job is to help
train novices to win debates, and I’ve both competed and judged in a lot of tournaments
throughout the country. It’s interesting, because the kind of ‘debate’
I experience in a competitive setting is very different than the kind I see
popularized online. It’s kind of like the difference between
going to a fencing tournament and sword fighting a stranger behind a Dennys at 3 in the morning. The way debates are considered by many people
to be this ultimate determiner of someone’s objective correctness is a little concerning
to me, as someone who’s won a good number of debates arguing for things that are, frankly, absolutely
terrible ideas. In this video, I wanna talk about a few things:
first of all, I’m gonna talk about what we can garner about a person from watching them debate,
then I’m gonna make my case as to why most of what we currently consider debating probably
shouldn’t be happening in its present form. Finally, I’m gonna talk about the positives
we can take from doing debating as a whole. What Can Debate Do? Watching someone debate is so interesting,
because I think how someone debates says a lot about them as a person. Do they wait their time to speak, or do they try to speak over others? How do they respond when asked a difficult
question? Is their rhetoric focused mostly on the arguments
at hand, or do they try to change the topic when things get dicey? What I don’t think you can glean from a
debate is how correct someone is. I mean, if you’re debating a truism, like
“do squirrels have eight legs?”, pretty much no amount of flashy verbal tricks is going to make you sound
correct. But when it comes to policy debates
or contentious topics, a good rhetorician can make any variety of ideas sound convincing. If the argument is, like, “should we ban
everyone over 65 from voting”, you can probably invoke a lot of fancy tricks discussing the
future of humanity and long-term decision-making that sound really great and convincing in
theory, even though in real life we’re talking about taking people’s human rights away. Conversely, if someone is arguing against
a really bad idea, but they're not super experienced with being put on the spot and they're stumbling
over their words and can’t immediately find the best answer to a question, they’re probably
not going to seem very convincing, even if in actuality their ideas are completely correct. Another thing I think is worth mentioning
is that when it comes to debates with an audience, the goal is generally not to try to convince
the person you’re debating with so much as another third party, like the public or a judge. If it’s just you and your friend discussing
the merits of The Last Jedi, you might be trying to change one another’s minds. But for the most part, no one in, like, a presidential
debate is suddenly going to stop and say something like, “you know what, that’s actually a
really good point. I’ve changed my mind”. Similarly, in formal competitive debates, you have
a panel of judges you need to convince, and no matter how swayed by your opponent’s
arguments you are, you need to stick to your own. What these two facts together mean is that
public debates aren’t generally about convincing people of your arguments through factual correctness
and sound logic. Rather, televised or streamed debates are
a sort of public pageantry; your goal is generally less so to be right so much as to look right. Of course, in an ideal situation, you can be both;
you can have the most correct arguments while still sounding the most persuasive. But these two things aren’t mutually inclusive;
you can and often do have one without the other. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything
from watching someone debate; how someone conducts themselves in this public setting is still
very telling. This is especially true when it comes to presidential
and parliamentary debates; they’re a good way to tell how someone responds to situations
of disagreement, how they handle tough questions under pressure, and how they balance assertiveness
and diplomacy, and debates can do this in a way other settings, like controlled interviews and
rallies, can’t by introducing a degree of accountability and unpredictability. I think this is a valid enough reason in and
of itself to have these debates, so long as they’re understood for what they are and
“winning one” isn’t treated as synonymous with “being right”. But what about when we’re not talking about
figures we need to decide whether or not to elect into public office? What about, for example, public intellectuals
debating each other on the best economic system, or YouTubers having livestreamed debates about representation
on TV? If debates are mostly representative of someone’s
argumentative skills and ability to handle stressful situations, and not whether or
not that person is right, how do these debates influence our idea of public discourse? Personally, as someone who’s done a lot
of debate and has invested years of time and energy into the topic, I think this
kind of public discourse is not necessarily useful. I mean, also they just make debaters look
bad, and it’s really embarrassing for us. In the debate world, it’s mostly treated
as kind of a sport; a way to practice your argumentative and critical thinking skills. Winning a debate about a certain topic doesn’t
signal to anyone present that that says anything about the topic’s objective correctness. But when society places an intense importance
on these debates, and on using them as a measure of an idea’s merits, harmful effects can
quickly take hold. Many people will watch a clip of someone “destroying”
or “annihilating” certain viewpoints in a debate and conclude from that that
that viewpoint has now been objectively proven invalid, and to me that’s kind of concerning. That’s not to say good, well-handled, and
quality public debates don’t exist; certainly, I think they do. Unfortunately, though, I think they kind of make up a minority
of what we’re seeing right now, which is why I would advise anyone to be extremely
careful if they’re either planning on watching a debate between public figures, or if they’re being asked to debate someone. While this isn’t universally true, and I’ll
get to that later, I think there are often better ways to critically engage with ideas
than the public debate format. I wanna give you examples of how these debates
between public figures can affect public discourse in ways that are useless at best and actively damaging
at worst. First, I want to give an example of how the
public performance of debate can empower people with persuasive rhetoric but flimsy arguments,
even when they are in the wrong. And then I’m going to give an example of
how, even when you’re in the right and you “win” the debate, you can still end up
wasting your time or platforming harmful ideas if you’re not very careful. I’d also like to clarify that I do support
varied discussion with people I don’t agree with. Many of my friends have very different perspectives
than I do, and if I know someone is acting in good faith and trust them to be as respectful
as I’ll be, I’m usually happy to sit down and have a conversation with them. Of course, there are certain ideas that I
don’t personally think should be treated as debatable in any way; “should we be
doing more hate crimes?” isn’t a real question and I’m not gonna be friends with you if
you think people should be persecuted on the basis of who they are. But I think, barring those extremes, having
conversations with people you disagree with is healthy for a variety of reasons. When I say “we shouldn’t be having this
many public debates and treating them as a measure of moral or argumentative correctness”,
I’m not talking about personal discussions. I’m talking about the publicized pageantry
of debating, where the primary goal is to convince onlookers, and the main focus is
not on finding common ground but on “winning”. I don’t think this is a healthy way to engage
in public discourse, and I hope to articulate why. The Danger of “Looking Wrong” When a lot of people nowadays are asked to
name people they consider influential debaters, a lot of the names that come up are those
associated with the “intellectual dark web”; basically, a group of personalities like Jordan
Peterson, Charlie Kirk, or Ben Shapiro who brand themselves on “intellectual debate”
and on the tenet that their ideas are being silenced in the mainstream. According to this philosophy, there are certain
ideas that some people are hesitant to discuss out of fear, causing significant damage to
academic spaces. But not these guys. Not this very smart and brave good boys. Rather, their aim is to dismantle supposedly
dominant narratives in these spaces, which in practice usually just means not calling trans
people by their pronouns, and they aim to do so through public debate. A lot of these people rose to prominence at
least partially from clips of themselves “taking down” or “destroying” the arguments
of various naysayers, most of whom are not debaters themselves. And it works wonders; Ben Shapiro in particular
has made a career largely on the back of videos of himself “destroying college snowflakes”. Now, I’m about to be critical of Ben Shapiro,
but I do wanna emphasize, as I try to do with all my videos where I criticize individuals,
that I’m using this guy as an example of a broader societal problem. He is not the only person who exemplifies
these issues, and if we woke up tomorrow and Ben Shapiro had magically poofed out of existence,
this would still be a problem. I don’t want this video to be considered a “response”
to any one person so much of an exploration of a broad societal issue. With that said, I think Ben Shapiro is a really
great example of why sounding rhetorically smooth in a debate does not necessarily equal
strong arguments. However, because we as members of the public
tend to have a lot of trust in the process of a debate and view it as an essential part
of a healthy democracy, sounding good in a debate can make people like Ben Shapiro seem
like trustworthy figures to a lot of people. What’s interesting to me is the fact that,
when you search up ‘Ben Shapiro debate’ on YouTube, the top results are, with a couple
exceptions, almost exclusively him a) debating random university students and not other journalists
with a similar level of prestige, and b) not formal, moderated debates where both parties
are given equal time to speak and rebut one another, but rather digressions from Shapiro’s
speeches, in which he always has the last word and can speak over the others any time. I’ve been to a lot of debate tournaments,
and basically the way bracketing works is that after each round, they try to pair you with a team that’s
won the same number of rounds as you have, so you can be fairly matched with a competitive
opponent. The first round is pretty random, though,
so you end up with a lot of unequal matchups. A lot of my friends who have been debating
for over a decade have gotten matched up with people who have never even been to a debate
tournament before in Round 1, and unsurprisingly, end up beating them pretty definitively. What I’ve never seen is any seasoned debater
genuinely get excited about beating a novice. Generally speaking, you want to beat people
who are equal or better debaters than you, because it signifies growth and it’s more
personally satisfying. Beating someone with no formal debate training
doesn’t actually mean you’re a good debater; it just means you’ve been matched with an
unskilled opponent. What Ben Shapiro does is effectively the debate
equivalent of an average quality sprinter exclusively challenging children to races
where he gets extra time, and then going “look, but I won most of those matches! I must be the greatest player of all time!” This is further evidenced by the fact that
when Shapiro does engage in debates with actual journalists and people his own age, he does
not tend to fare very well. Take Shapiro’s interview with journalist
Andrew Neil, pertaining to his new book. Neil pointed out numerous examples of Ben
Shapiro contributing to and benefitting from a culture of anger and personal attacks, despite
the fact that Shapiro’s book blamed the left for public discourse becoming less “civil”. As the interview continued and Neil kept bringing
up more and more quotes, many of which Shapiro still stood by, Ben Shapiro quickly became
more and more flustered. He then accused Neil, a hardline conservative,
of being a leftist, before resulting to personal insults and cutting the interview short. Shapiro himself later acknowledged that he
wasn’t properly prepared for Neil’s comments, leading him to lose the “debate”, but
followed up that acknowledgment with an article claiming the majority of those quotes were
either taken out of context, or were things that were completely true that liberal just didn't like This is interesting to me because Shapiro
is clearly capable of understanding that sounding the most eloquent and rhetorically correct
in a debate does not actually mean that your position is the correct one; similarly, losing a debate
does not mean you’re wrong. The fact that he’s linked to a website effectively
saying “listen, I lost a debate on this matter because I wasn’t ready, but I’m
still right about it” is evidence enough. What’s interesting to me is that he doesn’t
hold debates where he supposedly “wins” to that standard. Owning an 18 year old who didn’t go to law
school and wasn’t trained in argument, while you have the mic and most of the speaking
time and only allow that 18 year old to contribute to the conversation when it personally benefits
you is extremely easy. You can do it with like any topic. That does not mean you are actually correct,
and it does not mean that you are a good debater. But the fact that Ben Shapiro continues to
make “DESTROYING college cucks” or whatever a significant part of his brand signifies
that not only does he get a lot of validation out of these “debates”, he seems to think
winning them makes him correct. But even moreso than this, even in these conversations
with 18 year old college students, Ben Shapiro still is not actually a good debater. He imitates the aesthetics of what he thinks
good debating is- he talks very quickly for a long amount of time and only allows his
opponents to cut in when it benefits him. But those aesthetic flairs are not a substitute
for rationality or logical consistency, and he fails on those fronts repeatedly. In an actual competitive debate, each team
has exactly the same amount of time to speak. You can’t cut into or interrupt anyone's speech without their explicit permission, and each person has a designated time and
space to say exactly what they wanna say without being interrupted. A lot of novice debaters I’ve trained will
also imitate the Shapiro aesthetic at first; they’ll talk as quickly as possible to make it harder for their opponents to use
their time effectively, they’ll try to change the topic to make defending their side easier
on them, and they’ll address only their opponent’s weakest arguments while ignoring
their strongest. Oftentimes these novices, who may or may not
have debated in high school, will go to their first university tournament thinking they have everything
they need to win each round, and oftentimes they get a pretty rude awakening when they
don’t place particularly well. Any judge worth their salt will quickly steer
them in the right direction, and most learn pretty quickly that you need to actually address
your opponent’s strongest argument with logically consistent rebuttals. Watching Ben Shapiro debate reminds me of
those novices, but because he’s not a real debater and these aren’t real debates, there’s
no external figure to point out his arguments are inconsistent and aren’t particularly
strong. I'm gonna use this specific video of his to showcase my arguments here, and I chose this video to be fair to Ben Shapiro. The video has mostly positive comments, a pretty good like-to-dislike ratio, and Shapiro himself seems pretty proud of it; it's not considered one of his worse moments. It's considered pretty par for the course for him. It's a pretty average example of the kind of "debates" he engages in on the regular, which is why I chose it. Throughout the video, he makes a lot of
bad points that get cheers mostly because they sound like quick, snappy zingers, not because they’re
well thought out arguments. Let’s just look at just one clip of Shapiro
“destroying” a student regarding trans issues. Because for all of human history, boy meant boy and girl meant girl. Boy did not mean girl and- [Overlapping voices] Like, people that are from different cultures have- And if I call you a moose, are you suddenly a moose? Okay, if I- That's a completely different thing. No, it's a - Yes! That's right! Men and women are a completely different thing, that's true. Have you ever met a man or a woman? They're completely different. Here’s one example of what I’m talking
about. The student Ben Shapiro debating is criticizing
him for not accepting trans people as the gender they say they are. Ben Shapiro responds by asking her if we should
claim someone is a moose because they identify as one. She says, that’s completely different. And he responds with “exactly! Men and women are completely different!”,
and moves on without addressing her point. This moment in particular strikes me as really
disingenuous, because surely Ben Shapiro and his audience know that when she says “that’s
completely different,'' she wasn’t talking about the difference between men and women. She was talking about the difference between
being transgender and identifying as a moose. Notably, one of these things is a social role,
where what it means to be “a man” and what it means to be “a woman” have differed across various cultural and historical lines and in many cases, were not divided in the same biological binary that Shapiro claims they were. Simply looking at any culture with a historical
“third gender” is evidence enough of this; the same cannot be said for identifying as a moose. Instead of addressing in any meaningful way
the argument that identifying as trans is not as identifying as a moose, Shapiro
deliberately misinterpreted her point and kept going. What’s frustrating is that while he never
addresses her argument, the next thing he does, repeatedly asking her “why aren’t
you 60” and interrupting her when she tries to reiterate the earlier point she was trying to make,
is the exact same type of tactic that Shapiro decries as intellectually dishonest and not
allowing him to make his point when interviewers do it to him. Almost as if he knows his tactic of “debating”
isn’t remotely about having the most correct arguments, but instead about making the other
party seem foolish and implementing as many dishonest tactics as possible to do so. Why aren't you 60? Why aren't you 60? Because it... that's not what I mean- Why can't you identify as 60? Why- what is the problem with you identifying as 60? Because it's not the same as gender, you can't just- You're right. Age is significantly less important than gender. Even then, his example is not particularly
good; citing age as something completely biologically determined that has
no roots in society or culture is not a very good argument when I’m 21 in Canada but 22 in Korea. Sure, the how many years someone has been
alive on the planet is a biological thing but how we choose to categorize it and make
laws based on those years is social. Being alive for, say, fifteen years in some
places means you can drive a car, and in some places means you can’t. Kind of like gender, our systems of categorization
are indeed dependent on our historical and cultural context, and aren’t the same everywhere. But repeatedly bombarding someone with “why
aren’t you 60” isn’t a good foundation for starting an actual good-faith discussion
about the difference between biological realities and sociocultural ways of categorization,
and Shapiro knows this. He’s not trying to be right. He’s trying to win. I mean, he himself said that the only reason
he would ever debate someone is to verbally humiliate them, and the emphasis on “winning”
that public debate places on these exchanges doesn’t exactly help, especially when you
can “win” without actually being correct. And, besides bad arguments, when we do get
into cold hard facts, he’s not correct about those either. The idea behind the transgender movement, as a civil rights movement, is the idea that all of their problems would go away if I would pretend that they were the sex to which they claim, uh... to which they claim membership. That's nonsense. The transgender suic*de rate is 40 percent. It is 40 percent. And according to- Do you know why that is, though? According to the Anderson School at UCLA, it makes no difference, there's a study that came out last year, it makes no difference. Virtually no difference, statistically speaking, whether people recognize you as a transgender person or not. At one point, he brings up the fact that the
trans community has a disproportionately high suic*de rate, claiming that it has nothing
to do with how trans people are treated and everything to do with that being
trans is intrinsically linked to suffering. The study he cites, “Suic*de Attempts among
Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults”, does find that 41 percent of trans people
attempt suic*de. Shapiro also claims that according to this study, whether or not trans
people are accepted as their gender has no relationship to their suic*de rate, and that
he cannot find any study that suggests this is true. This is debunked in literally the first page
of the very study he cites, where they find that trans people who experienced rejection,
discrimination, harassment, or social isolation had a significantly higher prevalence of suic*de
rates than those who did not report experiencing those things. Literally this is in the summary on the very
first page. There is no way you could have missed it. Later on in the study, they also found that
people who reported that strangers could not tell that they were transgender had a far
lower su*cide rate than the average; almost like there’s something about how people
are treated when others recognize that they’re trans that makes them more likely to attempt
su*cide. The suic*de rate was also significantly lower
for participants who reported that their families accepted them after they came out. Shapiro is telling a bald-faced lie here,
but the problem is that unless the student was expected to whip out her phone in the middle of the argument
and google and read the whole study, there’s no way for Shapiro to be fact-checked on this even if
he did let her speak. The way Shapiro primarily engages with ill-prepared
students, calls these speeches “debates”, and then revels in the success he gets from
these videos being labeled as “Shapiro DESTROYS College Snowflakes” while embarrassing himself
in conversations with actual adults is frustrating in and of itself, but the fact that even with
this massive advantage of him having most of the speaking time and no one being able
to call him on his statements right then and there, he’s still clearly not making
logically consistent arguments is honestly kinda sad. But even more than that, it’s evidence of how
engaging in “debates” with people who appear to be skillful rhetoricians but still espouse
inaccurate and harmful beliefs can screw you over and make you out to be a ridiculous person,
even if you’re completely right. Getting flustered in a public forum happens;
most people are not trained debaters, and being interrupted or spoken over can be jarring
and frustrating. But in this type of informal “debate”,
where looking fancy trumps having logical arguments, a lack of immediate witty retorts
or ability to fact-check can make you seem unconvincing regardless of the facts. The fact that losing a debate has little
to do with your actual correctness, and yet losing a debate can harm your credibility in the
eyes of onlookers, constitutes a reason to seriously consider avoiding these types of
public discussions. But I think a lot of people seeing this
will just say, “well, okay, that’s all well and good if you don’t know how to debate or you get flustered easily, but that’s not the case for me. I know I could destroy these people’s arguments
if given the chance, and I just want to prove it”. So I think it’s also worth looking at what
can happen even when you “win” one of these debates, and why even when the “right
side” comes out on top, it doesn’t necessarily translate to the changing
of hearts and minds that we want it to. Before we get to this topic, I'd just like to talk about something fun for a minute. Are you a fan of Dungeons and Dragons? What about Dungeons and Dragons podcasts? What about just like, me, generally, as a person? Maybe you're a fan of one of those things but are not a fan of the others, or maybe you're curious about the other. Well, boy howdy, do I have an offer for you! And that offer is that you should listen to Trials & Trebuchets, which is a fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons podcast featuring me and some of my friends, It's a really fun story about these four kids at like a mysterious magic school as they discover some of the school's secrets, make friends, make rivals, have some good duels, some fights, some mysteries, some good fun joke bits... It's a really wonderful time. I have a lot of fun with it, my friends have a lot of fun with it, we already have a really wonderful community of listeners building up, and it'd mean a lot to me for you to check the podcast out and join that community. DND. TNT. That's not our catchphrase. Well, it is now. Winning Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be Recently, my friend Big Joel debated a YouTuber
known as the Quartering, whose videos read like sensationalist tabloid articles and centre
around complaining about GamerGate in 2019, deriding “SJWs”, and expressing extreme
anger about almost any movie or TV show that mostly features women or queer people, especially
kids’ shows. The debate itself mostly centred around The
Quartering’s perceived hatred of any material featuring LGBT+ people, particularly because
that hatred was couched in language like “I don’t mind it, I just don’t think it’s
appropriate for kids”. Admittedly, I may be a little biased here
in my assessment of the debate, but The Quartering was very evasive and either didn’t answer
or redirected a large number of Joel’s questions and concerns. I will say, that’s not just my opinion;
he himself after the stream admitted he ceded too much ground, and many of his fans agreed. With regards to this particular debate, I think
it’s fair to say that Joel won it. What didn’t appear to happen in the wake
of that debate, however, was any significant changing of minds. While many of The Quartering’s fans were
agreeing that he did not communicate his ideas effectively in the debate, those people were
still his fans, and weren’t asserting that he was wrong- just that he didn’t perform
adequately. "You were wishy-washy. As a content creator, I was horrified that my characters could be changed to push a cultural agenda and brainwash kids." I mean... maybe? I think what you call wishy-washy means I was just vocalizing, trying to understand where he was coming from. By and large, these people still agreed with
the ideas he espoused, and their main criticism was with how he presented his ideas. Not only that, but after the debate ended,
he refused to give Joel access to the footage so he could review it, taking it off of YouTube
immediately afterwards and not responding to requests for the footage for over a week. As it turns out, The Quartering forgot to
erase the footage on Twitch, but regardless, it means that the conversation- who got to
see the debate, the framing of the debate, and the last word of the debate- was controlled
entirely by him. Because the Quartering controlled that conversation
and the debate took place mostly on his own platform, he was effectively able to negate Joel’s
good-faith efforts and bury the evidence. Joel himself has said that he feels like debating
The Quartering was a mistake, and I agree- not because Joel did anything wrong, but because
even though he was right and “won” the debate, The Quartering effectively wasted
his time. Even if the debate had happened on Joel’s
channel, and even if the two had acknowledged that they weren't likely to change each
other’s minds, I think the harms of debating this guy still would have
outweighed the positives. For one, it would give him an unnecessary
platform to further make claims that attack certain groups, like implications that seeing
gay characters on TV is inherently bad for children. I know some people don’t like the idea that
certain views shouldn’t be given a platform, but ultimately all interactions are kind of a matter
of determining what to platform. If someone comes up to you and says “I think
birds don’t exist and the earth is shaped like an ice cream cone”- you could debate
them, but I think most people would agree that treating it like a topic that needs to be debated and
taken seriously is ridiculous, and that you could be using your time and energy in much
more valuable ways. Not every topic creates quality debates. The same applies here, where it’s
just a matter of choosing what to prioritize and what to platform. No single person platforms every idea they’re
exposed to or treats every single thing they hear as debate-worthy, and that’s not a
reasonable expectation of people.That’s not to say that every debate topic is inherently unreasonable and unworthy of being given a platform; in fact, I think most aren’t- but in cases
where both people have relatively reasonable perspectives, I still don’t think a debate
is usually the best format for that kind of conversation. If your perspectives aren’t both reasonable
and one or both of you aren't acting in good faith, I think it’s self-evident to say that debating them
is going to be a waste of time. And if you are both acting in good faith with
reasonable perspectives, there are often better alternatives like non-showy conversations
that take the focus off of “winning” while still permitting a dialogue to take place. That being said, it is true that debates do
have the power to change certain people’s minds, for better or for worse. Like I said in my section about Ben Shapiro:
if you can’t immediately fact-check the guy,
his arguments might sound convincing. Certainly, it’s possible that that power
could be harnessed for good. One YouTuber, who made a particularly profound
video about how he was pulled out of his hateful beliefs, cited watching a livestreamed debate
wherein some of his own beliefs were challenged and debunked as a jumping-off point for further
questioning his views. I don’t want to claim that debates are never
able to change people’s minds or that it’s impossible that someone could use the format of public debate for good. And it is true that if you have the rhetorical
ability to make your point sound compelling and convincing, debating with people you
disagree with could help expose their audience to your own ideas and do some good. But a lot of factors need to be present in
order for that to be the correct decision; you need to be a genuinely skilled rhetorician
with good intentions, you need neutral ground where one person does not have greater power
and control over the conversation than the other, and when it comes to beliefs that could have
genuinely harmful effects if given a platform, the benefit of this debate to society in general
should vastly outweigh the potential harms. In my opinion, these caveats don’t tend
to apply to the majority of these sensationalized public debates, which mostly end up either being ineffectual
by wasting people’s times, or actively harmful by acclimatizing people to misinformation
that’s masked in pretty words. Granted, debates aren't the only way that
grifters can couch lies in pseudointellectual nonsense to make them seem more palatable, but
because debate is considered such a cornerstone of democracy as opposed to like, saying your random
bullshit on a blog somewhere, it gives these ideas a greater facade of legitimacy. Thus, generally speaking, I think we should
choose to restrict our participation in public debates to those that fit the
aforementioned parameters, and we should be devoting similar time and resources to other
forms of educative outreach, which depending on your message and audience, could look like
anything from YouTube videos to in-person community engagement. TL;DW From the perspective of anyone who’s been
constantly bombarded with “debate me! debate me!”, I hope this video can serve
as a general argument for why, in most cases, you probably shouldn’t engage. If they’re a bad-faith actor, there are
a variety of potential harms from “making you look bad” to “wasting your
time” to “giving horrible views unnecessary attention” that don’t make the
benefits worth it. And if they’re acting in good faith and
you’re genuinely interested in a conversation, consider using a different form of dialogue that doesn’t
primarily emphasize “winning”. On the other hand, if you’re an audience
member who genuinely enjoys watching a lot of these debates, I would encourage people to pass
a critical eye over them. If you like watching them, I’m not going
to tell you to stop, but it’s best to take them as what they are; a test of someone’s
rhetorical skills and potentially their character, but not of their factual correctness. And if you see one public figure refuse to debate
another, don’t take that as a sign of their cowardice or fear of hearing another opinion. There are a lot of valid reasons to refuse. Honestly, as much as I rag on debates here,
I would genuinely encourage anyone who is interested, particularly if you’re a student, to check
out the world of competitive debating. Like I said earlier, it’s a lot more carefully
moderated than the public, pop-culture kinds of debates, and there are actual equity and standards
in place to make sure that are actually contentious are the only things being discussed so there's no “hey,
should we do genoc!de?”. I also think a lot of people would benefit
from learning debating skills, even if they’re not interested in becoming debaters themselves. A lot of what debating teaches you is critical
thinking skills; if you’re arguing against someone who’s really good at
fast-talking and verbal switcheroos, you’re going to have to learn very quickly to get to the crux of their arguments so you can figure out how to
refute them. In a world where we’re unfortunately exposed
to a lot of misinformation in the place of quality arguments, an activity that enables
you to better identify and combat it is really helpful. It’s also just great for improving your
confidence and communication skills, and I can attest to the fact that it’s honestly
a lot of fun as long as you take it for what it is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to call
up some friends and argue about Steven Universe. I’d like to thank Curiositystream for sponsoring
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