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Comment by ipsin | Hacker News Reader

I was a high school debater. The topic that year, if I recall, was "Resolved: the United States should embark on a campaign to restore political stability to Latin America".

The last competition I was at, some of my school's teammates went up against what I thought of as "The Superweapon".

The debate starts out with the normal political, social and military arguments related to your side of the proposition, and then moves on to phase 2: even so, none of it matters because Jesus Christ's return to Earth is imminent. "Expert" after "expert" weighing in on Christ's return and its implication for Latin America.

I had a very large briefcase -- a case full of briefs -- but, uh, none of those briefs really addressed that particular line of attack.

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Fun. Our favorite troll negative approach was to argue that increasing entropy speeds the universe towards Heat Death, and that this is clearly undesirable, and that participating in a debate clearly increases entropy, and that therefore the judge should immediately stop this round and award us the win.

What I wouldn't give to have known about Roko's Basilisk at the time.

An argument invoking an statement that is not falsifiable is immediately invalid. At least in sane societies, so help us God!

EDIT: correction of "unprovable" to "not falsifiable"

But most statements are unprovable. How do you prove that your plan to stabilize Latin America will work?

God told me so in a dream. Isn't that enough?

Maybe we better need some logic and work our way towards a solution. Having a solid base with well tested theories is a good start. It won't ever be fully bulletproof, sure. There is only one final way to find out. Try it. Maybe we should choose a plan that doesn't involve creating a better world only in the so-called "afterlife".

"Jesus Christ will return to the Earth soon" is falsifiable. At least, it's as falsifiable as "Fourty years of exposure to Flouride in the drinking water will turn our children into communists."

"A bunch of people saying that Jesus Christ will return to the Earth soon" is also falsifiable.

Who or what is a "Jesus Christ? How do you determine that something or somebody is a "Jesus Christ"?

What does "return to Earth" mean? Does it mean physically in a human body or is mentally felt by his followers enough?

Define "soon".

The statement "Fourty years of exposure to Flouride in the drinking water will turn our children into communists." is much better defined except for the "communists" part. But we could define a "communist test". If the children exposed to forty years of Fluoride in the drinking water fail pass the "communist" test it is clearly false.

Still, within the short time of the debate you won't find any meaningful answer to these questions thus limiting their utility severely.

These are great criticisms, but they can be levied against all sorts of claims about abstract concepts (Freedom, justice, markets, etc.) Different theologians (Or ethicists) will have different, contradictory answers for these questions, but that doesn't mean that discussing ethics is a waste of time, or that a claim like "China restricts its citizens freedom" is unfalsifiable.

I believe that discussing the inevitable return of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (In the next 60 years) to be a waste of time, but that's because I believe the probability of his return, and the subsequent apocalypse of unbelievers, is zero. Unfrotunately, I won't be vindicated in this belief until 2077.

The counter to a move like this is trivial, but they are banking on surprise and that you won't have any Popper to actually pull it off in your evidence on-hand.

(I haven't paid attention to policy debate in 15 years and now I wonder what kind of impact smartphones have had, or could have assuming they're not currently allowed.)

I've never seen a formal debate like this, but I'm surprised this kind of stuff is encouraged. It seems kind of dumb to me. If they're just making stuff up, can't you just make stuff up back?

"Oh actually it's not Jesus but Satan that's returning to Earth...."

I imagine, beyond the novelty, this would be an incredibly boring debate to watch.

They have quotes from experts researched they can read off, which you can't provide a direct counter to (for 'oh it's actually Satan') because you have no experts you can rattle off, at least not without completely bullshitting. Coming up with an out of left field argument to surprise and leave someone without a good means to address the argument is extremely common both in L-D debate and the modern media yelling clown show that passes for 'debate' on news channels today.

So? Those are the really fun debates. You have to really dig into your understand of how the debate framework works (if you want to be "practical") or, just beat them back at their own game, which is really interesting because you have to think in a very different way.

"which is really interesting because you have to think in a very different way." .. which is?

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