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Comment by paggle | Hacker News Reader

Of course PC principal can’t stand for this but being able to argue any issue from any point of view is considered to be a hallmark of the well educated by people who have been in the education business for centuries. In 9th grade my history teacher routinely randomly assigned us to write one of two positions on the same issue (capital punishment is unjust, etc). Much of the present state of modern electoral politics can be traced to a widespread inability or unwillingness to understand the people who disagree with you.

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I've been told by multiple people I respect variations of "If you cannot argue the other side's argument in good faith and well, then you really don't know what you believe yourself".

I do fail in this with some of the extremes. I just cannot figure out the why of the "flat earth" thing since I don't understand who "profits" in some way from a cover-up.

Sometimes there is no good faith intent; "write an argument explaning why a Nigerian prince would use a random person from the Internet for a money transfer".

Other than the lack of a prince in the first place, I can actually see, given some of the US banking laws, a good faith argument where the offer is genuine. Won't believe it ever (much to regret of the actual IT industry trying to start there), but I think someone could do it well.

Although, that strays more into scenario as opposed to opposing beliefs.

Isn’t the “flat earth” thing a bunch of talented trolls who captured an army of gullible idiots? I can understand why there is a population of people so willing to believe government conspiracy theories — the government has perpetrated so many sociopathic conspiracies from Tuskegee to Mossadegh to PRISM that it’s proven willing to commit arbitrary amounts of evil. With an entity like that it’s not too hard to convince someone that they’re lying about something small like the Flat Earth.

As part of the debate team in high school, I had to do the same thing (prepare for both sides). I think it is an excellent exercise in critical thinking, even if you wholly disagree with what you're arguing for. Sometimes it even led me to find points I never thought of in the opposing side that I agreed with.

And, then you have time to prepare rebuttals to these points.

In general I agree this is a good thing, but I do wonder if it leads to a modern day society where educated people are able to rationalize the indefensible, as long as it's good for whatever organization/bureaucracy they've aligned themselves with.

> I do wonder if it leads to a modern day society where educated people are able to rationalize the indefensible, as long as it's good for whatever organization/bureaucracy they've aligned themselves with

We have good reason to believe this has been the case since at least 500ish BCE and one may well suppose the phenomenon pre-dates that, so it seems to be more a society thing than a modern day society thing. It's probably hard to educate people to defend or promote ideas well without also enabling them to defend or promote bad ideas better than most people can do for good ones.

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