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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, no. I get enough partisanship and parroting in the news already; we don't need more people trying to convince others that they are right and only succeeding in either breeding echo chambers or talking past each other. In my opinion, the "art of debating" is merely a means to an end: the goal is to arrive at a deeper level of understanding about a topic.

What I really want is for more people to make good faith efforts to make substantive arguments against their own opinions, and learn to recognize the usage of fallacies (ad hominems, etc) and other forms of "pop politics" ("X said Y, which implies some character flaw!")

Argument maps are certainly a useful tool to have, but IMHO, one does not arrive at good charts through arguing in debates (especially heated ones!), but through dispassionate impartial curation. </two-cents>

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> What I really want is for more people to make good faith efforts to make substantive arguments against their own opinions

Agree! A big cause of the divide is that people don't understand each other's arguments.

When you are in a debate club, the side you have to debate for is decided by a coin flip. And there is no better way to truly understand the other point of view than when you try your hardest to win a debate arguing for something you disagree with.

> and learn to recognize the usage of fallacies

Yep, this is exactly the driver behind the idea.

> dispassionate impartial curation

Could you please explain this?

Yeah, debate clubs often have many of the elements I alluded to.

Re: curation - In school settings, for example, the curation is done by the teacher (rather than the students who are actively trying to "win" the argument). Curation is needed to avoid redundancy and to ensure factuality.

Impartiality is needed in order to not alienate the parties: it undermines respect for the tool if one allows loaded keywords to be put into it. Debaters' choice of words are often "tainted" by their biases (especially if they believe in what they are defending), and there's usually a more neutral way to rephrase something someone said. More generally, though, sometimes the best arguments don't always show up at the heat of the moment, but upon offline reflection, or based on careful research.

What would be cool is something analogous to the "slowest horse" puzzle (given two people, race them to determine who has the slowest horse - the solution of which is to have them mount their opponent's horse), but in a sort of collaborative setting. I.e. people would be teamed up so as to collaboratively come up with the strongest argument against their own beliefs.

Mmm...impartial curation is certainly difficult to find online. I also wonder how it is in today's political climate compared with 10 years ago - even with teachers. Probably the biggest challenge to the whole concept. I think any system needs to be designed without a reliance on such an authority. But then all you have is some kind of voting or reputation system. How do you develop a karma system optimized for impartiality - that's something for me to sleep on.

> people would be teamed up so as to collaboratively come up with the strongest argument against their own beliefs.

Awesome idea. Will definitely think on this!

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