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Since I was a child, I have never been a fan of the debate format for determining truth. There’s a reason it’s a competitive pursuit in high school and college where people can excel regardless of which position they’re defending. It’s because debates don’t prove who’s right, they prove who’s better at debating.

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Debates aren't really about determining the truth. Or, for that matter, about winning.

Debates are ideally ways to expose ideas, where they work and where they break, so that the audience can make better decisions. Debates are about the audience.

100%. For COVID and other topics there is an unfortunately common mindset of "the public isn't smart enough to sort out truth and make up their own mind" which is patently incorrect and dangerous, really, because the people that tend to espouse this are either the experts that want to be deferred to or people willing to defer to experts out of fear or laziness or inability to contend with ambiguity.

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