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Comment by worrycue | Hacker News Reader

> Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind.

I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.

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No - particularly because these debates occurred at many tables simultaneously, like games of chess. Of course the point of rhetoric is to win an audience, but this type of training was much more than that.

Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side.

Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.

> Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them.

How does one know when they completely understand the best possible case against their own belief? Or know for sure that they’ve arrived at the best possible case against it? Seems like an unattainable bar.

You don't. You always keep learning.

What I wrote was for people who truly think there's some one truth they want to argue; to explain to them why this is valuable. The real value is that this method teaches you to see all sides, and gives you both compassion and the ability to determine and assert what you think is right in circumstances you haven't encountered before - to think on the fly without judging prematurely.

So wouldn’t that mean that the part of your comment that I quoted can be simplified to:

> Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs

That's also true, if you're honest with yourself and don't become ossified.

I should stipulate though that you can arrive at about 99% of your beliefs and know them thoroughly enough to know why you believe them, while still being willing to change your mind if you're given new evidence.

Fair enough :)

> you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do

This presuppose that I even have a position to begin with ...

I don't understand why anyone would adopt a position before the discussion/debate - the whole point of which is to decide what is the factually correct position.

It seems that you fail to see the distinction between putting yourself in the position of one who believes and actually adopting the position. You can think of it as intellectual empathy. You being able to put yourself into someone else's shoes does not mean you become them.

>the whole point of which is to decide what is the factually correct position.

you presuppose there is a factually correct position to begin with. For the kinds of topics debate prepares you for, there often isn't.

> You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do.

No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions.

This might happen when you imagine you truly hold some other position, but it is clear from the structure you describe (mostly unstructured talking to an opponent) that this is incidental learning and not the focus of the exercise.

What you describe is plainly a exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.

> No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions.

I disagree with this.

It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but for sure mathematicians often engage in similar ways of learning. Almost always, you'd learn something new, like a new definition, by considering other ways to define the same thing and see how that affects things.

And at the high level of maths, there sometimes are actual debates about which direction to go with certain axioms/etc.

> What you describe is plainly an exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.

Hard disagree. Being able to switch sides is essential to being able to understand why one side is better than the other. If you're trying to decide which ice cream flavor to order, but literally cannot see one of the options, it is meaningless to say you chose not to take that one. Only by actually seeing it, tasting it, and deciding against it, have you actually made a choice that one flavor is better than another.

> It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but [emphasis mine]

Ha! Seeing you use a literal non-sequitur to as a counter is a perfect illustration of why rhetoric exercises aren't an automatic pathway to sound logical reasoning.

(Explicitly the argument by edanm goes: "I hold the proposition 'A does not do B' is not true, because A does C")

Note that you shifted the argument to "truth" while the above comment you replied simply talked about "beliefs". Not everything in life can be mathematically proven, after all (and very few people practice professional philisopical rigor to begin with, so we need to lower the assumptions here).

The goal here isn't to find truth, because sometimes the truth doesn't exist. It's to understand and be ready to counter-argue conflicting stances when necessary. Knowing what your opponent will say lets you better strengthen your own argument.

If the truth doesn't exist, whats the point of debating at all?

The truth exists, but often we cannot know it, ie incomplete information, biases, etc. Or sometimes you may be predicting the future where it absolutely doesn't exist yet - you plan a new policy to improve something, but you can never find "the truth" in advance, eg whether it will work or not.

But if we challenge our opinions, we can make better decisions. If we challenge and they hold, we are more confident in them. If we challenge and they don't hold, maybe there's a better idea to explore.

In short, what I believe is: you can aim for the truth, and you will be better for it, but you will never reach it.

First of all: lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if we had hard raw data on a census of a population, we are going to interpret the causes differently. Because there never is one answer to a sociological issue. Truth also doesn't determine the best course of action for any given society either.

Tame example: say that we know that objectively 100% of the time that browsing Facebook leads to depression. Okay... what do we do with this? Do we force facebook to change, maybe even ban it from a country? do we strongly regulate people using Facebook? Maybe only regulate minors? How does that information affect Instagram or any other Meta product? One "truth" doesn't answer these questions.

Second of all: debate is ultimately communication, and communication is about being able to express your own thoughts, often while trying to appeal to other person's thoughts. These core factors of society are important no matter the topic. It should also ideally teach one to consider multiple points of view and make for a more well rounded understanding on comlpex issues, but well... here's the article talking about modern debate.

Sure, maybe the original poster was thinking of beliefs purely as "statements made within the internal logic of pieces of fiction", the only type of belief where truth has no place.

On the other hand they were talking about religious training, and religions are pretty clear that they do teach (some sort) of truth.

> No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth

In math, proof by counterexample is pretty directly what you'd call "both-sidesing" above; you make a thorough, detailed, and compelling argument for a case against your hypothesis, then demonstrate why it can't be true.

If you can't do the work of the making such a detailed counterexample, then the proof of your actual hypothesis falls apart too.

Being able to make the strongest argument against your beliefs is necessary for you to hold your own beliefs most strongly.

That's not a proof by counter-example, that's a proof by reduction to absurdity, and you don't need to make a case for what you're disproving, you just need to show it leads to something false. Whatever argument anyone has towards it being true is pointless and doesn't need to be mentioned.

A proof by counter-example can get even more terse, you simply have to construct an object which breaks a hypothesis. You don't need to consider the incorrect arguments either. Sometimes these proofs are only a sentence long.

As someone with a degree in Philosophy, I'm going to disagree with you here. I've often found the best way to hone my own argument is to think about what someone would say if they opposed it. This helps you hone in on potential weak points, but it has also caused me to change my point of view when I discovered that my original viewpoint didn't just appear to have weaknesses: it actually was flawed.

My central claim is that you were not taught how to find flaws in an argument by being paired up with a classmate and taking turns arguing in favour of positions like "tormenting Jonah to do gods will was justified", I did not say "pretending to hold a different opinion is never done".

Hmm... The post you responded to - and you quoted - said :

"You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do."

It seems to me that your post doesn't make the point you think it does and you ascribe a viewpoint to the post you're responding to which is not in evidence.

I'm not sure what you are saying, you think that post was talking of "beliefs" in the sense "opinions about pure fiction"? I'll also state here that for me "beliefs" about anything except fiction will by definition have the last turtle rest on the firmament of empirical reality.

Anyway, that seems a distinct debate from the one you opened with, that you were trained according to: > Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind.

The point is to learn to see through manipulation, among other things.

Truth can only be found if both sides share axioms. Very often they don't, and the point of a debate is to detect and outline that difference, and show it to your audience, if any.

The exercise is exactly to detect and pick a set of axioms that a particular character used to have, and then honestly think along those lines. It's a hugely important exercise, and not merely for disputes. It teaches you to think in terms of logic of somebody else, see their reasons, understand their feelings. That other party is not necessarily your opponent in any way; it could be your teacher or your student, your business partner, or even your spouse.

Great many people are never taught how to leave the "my truth is the self-evident truth" point of view, and this results in a lot of suffering, theirs, and those who have to interact with them.

Not necessarily. We were doing this in sociology seminars at college and it was not about manipulating the audience at all. It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective. It is basically a practice of the skill of critical thinking. When you try to argue your opponent's side and to your surprise, you come up with arguments that seem good to yourself, that is getting closer to the truth, isn't it?

> It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective.

But you do this automatically when you are trying to discern the truth - invalid arguments are to be eliminated.

The whole, now argue for the other side is kind of ... frankly, telling the anyone to argue for any side is ridiculous IMHO. You are pretty much putting the cart before the horse - i.e. picking a position before the arguing has even started.

The whole point of discussion and debate should be to decide which position to pick (because it's the factually correct one).

Perhaps. Or maybe there is a completely different purpose in this exercise. We could pick a topic like "Passing by reference is better than passing by value". In the end we might not care at all about "getting to the truth." The topic could be "salt tastes better than pepper."

The point of this exercise could be to learn that "nine out of ten dentists" arguments are flawed and why. It could be to practice listening skills to be able to "flow" the points of discussion.

These practices might not be to get at the truth of any particular argument, but to learn methods to get at the truth of any and all arguments.

To be more precise, what you are talking about is analysing the outward form of the argument, to see trough the misdirection rhetoric has provided. It is then the task of logic to examine the core propositions and determine if they mean anything.

There are cases where people are intractable in their beliefs, and both may be right. Abortion in the US is a good example. Regardless of what I personally believe, I will not write off half the people I meet as moral idiots or say that they don't have a valid point. I think both sides are right and wrong, and I don't have the indecency to believe I should be an arbiter of every case. And I could argue either side. That's important when you go from your general principles to being forced to deal with the individual cases. The most astonishing thing about the law is what it shows you about the individual nature of most incidents. No two things are alike.

If you are in a courtroom, say, serving on a jury, you will be presented with carefully crafted discussion and debate which will make you think the best and worst of both sides. The lawyers presenting those cases could switch at any moment and present to you the opposite side's case. Does the opposite side not deserve representation? How many false convictions resulted in the death penalty because a lawyer failed to argue their client's case well enough? How many pagans were burned at the stake, or Christians crucified and fed to lions, because people were taught that argumentation was to decide which position to pick? Discussion is to open your eyes, not close your mind.

> But you do this automatically when you are trying to discern the truth - invalid arguments are to be eliminated.

The world would look a lot different if this were something people do "automatically". No, it is laborious and emotionally difficult, and even smart and intellectually honest people who try hard fail at it often.

> The whole point of discussion and debate should be to decide which position to pick (because it's the factually correct one).

Something in this formulation reminded me of those times at university - I was going through some sort of crisis during the first year. In my country at the time, elementary school and even high school approached things kind of like "there are things you don't know yet and once you learn the facts, you will know the truth". University destroyed this for me. I started to realize how flawed our brains are and how complex reality is. There are facts that are and always will be beyond our grasp and we can only have approximations of approximations, simplified models that hopefully work well enough to be useful. It was surprisingly emotionally difficult for me to accept that fundamental insecurity and un-discoverability of some ultimate "truth".

It is common in high school debate tournaments to argue the same resolution repeatedly at every tournament through the school year. Each match you are assigned one side or the other and you should be ready to go 100% on that side. You aren't trying to persuade anybody. You are trying to make as many arguments as you can, be ready and refute any arguments from the other side, identify logical fallacies, etc.

The point of the year long effort, in my opinion, has nothing to do with any particular topic. It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. It is so that you can spot the problems when Trump tries to sell you hogwash or when Biden tries his pitch. It is to help you stay protected when your school district or home owners' association or even you yourself use faulty reasoning to justify a bad policy. So you can not be persuaded by things you should see through.

These are skills sorely lacking in most of the world where I live.

>> It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life.

This is right on the money. That's why it's a shame to short-circuit any debate by conflating the person taking a side with the side they're taking. Come to think of it, that's also a great reason why it's good to force debaters to take both sides... because neither can be held liable as it's not "their" opinion, and they're free to use their minds without fear of being judged.

The point of the argue both sides exercise is that it does help get to the ultimate truth.

When you are forced to argue for things that you disagree with, you will quickly come to realize that some of the things that your opponents say are true!

That does not mean that their conclusion is ultimately correct, but doing the exercise helps you get out of common mindset that anything said by your opponents is wrong.

Yes - and it's rich to me that veterans of sophistry as a game are complaining about new tactics. Granted, I don't think highly of most of these kritik-hijackings either, but they only exposed the shallowness (or "nihilism" in the author's words) at the core.

Welcome to Judaism.

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