Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

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>> I'm legitimately not sure whether

I was referring to the article.

>> It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.

Well, both students are unwilling to engage with the material they need to deal with, as unpleasant as it is. I personally don't think one is worse than the other on its face. But if the ground rules of the debate have shifted in a way that forces you to frame everything in a way that implicates the speaker as agreeing with the position they're arguing unless they use a particular category of argument to undermine that position while they're arguing it, then it's not a matter of learning to refute that category of argument but rather being forced to embrace it. Rejecting that artificial requirement to salt your own speech seems rather honorable in the "purest" sense of debate; whereas refusing to play by the rules and do the work of arguing something you don't agree with shows an unwillingness to engage with the subject matter - which is not the topic of debate, but the ability to debate.

There is no ground rule that "forces you" to implicate yourself as person as committed to the positions you take as debater. But there's also no ground rule that prevents your opponent from trying to implicate you in that way. If they do, you get to choose how to respond. In general what it means to "play by the rules" has always been up for contestation in competitive policy debate (see also "topicality" arguments and arguments about what one is entitled to "fiat" as part of one's proposal). If one wants to win under a certain conception of the rules, one also needs to be prepared to defend that conception of the rules. In another version of debate that might not be true - perhaps that's "public forum", which I know little about? - but for many policy debaters I think the fact that everything is open to question is part of the challenge and the fun.

Right, but I think you're talking about the real world. I'm saying that in an debate competition, where the rules of the forum are such that the sides are assigned at random, impugning your opponent's reputation for arguing too well or too convincingly for the side they were assigned - while refusing to argue any side you don't agree with - demolishes the purpose of the debate.

It's akin to "winning" a debate by showing up with a baseball bat and daring anyone to challenge your point of view. That is often called debate in a totalitarian system, but that's precisely why such systems are so brittle and inefficient at coping with and responding to policy challenges. My point is that such a "win" is not, in fact, a win, either in the rhetorical sense of changing anyone's mind, or the utilitarian sense of finding the best way forward on an issue, because everyone can see you merely bullied people into silence - hence there was no debate. Thus suppression of the opposing side under threat of censure or harm has no lasting power to override the speech you don't like, and usually backfires.

I was talking about competitive policy debate, which I think I was pretty explicit about. I am unaware of a case of anyone showing up to one of those with a baseball bat, and I don't know where you're getting the "suppression... under threat of censure or harm" thing. Having a debate judge vote against you is not harm (certainly happened to me plenty of times and I'm doing ok). Are you transporting a general sort of culture war fear into the context of debate? The article does seem to be trying to get readers to do that, so it's forgivable, but calling critiques "bullying" is a real stretch at best.

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