[TeMPOraL]

One of the side effects of the Internet is that you can find pretty much any plausibly sounding justification for any view. Couple that with the modern world being insanely complicated - acknowledging which leads to feelings of helplessness - and there's no surprise people end up believing different things depending on what they happened to read. People want to feel they understand things. Nobody wants to feel stupid.

[memracom]

In the British tradition, university students used to participate in debates where two people argued the opposite sides of a question. The debaters got brownie points for winning the debate, not for arguing the RIGHT opinion. Often the debaters had to argue for a question which they themselves were against, or vice versa.

The audiences who voted the winner, paid more attention to the quality of the debate, not to the question itself.

In a culture where this type of debate is practiced in the schools, people of all ages will be more open to discussing an issue in a social setting without strapping on revolvers and a bulletproof vest.

It is not a question of identifying who is the enemy, it is a question of figuring out which path will lead to a better world 100 moves in the future. Because real life really is like a chess game. The outcome of the next move is not the be all and end all.

[TeMPOraL]

I always viewed this kind of debates as potentially harmful though. If you award brownie points for "debate quality", as opposed to "getting it right", you may end up promoting eristic over rationality.

But maybe British universities get it right. I don't know, I haven't had the experience. We had debates in my secondary school, and I remember that the best way to win those was to be the cleverest bullshitter in the room.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I think you're completely correct. It's politically poisonous because it promotes a legal/corporate view of the world where you win by being glib, emotive, and persuasive, over a scientific/rational view of the world where you win by modelling and predicting objective reality more accurately than the other side.

It's easy to see how this destroys any possibility of rational policy-making.

It doesn't help that most countries suffer from literally industrial levels of PR effort, media spin, and online astroturfing, all designed to persuade, influence, and manipulate, and not to inform.

See e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/astroturfing-grassroots-movem... for a very incomplete list of examples.

The whole point of PR etc is to deny reality. So the idea that the other side might have a point worthy of respect is deeply problematic.

It would be true in a world where everyone had access to unbiased information, deliberately misleading the public was banned by law, and public education was a significant policy goal.

That isn't the world we live in.