[barry-cotter]

Being competitive at policy debate is genuinely impressive, just as getting really good at the racing on pogo sticks is impressive. It takes a lot of hard work and skill. But if you want to learn to persuade people outside your little subculture do parliamentary debate. Real debate is rhetoric, it engages in pathos and ethos as well as logos. Given its size and education levels the US should be crushingly dominant in debate, not competitive. Policy debaters don’t persuade people.

[scottlocklin]

Marketing techniques, propaganda and low-level politics (promote your guys, blow up the other guys) are obviously vastly more efficient than old school rhetoric.

[woah]

The things you mention are rhetoric, and are as “old-school” as anything else. Your comment smacks of a bizarre attitude that seems popular among programmers, that “marketing” is at once all-powerful, impossible to understand, and completely without merit.

[scottlocklin]

I dunno, if you read, say, "Merchants of Attention" or some other history of marketing, you'd not find any mention of Aristotle, but a whole bunch of snake oil salesmen and cousins of Freud. Maybe "programmers" know something you don't.