[vincent-toups]

"In cases of formal debate, where the goal of the debaters is, as often as not, not for one side to dominate the other with rhetoric, but rather for everyone to “adversarially collaborate” to discover the complete shape of the debate—to map all the pros and cons—so that they can then go over the mapped argument and judge its merits for themselves, rather than working form the incomplete information they started with (usually just the information held by their “side.”)"

I did formal (policy) debate and my goal was always to win. Are there forms of formal debate which are really oriented towards sketching out a complete argument landscape?

[tempguy9999]

> I did formal (policy) debate and my goal was always to win

I find this POV difficult to understand. Maybe I'm misunderstanding (and what is "policy" debate vs plain old debate?)

. Did you want to win for a reason other than winning?

. Did you ever feel you were wrong but won anyway?

. Did anybody make you doubt your position? If so what was your response?

. My position is to find the 'truth' so if I'm shown wrong I'll accept it quickly. Do you think this is a flawed approach compared to yours?

Not hostile, but curious, thanks.

[vincent-toups]

No hostility detected! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_debate

Policy debate is a formal style of competitive debate, characterized by a high degree of "game" like behavior and, most notably, the act of making arguments as fast as possible, so as to literally make it impossible for your opponent to answer them all.

Mostly its a high school thing, but there are some college leagues.

To answer your questions:

- Winning made me feel smart and cool.

- Never, but I also don't feel I was right either, really. I mean the relationship to the substance of the ideas in the debate is so tenuous. It really is a kind of high speed game of conceptual chess, more than an argument.

- The policy debater takes up and puts down positions like tools. One round you might make an argument you defeated in the previous round. You might argue against your very own position.

- As a data scientist (and a scientist and philosopher in general) I'm with you about truth being important (as far as that goes) but policy debate is much more about developing a facility with ideas. A certain detachment from specific ideas is actually very important to finding the true ones, and policy debate helps you see that.

On the other hand, it does make people cynical. I see a lot of what is wrong with this country in my training as a debater. Its a thing taught mostly to rich kids at private schools and it teaches them to bullshit, which is a critical skill if you're to lord it over the plebes. The world might be better off it we didn't know how.

My view these days is that I'm quite skeptical of strong claims made either way and that I prefer virtue ethics, which say we should focus less on complex schemes to understand and manipulate the world and more on our character moment to moment.

[tempguy9999]

Excellent answer, very informative, thanks!

[pmarreck]

I would agree with this pointed question.

I've been studying the informal fallacies and it dismayed me to discover that lawyers typically USE, instead of AVOID, many of these fallacies... precisely because it wins cases. Their purpose is to win, not to be the most correct.

Winning is thus a perverse incentive in truth discovery. Maybe conflating competition with truth discovery was a bad idea? I guess, it's impossible to dispassionately plead a court case when livelihoods are at stake, and thus competition is inevitable...

I would like to think that if I was a lawyer arguing a case, and I knew that using a certain fallacy would work, I wouldn't use it... but who knows.

[iamnothere]

> I did formal (policy) debate and my goal was always to win. Are there forms of formal debate which are really oriented towards sketching out a complete argument landscape?

I don't think this exists yet, but it should. It may just end up with everyone arguing over what the meaning of "truth" is, but I'd still watch it.

[gbrown]

In principle, the adversarial system of justice in the United Systems is supposed to sort of work in this way (though the judgement is by a third party). Even though each party is focused on winning, the structure is supposed to give rise to fairness by construction.

Whether that happens in practice is... debatable.

[CobrastanJorji]

A better example might be an inquisitorial justice system, in which a theoretically neutral party attempts to reach a conclusion and a defensible support for it.