| > It's useful if you care about intellectual curiosity and/or arriving at truth. I disagree. > For the same reason that high school and college debates happen where people are assigned a position rather than allowed to argue their "real" position. Haha, I hate debate clubs and think they're largely useless grandstanding. They might be nice to put on your résumé, but other than that, sound and fury, signifying nothing. By the way, I feel the same way about our "adversarial" legal system. It often feels like truth is actually the last thing it's concerned with. > The whole point of saying "devil's advocate" is to let the person know "this isn't my personal position That may be what you think, but from what I've seen on HN and social media broadly, it's often a cover for stating distasteful opinons while attempting to avoid personal criticism for those distasteful opinions. > Ultimately though, if what you want is a discussion where everybody already agrees and hasn't/doesn't consider actual (non-strawman) arguments against their position That's not what I said. Here's what I actually said: "there are surely some sincere defenders of Google out there? Why not let them do the arguing? Of course, if nobody is a sincere defender of Google, that seems to prove that Google doesn't actually have good reasons for its actions." > not being allowed to argue anything other than your real position Again, that's not what I said. "I think that people should be open and honest about what they believe and what they don't believe; IMO the phrase Devil's advocate is obscurantist at best." But you appear to believe that "Devil's advocate" is a clear statement of disbelief in the stated opinion, whereas I don't agree with that, as a universal generalization. > Your mind is a tool and tools need to be maintained otherwise they decay. Without "devil's advocate" such sharpening becomes significantly more difficult But this isn't just an intellectual exercise. Some people, including myself, consider the existence of browser extensions and the utility of browser extension API to be an important social and/or technological issue. We're not here just for "fun". That's something to keep in mind if your aim is merely to sharpen your own mind. To repeat, though: Devil's advocacy is not the same thing as intellectual curiosity. If one is curious, one usually asks questions rather than making bold statements. "Refute me" is an incurious position. |