iStock 958742546 Debate is an Extremely Flawed Way to Decide Truth

Debate is an Extremely Flawed Way to Decide Truth

Often you see when intellectuals disagree (or even when idiots disagree), the solution seems to be to have a debate so that, in theory, one can convince the other, or, in reality, so one can convince the audience that has no idea about the subject which intellectual they should adopt as a trustee to tell them what opinions they should have.

There is a reason, I think, that in the hard sciences, the scientific method is so precious, and that reason is that the alternative is debate, which is a flawed and wholly stupid, completely incoherent and absolutely arbitrary to try to decide on anything. Deciding what is ‘true’ via debate is only marginally less stupid than trying to decide what is ‘true’ by having an arm wrestling match or a spitting contest.

Why? Because debates are not about truth; they are about debate. It is about convincing a (usually) uninformed audience that a person’s point of view is correct, which is a completely social exercise that has absolutely nothing to do with objective fact. The major factors of debate are rhetorical flourish, verbal acuity, likability, confidence, popularity and institutional backing. All tools of social power. You may notice not a single thing on that list is “being correct”. You may have learned from a lifetime of watching political debates, that being correct has very little to do with winning a debate, largely because humans are stupid, easily distracted monkeys who are obsessed with tribalism.

To illustrate this point, recall back to the 2016 Presidential election when Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was a major geopolitical foe to America, and Obama responded with that very clever line about how the 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back, yada yada, we don’t use horses and bayonets either. Of course, Obama’s answer won that debate. What a brilliant response. Such verbal acuity. So clever. Objectively, however, Russia is a significant geopolitical rival to the United States and the same pundits who mocked Mitt Romney at that time have spent the last 4 years accusing everyone under the sun of being a Russian bot.

Now, having said that, you may very well think I’m taking a political stance. Which, if you are, proves my point: you, as a human, are a stupid, easily distracted monkey who is obsessed with tribalism. It was completely correct to say Russia was a geopolitical rival; it was completely true that Obama’s retort won that debate. If you think this is me making a political statement, you’re projecting that onto me: I have no interest in that. However, what I am making a statement about is the ineffectuality of debates, and that was merely an example.

There is a prominent physicist named Michio Kaku, and one of the things that he talks about is how the human brain evolved first from the typical mechanics that we share with all animals: breathe, sleep, eat, fuck, kill. What then separated low-level sentience was the ability to form social networks and culture and communication. Then, what separated humans from that pack of animals was rationality and the ability to plan for the future and the recognition of our own mortality. The more evolved we become, the more we transition from those instincts at the back of the brain, toward the high mindedness represented in the cerebral cortex. Debate is a mechanism of social mechanics. It is a tool of that middle brain portion. People, because they’re incapable of deciding truth for themselves, pick a champion to decide truth for them, and the mechanism that we use to decide on those champions is debate. However, the winner of the debate is never the correct person. It’s the person who’s better at debate, who’s more popular, who people want to envision as their champion and thus, it is entirely a social exercise.

When people make the joke about how instead of debates we should just have our politicians fight to the death, they’re making the joke at the expense of the fact that we all, on some level, know what I’m saying is true. Debates are a useless social exercise that has as much to do with defining truth as does a duel to the death. More than that, debate is simply a sport. Like any other, the sport has strategy. Players score points. Teams have fans who spin the outcome of the game. Players will employ lies of omission, half-truths, logical fallacies, and all sorts of other verbal sleight of hand that audiences are not conversant enough in the sport to grasp in order to appear to be perceived to have a greater claim to being the “champion” of the audience and to “win”.

While the ‘ball’ is the ‘truth’, it is reductivist nonsense and reshaping it to fit each player’s strategy is part of the game: at no point during a debate on say, nihilism (I’m just picking this because it’s one of my favorite subjects), will either of the debaters launch into a 600,000 word verbal essay fully informing the audience of all the introductory knowledge necessary to understand the concept, from which the real truth may be derived. No, they play a sport and an audience, that has no understanding of the topic at hand, decides the winner by saying, “Hmm, I like that guy. He seems smart, and he had the position I had before this whole thing even started. Show of hands, who likes my guy?” We may as well throw the candidates into a Roman coliseum and have them hack each other to bits with a sword. It is the same mechanism: choosing a champion through an arbitrary sporting event.

Our reliance on debate to decide truth (and in some cases intelligence), not only in politics, but in every area of life, simply shows how unevolved our species is. Not because debate is useless, but because we actually, legitimately think that it is bringing us closer to some kind of correct conclusion when, in fact, it is simply a sporting event that we use to entertain ourselves while the real truth is hidden in the facts of the natural world and in esoteric essays 99% of the population would never in a million years read, comprehend, or contrast with other essays.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

Similar Posts