Rebuttal
Apparently Taylor Swift has released a new album. I plan in listen to it and then review it for your edification in 2034. Please be patient until then. I will not be rushed into hasty judgments.
Useless garbage
Physicist Angela Collier throws down a double whammy of the history of atomic theory and a furious dismissal of “debate spectacle”. Part one relates the end of the 19th / start of 20th century debate among physicists including Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Max Planck about “are atoms real”. This might make me a woke suppressor of free speech and corporate shill but I am going to say that atoms are real. But this is a fairly low stakes because I am not a particle physicist. Neither am I an atom. I am most likely about 10 billion billion billion atoms (and for the sake I my health I should probably reduce that total number of atoms). And before anyone chips in, no, I am not going to “do my own research”. I have neither a particle accelerator nor the expertise actually use one if I did.
This atomic beef is as epic as the rambling beards, the tiny circular glasses, and the heavy frock coats. The current fracas between Drake, J Cole, and Kendrick Lamar is microscopically small potatoes compared to this although seeing Aubrey Graham getting published in Physics Review Letters might be worth it.
Part two relates Dr Collier’s frustration with empty epistemological spectacle of public debates - using the Ken Ham / Bill Nye 2014 debate as an example.
As she states: There is a population of people who view spectacle debate as like the highest form of gentlemanly communication “oh wow it's so beautiful to see people at odds have such a pleasant conversation”. Which is so weird. You go see the debate. It's not two gentlemen just delicately crafting arguments and then politely listening to another point and then just recrafting their statements in a lovely conversation. It's a spectacle, a performance, where people yell at each other and the the person who's better at yelling wins and that to me is useless garbage.
Now I absolutely share a lot of her annoyance with the public debate format and the esteem in which it is held. Throwing zingers at each in front of a goggling crowd and then snipping out a bit and posting it on YouTube with the title stating that you DESTROYED your opponent is premier league douchery. In doing this, the sum of human knowledge has, at absolute best, remained static. But has likely been decreased.
I probably am a shade more tolerant than Dr Collier of debate as a way of learning to publicly present and sell your positions because the world is not reasonable and fair and learning to operate in that unreasonable and unfair world allows you to achieve your goals. But much public debate is basically the WWE with more bowties and less spandex.
What are we actually debating here?
Following on from this is a slightly older video by Drew “Genetically Modified Skeptic” McCoy. He’s not talking about what passes for scientific debates - he’s more concerned with debates about religion. His position is that most debates that attempt to argue for or against the existence of God using FACTS and LOGIC are a waste of time. Because people’s religious commitments are rarely rooted in rational beliefs but in their behaving and belonging (yay, the 3Bs again).
“We must understand then that when we non-Christians engage with Christians on arguments for God or Christianity we are not dealing with the foundation of their faith we should not typically expect to change a person's belief much less their faith position through argument.”
Christians are not Christians because they agree with the conclusions of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. So debating this argument is low-stakes theatre for most participants. From McCoy’s perspective, such public debates validate the claims of religious believers to a rationality that is not actually foundational to their faith.
Then McCoy has a conversation with Alex “Cosmic Skeptic” O’Connor and quizzes him on the effectiveness of his debating ways. And then Stephen “Rationality Rules” Woodford decides to debate this in a reaction video. Woodford is of the belief that public debate changes minds.
All Of The Feels
Some of this comes down to temperament. My impression is that Woodfood and O’Connor really enjoy debating people on a public stage in much the same way that I think John Cena really enjoyed dressing up in spandex shorts and grappling with people for the WWE. There are differences even there. Woodford is more overtly combative in style and he has a contempt for his opponents that O’Connor lacks. Whereas McCoy and Collier don’t get the same buzz from rhetorical combat. Collier in particular finds it repellent.
It’s not clear to me that public debates actually do change minds around topics that are foundational to people. How people change their minds is often slow and complex. And it is likely more about how their context and their experience and their berhaviours change than it is about seeing a YouTube video where someone gets DESTROYED.
With their rules and time limits, debates are not great ways of exploring topics that require detail and nuance. That doesn’t mean that they should be banned but rather than we should not take them seriously. More pressingly, we should not let those who are skilled at public debate try to turn everything into a public debate. If John Cena called for public policy decisions to be decided with a bout in the ring, we wouldn’t nod and agree to such a nakedly self-serving request. The venues we choose often define the outcomes we get.
Collier’s centring of “the scientific literature” as a space for debate works because it is made up of a group of people with a common project and an overlapping set of norms. Sometimes those norms are stretched but what counts as “evidence” and “truth” and “facts” and “logic” have been worked though. I can’t suddenly claim in a physics paper that my result is true because “it came to me in a dream”. Debate theatre lacks many of these groundrules and more importantly its participants lack a common project. So the adversarial structure of a debate enhances the incommensurability of positions taken.
Now I don’t want to spoil other people’s fun but what I’m left with no more of desire to engage in debating than to don spandex and hit someone with a chair. I would propose different models of intellectual inquiry. Feel free to grab a glass.