Debates

A week or so ago I was at a debate between Positive Money, and the Socialist Party.  Positive Money were arguing that there are big problems in the monetary system that need to be sorted out.  The Socialist Party money isn’t required and we should instead aim for a resource based economy where everyone gets as much as they need for free. 

However this isn’t a blog post about that.  It’s about the debate itself.  I’ve seen a few debates online and been to a few in real life and it always seems be a futile exercise.  This is especially true where the “facts” are being disputed.  As you just end up with each side asserting facts without making much headway. 

The problem seems to be that by framing a debate as a zero-sum game there has to be a winner and a loser.  To concede a point is to lose ground to the opposing side.  If the two parties happen to agree on anything they have to ignore that area or find some nuance of the point to argue over.  As a way of progressing an idea this can’t be the right way to go. 

I’m therefore trying to come up with something that is a sort of anti-debate, where you win points by agreeing.  I have no idea how this idea will work so I thought I would write this blog post and see where my thoughts take me.

So I think the first step would be to change what the aim of the debate is, the aim of a debate as far as I can tell from everything I have seen is to convince as much of the audience as possible to join “your side”.  The aim in my new kind of debate is to create a list of things that can be agreed on. 

For example, if the debate where about marmite then you would have a crowd made of lovers and haters.  However you would be able to reach common ground on some basic factual stuff like “Marmite is high in vitamin B12” and probably some ethical stuff “Though I don’t like marmite it shouldn’t be made illegal”. 

This means that the entire concept of “debate” has left the room, you would not have something on the sign like “Marmite: Lover VS Hater – Who will win” you would have something like… hmmm.

Well here we see a problem because debates are intellectual sports.  And sports are always VS events (evening ironing!).  So unless we try to advance debates into the realm of contemporary dance we are going to need some kind of competition to draw in the crowds.  “Going to see an amazing demonstration of cooperation” sounds a bit dull.  So perhaps we need to look at team sports. 

This is getting tricky!  I’ll have to put more in the next post.  Thoughts welcome in the meantime.

Regards

Bucky O’Hare