In my latest essay, I write,
It turns out that the most difficult challenge in scoring opinion pieces is that the writer or podcaster rarely states a succinct question. As a reader or listener, I struggle to figure out what the pundit is trying to say.
All too often, someone goes off on a general rant, without stopping to formulate a specific question.
I noticed years ago that most opinion pieces are intended not to open anyone’s mind but instead to close the minds of people on your own side. If they were really designed to persuade, opinion pieces would state clearly the point that they are trying to make.
I was somewhat uneasy with the idea of clearly stating the point, and I think this way of phrasing it — about closing a reader’s mind — clarifies my discomfort. I think a lot of readers will see a question, answer the question based on their priors, and engage in motivated reasoning as they read the rest of the essay. In this scenario, clearly stating a point being made is counterproductive.
It helps when arguments and counterarguments appear together. When you read a Supreme Court opinion, the holding is right up front, and you know everything that follows is the majority’s explanation for why they think that is the correct result. But you also know that the dissents come right after that opinion, and will usually present very rigorous and compelling arguments for the opposite result. Furthermore, the ways these are crafted are usually after multiple rounds of circulation of drafts to reach an eventual equilibrium in which both the opinion and dissent contain most every point, counter-point, and counter-counter-point.
That – as well as the impact it has on the law itself on on future cases – makes it easier to read the entirety of both holding and dissent without dismissing it out of hand just because you know which side it’s on. Unfortunately, this has been made more difficult because the length of the average opinion has gotten completely out of control.
There seems to be some disagreement about debate itself. You say, “The epitome of good intellectual discussion is a formal debate.”
The key here is “formal”, but people tend to think of the value of ‘debate’ in terms of the whole spectrum of argument from the top and all the way down to twitter flame wars consistent mostly of personal insults and threats.
Consider: Here is Yglesias and Galef:
Mostly that quality is a deterrence that filters out a lot of low quality argument and keeps people on their toes. It’s hard to get away with mischief, insufficient rigor, or pretending you know more than you do, if there is a pro right there who is going to get a chance to poke holes in any of your lapses or weaknesses, and a judge who will take that criticism seriously. Knowing that incentivizes one to bring one’s A game. Our intellectual life today is deteriorating because of increased insulation from that kind of accountability.
I think a lot of this is a generational split. People who remember life before the internet (more properly, the democratized internet) remember a time of greater toleration of a broader range of opinion and a more healthy and flourishing culture of intellectual debate, and can thus more clearly appreciate the net benefits of productive dialectic.
People who grew up on the internet, on the other hand, tend to be completely exhausted with all the constant low-grade trash and fakery, and tend to have experiences of being burned over and over and having wasted their time trying to engage in an informal and unstructured way only to be pestered relentlessly by ‘trolls’ and so forth. They tend to see such open ‘debate’ as producing so much noise it just drowns out the signal.
This is an excellent comment. Perhaps in this context FITs can be viewed as trying to revive the practice of formal debate.
Every opinion piece should be reworked and polished to elucidate clearly. I think that’s more fair than imposing the requirement to pose a question. It might be that reworking results in the question that helps the reader but there may be good examples in which it does not. It seems too restrictive to mandate a form for all opinion writing. As for Ross Douthat, I find his writing mind-numbingly dull because he seldom has anything interesting to say. I suspect people read him the way progressives watch the Maddow Show. The audiences are alike in that they both seek pleasure in having their biases repeated to them. It’s puzzling to me why Tyler Cowen often links to Douthat. If he wants to elevate the status of (some) religions can’t he find a more compelling and interesting writer than Douthat?
Should not your essay have started by posing a specific question?
The idea that every essay should advocate exactly one thing strikes me as kind of ridiculous. Most situations are more complex than that, and the success of most policies depends on both the circumstance and the implementation. “You should drive fast” is worse advice than “You should drive 70 mph on the highway (but not in a school zone), if the pavement is dry, traffic is sparse, and there’s no slow-moving truck directly in front of you”.
It’s a trade off. The chance that a debate will be productive is proportional to the narrowness of the question and how clearly defined are its terms. Yes, that really limits the scope for anything that can be dealt with in a quick exchange, but otherwise they tend to produce a lot of confusion and frustration. Here’s Robin Hanson
I get that, and that’s why courts (which are tasked with deciding discrete questions defined by the pleadings) require arguments to be structured that way. But in general public intellectuals are engaged in discussion, not debate – it’s much more open-ended and much less win-or-lose.
To phrase it differently, Kling is asking public intellectuals to become more legible (in Seeing Like a State terms) to facilitate his ranking of their arguments. This is generally contrary to the libertarian philosophy as he expresses it.