in our intellectual world, usually there just is no “debate”; there are just different sides who separately market their points of view. Just as in ordinary marketing, where firms usually pitch their products without mentioning competing products, intellectuals marketing of points of view also usually ignore competing points of view. Instead of pointing out contrary arguments and rebutting them, intellectual usually prefer to ignore contrary arguments.
Or cherry-pick the weakest contrary argument. Or make up straw-man positions for the other side.
Obama is the master of the straw man.
People love to argue about sports, but there such argument or shop-talk discussion is practically absent in the casino’s betting parlor. People have to put their money where their mouths are. If they know something special, they’re better off keeping it to themselves, and there is a negative incentive for trying to persuade delusional participants to adopt a more accurate view of the real state of affairs. Likewise, people argue about companies and products, but the stock market is not a forum for performative debate.
The only way to ensure real debate is something like an adversarial trial system, but the trouble is always in finding genuinely good judges.
One difference between product marketing and intellectual marketing is that, in intellectual markets, people play the roles of both provider and consumer simultaneously. Yes, intellectuals market their viewpoints with as much (lack of) objectivity as product marketers, but intellectuals are also consumers, trying to form and refine their own views. While it’s true that many intellectuals seem to always have their seller hats on — cough, cough, Paul Krugman — others spend at least some time playing the role of product reviewer, similar to the reviewers one might find on Amazon or Yelp.
One social science topic that seems to be understudied is what drives some people to act almost exclusively as intellectual sellers while others do a mix of selling and buying. As @Handle alludes to above, investors act primarily as intellectual buyers of economic ideas, for example. Public intellectuals could gain from both buying and selling ideas, but some seem to spend a lot more time selling than buying relative to others.
More troublesome is the literature which shows that when people are confronted with data which proves they are incorrect, they often hang on to their preconceived ideas even more firmly.
Steve
It’s the internet I suspect, or the way we interact with it. Back in the 1950’s, let’s say, I read your views in a book or magazine and wished to argue with them, I might have sent a letter to the editor or written an article of my own — preferably for a publication with high status (The New Criterion, say) or salience (Architectural Review) or visibility.(The Saturday Evening Post). I’d have to be reflective, I’d have to argue logically, I’d have to consider objections to my comments, etc. My piece would have to pass scrutiny by an editor and possibly be revised. And after that I’d have to wait for it to be published and for others to react, This was a slow process.
On the internet, I can react to opinions almost as quickly as I encounter them, with little screening for sense or relevance or accuracy. I can indulge my emotions IMMEDIATELY, which sadly provokes quick responses. And to make matters worse, a major source of satisfaction for internet commentators is getting their comments in particularly quickly, both to be noticed (“I’M FURZT DUDES!”) and to shape the discussion which follows.
I’m not sure if there’s a cure for this. My heart longs for the good old days of Little Magazines and earnest journalists living in garrets and Concerned Readers from the provinces penning their long Letters To the Editor. But that environment rested on exclusivity and economic supports of advertising and subscriptions which aren’t easily duplicated on the internet. It seems irrecoverable.
Every time I point out that it’s a software problem somebody offers up “Reddit” and I’m all like “yeah, no.”
The software here, sorry, is about as bad as possible but the discussion superior in many ways.
So, we need a software that encourages quality. It seems like it shouldn’t be that hard. I’m not a fan of disanonymity as the pay answer.
Well … One possibility is to institute some sort of charge for addressing the internet. A penny per email, say — that’d cut down on spammers. A dollar for each comment sent to a blog, whether or not it gets published — that’d do in trolls and show offs.
Another possibility is software-based screening. Any post with “Warez” or similar mispellings or that mentions “HRC” and “fascists” in the same paragraph gets sh**-canned. You can make your list of Bad Words as elaborate as you choose.
A third possibility is human screening. Hire an editor or Mechanical Turk coolies to seperate the wheat from the chaff. A good strategy, but a costly one!
Fourth, abandon comment streams such as this, and divert people to Snapchat or Twitter or other specialized site where the passion for argument fades quickly. We’re seeing some of this now, and I expect it’ll be routine in a few years.
I don’t think we need technology to save us. We need some sort of cultural shift to cut down on obsessive and inane internet posting. Maybe that’s a conservative-vs-liberal issue. Or maybe it’s a philosophical issue that no one’s eager to pick up yet.
I couldn’t find the negative reviews that Hanson claims to have found. I heard Mindell on Econtalk and was impressed enough that I bought the book. I assumed that driverless cars were right around the corner (say 5-10 years), but after reading the book, I changed my mind. I found Mindell’s arguments about full autonomy to be persuasive; even though cars can drive themselves and aircraft can fly in controlled situations, going the last mile to full autonomy is pretty far off.
I see plenty of fully autonomous creations around me. They are called animals and human beings.