My latest essay begins,
I will describe two modes of political discourse, which I call persuasion mode and demonization mode. In persuasion mode, we treat people on the other side with respect, we listen to their logical and factual presentations, and we respond with logical and factual presentations of our own. In demonization mode, we tell anyone who will listen that people on the other side are awful human beings.
Although I don’t cite Eric Weinstein’s podcast with Timur Kuran, I think that listening to that podcast influenced what I wrote. I have some comments about that podcast scheduled to go up on this blog next week.
“For an example of persuasion mode, consider a high school debate team. Your chances of winning increase as you better understand the arguments on both sides. You do not help your team by insulting the members of the opposing team.”
This is an aside, but have you seen what “debate” has become. Even when I was a college freshmen long ago I was floored by how…autistic…it had become.
Finals of the 2004 National Collegiate Debate Championship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui8XXE1friM
As I recall, “gerbal speak” was employed because judges tracked all your “arguments” and if the other side didn’t have time to at least “address” your argument then you’re automatically “won” that argument. So one min/max method to “win” was to speak as fast as you could and spam as many “arguments” as you could in the hopes that the other side would miss one.
After arriving on campus a week early to study for “debate” and realizing it was this I quit.
At the high school level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0
That’s how bad it was before it just descended into this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8
These video examples seem to be more appropriate to Kling’s earlier post Systems Invite Gaming rather than an example of the degeneration of political discourse. Applying the fast talking auctioneering style to the school debate format says more about the inability of the judges to adapt their scoring system to new gaming tactics.
I thought this was going to be a culture-war free post by asdf but the third video features black oppression social justice arguments as yet another school debate gaming tactic.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to reiterate a claim I’ve made before; social justice activism has perfected specific tactics and has applied them in ways that are nothing more than gaming of free speech and mass media systems.
I’m not sure the social justice tactic “descended” further than the auctioneering tactic. The debating format was captured by gaming tactics and has lost all credibility, assuming the three videos accurately represent the general state of school debating contests.
We should not confuse gaming tactics with persuasive schools of thought.
“I thought this was going to be a culture-war free post by asdf but the third video features black oppression social justice arguments as yet another school debate gaming tactic.”
I find the chipmunk style demeaning, but at least the debaters are trying to include legitimate debating points. If an adult told them to stop speaking like that or leave the room, there is actually something to be salvaged there. The third one is a further degradation because social justice arguments aren’t even arguments. One of these black gentlemen doesn’t even bother to present an argument, but just some kind of rap music singing. Did you enjoy his arguments about “dreams of chocolate covered watermelons”?
I do think social justice is a continuation of the trend to “win at any cost”. If chipmunk style is an attempt to win via speed at the expense of clear discussion, social justice is an attempt to throw away logical argument altogether.
The closest thing I can come to an agreement with you is that the whole thing has rotted out. I’d say there real problem is that judges decided they needed to have “objective” criteria to decide winners (rather then just using their judgement and acting like adults, and if people complained it was unfair or unscientific they could just live with it and stop complaining).
For instance, in relation to the third video, the judges should have immediate thrown them out of the room for behaving like a bunch of n-words (which I must say they use A LOT in their debate). It’s hard to see how a bunch of adults thought that awarding people something for that display made the world a better place. But I guess nonsense comes in a little at a time. They shouldn’t have awarded the chipmunk speakers either. The whole thing reeks of not having a single adult in the room tell someone they’re are acting retarded.
I would agree that debates are ineffective and most like turn people off. It appears they trying something different but different is not effective.
Unfortunately, there is a degree of getting higher clicks than more normal college and HS debates from what I have seen on Youtube inputting ‘College Debate.’
In terms of falling debate standards, I see lots of videos of ‘Ben Sharpio Destroying Liberal Professor.’ (Talk about being demonization is profitable.)
Why is demonization not going away?
1) It is extremely profitable and look at how money Rush Limbaugh has made or even the number of digitable subscribers NYT has now compared to 2016.
2) One way to control demonization is to have a defining enemy.
Think of an ideology as a self-replicating trait. What’s the best strategy from the ideology’s standpoint? Certainly the best way to reduce defection is through demonization and ridicule. An ideology that inoculates its adherents against persuasion survives better than one that leaves their minds open to persuasion. Of course, the persuasive strategy may be useful for accruing new adherents, but even normally, most conversion to an ideology happens, I’d contend, by osmosis, or ‘peer pressure,’ not by rational persuasion. Polarization probably increases susceptibility to peer pressure and reduces susceptibility to rational argumentation, so the more ideologies resort to demonization or polemics, the lower the probable returns to trying the ‘persuasive’ strategy get.
A simple example: if you have two ideologies of equal size, one of which requires it’s adhere to ostracize members of the other, while the other does not, which will win the ideological war? When one considers that political opinions are practically irrelevant to one’s life, and being wrong has no real cost, while being unpopular, even if right, has a very real social cost, it’s easy to see how one can end up with a situation where the ideologies that impose the highest social costs on non-adherents will be most successful, hence the appeal of the demonization strategy. So maybe it’s a collective action problem, where there’s no real incentive – for an ideology – to unilaterally foreswear demonization even if a universal adherence to such a rule would be optimal.
You may not be interested in [fill in blank] but [fill in blank] is interested in you.
The debate is with the public, not the opposing debater. The public is generally viewing tribal representatives, purveyors of a philosophy.
What do you think the time period is when persuasion was at its high point? What was the major difference between now and then?
For American history, I might suggest 1875 to 1925 or so. Several major constitutional amendments were passed in the latter half, so that a lot of the groundwork was laid in the first half. These include women’s suffrage, the income tax, direct election of senators, and prohibition. You may think some of these were bad ideas, but the American amendment process is pretty much the epitome of persuasion.
But why did persuasion work here? Perhaps one explanation is that the Supreme Court ruled against women’s suffrage in 1875, forcing the suffragettes to have to use persuasion. Perhaps the existence of a more activist Supreme Court makes demonization easier, because you don’t have to persuade the majority of the populace, just the Court. Or if you do have a majority, you can still fail if you don’t have the Court. Persuasion is hard and time-consuming, and perhaps people will only resort to that to effect societal change if they have no other option.
There is a large psychological element to the two approaches to argumentation. (See e.g. Ray Dalio’s “Principles” or any of Annie Duke’s writings, e.g. on Twitter.) Persuasion (classical argumentation or truth-seeking) is hard work. It requires listening to and understanding your counterparty’s argument, and arguing your own position based on facts, logic to the extent possible, and otherwise on the preponderance of the evidence. Persuasion also runs the risk of *being persuaded* by your counterparty, in other words, being shown beyond a reasonable doubt that you were wrong, which is very difficult for human beings to admit, and humbling.
Demonization is relatively easy and psychologically satisfying. Demonizers may feel as if they are (regardless of whether they are in fact) part of a tribe, are right, and vanquishing an opponent – a much easier route to protecting one’s ego, albeit more of a “sugar high” than successful, or even unsuccessful, persuasion.
Most people psychologically prefer feeling right (demonizing) than becoming right (learning the truth). I’d play poker against the former any day of the week.
There has long been some demonization, as Arnold concedes, but he claims:
But in recent decades Rush Limbaugh discovered that demonization could appeal to a mass audience and Paul Krugman discovered that demonization could appeal to the readers of the New York Times.
Rush got his appeal not primarily thru demonization of the PC libruls, tho he did that, but by frequently speaking True Facts which the Dems & Dem media & Dem academia were obfuscating.
Only recently the NYT took down a tweet of theirs which had been celebrating Mao, one of the three greatest Mass Murderers in history. Reagan had certainly been demonized, and so was Nixon, and Goldwater.
(I call it Democrat Derangement Syndrome; not Bush DS nor Trump DS).
It has long been going on in colleges, where there has been an “open secret” about discrimination against Republicans. Most professors have for years felt, and feel, very free to speak up – to demonize Republicans, Capitalists, & Christians. Tax & gov’t support for such demonization should be withdrawn.
The criminologists, too: “These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations. Wilson’s work was ignored by awards committees, and criminological reviews of his books, especially Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, were almost universally negative.”
City Journal