Why face-to-face debates are wrong

[sketerpot]

When you debate honestly with a shameless liar, reality has already lost. Public debates are garbage if truth is not the first, last, and only goal for both sides. The deck is stacked from the beginning in favor of poor logic and outright falsehood.

I just got back from a debate about "whether gay rights should triumph over Biblical morals", and I need to rant about this. It was a travesty, and entirely predictable. On one side was Hector Avalos, a reasonable and soft-spoken professor of Biblical studies. On the other side was some bigoted yahoo with a radio talk show, named Jan Mickelson. Can you guess who was on which side?

Avalos came out with pretty standard, solid arguments. There was some interesting material about the history of the times when the Bible was written, but aside from that it was the same stuff you'd hear here. The problem is that he talked softly and used big words, and he was honor-bound to be reasonable. Mickelson talked several decibels louder, had a folksy manner about him, and cracked jokes to distract the crowd from the vacuousness of everything he said. He monopolized the time, he got most of the crowd cheering for him, and he was a fan of the Gish Gallop. If you hit the audience with lies and distortions fast enough, nobody will be able to distinguish truth from lies. It works great when you have the audience rooting for you, and it can only be used by people who don't care about reality.

And make no mistake, this guy was all about the lies. According to Mickelson, the earth was created a few thousand years ago and gay people are a hoax. This is not an honest man. And that's how he won the debate.

This is why debates should be done in writing. It may not be as theatrical, and it may require people to read (oh no!), but in writing the truth stands a chance. A deceitful debater can't rip off a bunch of lies and expect to get away with it in writing. Points can be explained as more than sound bites in writing. Are there any redeeming features to the classic public debate format?

Face to face public debates need to die, so that honesty has a chance.

[Feil]

Are there any redeeming features to the classic public debate format?

Dollars, yen, pounds, euros...

For determining the truth, no. For convincing a crowd, face to face debates are more useful, because people are too lazy to read, but they'll watch a lively debate.

[Superman]

This is exactly why idiots like that convicted felon Kent Hovind "won" as many debates as he did. I watched a live debate he did with an anthropology professor at CSU Chico. Hovind was clearly a pathological liar, and he also stacked the audience with a high number of Christian fundamentalist supporters. Of course the professor won the debate, but most of the retards in the audience had no idea as to what something like "genetic drift" actually was. They thought Hovind had won.

[Count Chocula]

Debates do serve a useful purpose, especially to get a feel for how a politician will handle public interaction in office. Of course, the audience has to be intelligent enough to discern when a debater is lying, straying off topic, or monopolizing the debate time. This requires a modicum of intelligence, a modicum of education and logical thought, and some knowledge of Robert's Rules of Order. If you look at the Presidential debate from last week, it seemed apparent that McCain was more of a traditional debater while Obama had the more folksy charm and audience-swaying charisma (I venture no opinion on the content of the debate and their opinions/policy statements).

Where I have seen debates go sideways, it's usually when an academic challenges a demagogue, thinking that they're going into a university-style debate. Bzzt! Wrong. Many academically-trained debaters, in my observation, will fail to rise to the occasion and fail to call out their opponent on misstatements, lies and distortions.

[Dooey Jo]

When you debate honestly with a shameless liar, reality has already lost. Public debates are garbage if truth is not the first, last, and only goal for both sides. The deck is stacked from the beginning in favor of poor logic and outright falsehood.

No, the deck is actually stacked in favour of superior rhetorical skills. You don't have to be dishonest, just know how to speak properly, depending on the situation.

A deceitful debater can't rip off a bunch of lies and expect to get away with it in writing.

That's why there are no creationists on the internet. Oh wait! Turns out they can just ignore it when they are called on their bluffs and continue to fool people with the same lies that have been disproved in a thousand different ways. Catching a lie is much more effective in a public debate, because then they have nowhere to run, and repeatedly ignoring a point is more obviously dishonest when it happens in real-time. Of course, you can't make it happen if you're not a good debater.

[Scottish Ninja]

It would be a great advance for honesty in public debate if candidates traded articles back and forth in the newspapers, hammering away at each other, while a dedicated team of analysts went over each submission to pick out dishonesties, inconsistencies, usw. By nature it would force the candidates into properly identifying what their planned policies and official positions would be, rather than trading barbs over vacuous "issues" or simply out-and-out lying.

[DPDarkPrimus]

It used to be that candidates never debated with each other face to face, but wrote essays and held addresses at rallies and focused on what they would bring to the table, not what was wrong with the other guy.

[Big Phil]

It used to be that candidates never debated with each other face to face, but wrote essays and held addresses at rallies and focused on what they would bring to the table, not what was wrong with the other guy.

When was this exactly?

[Patrick Degan]

The most famous political debates in American history were those of Lincoln/Douglas, which were conducted in a very different format from what is seen today: the first man had the stage for an hour to state his case, then the opponent an hour and a half, then the first man was allowed a half-hour rebuttal of the argument of his opponent.

Transcripts of the seven debates staged by the two men during the 1858 senate race can be found here. It is quite instructive to read them through and to speculate how any of the modern candidates would have fared under such a format.

[Pablo Sanchez]

When was this exactly?

It occurred throughout much of history, because if you think about it, it's obvious that face-to-face debates couldn't happen much because travel was obnoxiously hard. You can look to the debates of Bodo and Alvarus in medieval Spain for one example, which were carried on by letter-writing. The best case from America is probably the Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist campaign, which produced the Federalist Papers.

[DPDarkPrimus]

It used to be that candidates never debated with each other face to face, but wrote essays and held addresses at rallies and focused on what they would bring to the table, not what was wrong with the other guy.

When was this exactly?

Oh, over a hundred years ago.

[Big Phil]

It used to be that candidates never debated with each other face to face, but wrote essays and held addresses at rallies and focused on what they would bring to the table, not what was wrong with the other guy.

When was this exactly?

Oh, over a hundred years ago.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear what I was asking. I understand that face-face debates are relatively uncommon until recently, but I was asking when candidates didn't focus on "what was wrong with the other guy?"

[Big Phil]

The most famous political debates in American history were those of Lincoln/Douglas...

Ahh yes, the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates... Fox News is so educational...

[Pulp Hero]

I remember actually seeing that on TV. FOX = Epic Fail.