Steelmanning that position, though, would go like this. The purpose of debate is to challenge people's views, even if they strongly disagree, in order to convince if not participants then bystanders to change their mind. Good debate makes good viewing, which is why debates have audiences. And young people in particular tend to be impressionable because they don't have a lifetime of commitment to one position.

So if you want to engage people politically via debate, then university campuses are a good place to do that and thus - to someone extraordinarily uncharitable - any such debate could be described as "trolling immature leftist college students to score YouTube views". The same activity done by an academic would be described as "presenting the youth with mind-expanding dialogue", and they'd be doing it to score tuition fees, but nobody would quibble with that phrasing.

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camgunz 5 days ago | parent [-]

> The purpose of debate is to challenge people's views, even if they strongly disagree, in order to convince if not participants then bystanders to change their mind.

Debates are not two parties seeking the truth together. Unless you're very, very careful and good faith, and your counterpart is very, very careful and good faith, debates are a race to the bottom of psychological manipulation. They're not contests of facts; there's no way to objectively score them; they're not good ways for participants or bystanders to learn.

Facially, they're theater. But a system's purpose is what it does, and these performances serve as a venue/foundation to hone/push messaging. You'll almost never see right-wing "debaters" go up against "big" left-wing names like an Ezra Klein or Destiny (Ben Shapiro is kind of the exception, but he's far more conciliatory with someone like Klein--he did do one with Destiny, it went pretty badly for him, so it of course became a one-time thing).

Kirk et al lose--they lose frequently! You rarely see it because they have far bigger megaphones than their victorious rivals. But have these (many) losses changed their views? No. Debates are not two parties seeking the truth together.

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johnnyanmac 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Debates SHOULD be about 2 parties seeking truth. In reality, it's about brining people over to your viewpoint and garnering support.

There's many ways to do that, but centuries of debate etiquette describe bad form and dishonest means to "win a debate". Despite the events here, it is generally bad form in an exchange of words to incite violence against an opponent. And that's often what Kirk does, or did.

>Facially, they're theater. But a system's purpose is what it does, and these performances serve as a venue/foundation to hone/push messaging

Yes. Before we sigsrcoated it, we just called this propaganda. Propaganda is not a debate. The most dangerous discovery in early social media was that a spewing of propaganda (aka, arguments not all based on reason nor a goal to further humanity) will still get you a following, no matter how badly you use. Becsuse saying those words rouse the thoughts of those who are either prone to propaganda, or simply embolden those who already had those thoughts but werre too scared to admit it.

A decade of refinement later, and look where we are.

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yostrovs 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

One could say the same about this very debate you're participating in. And since that's how you see debates, one has to immediately assume that you're not acting in good faith.

	▲	camgunz 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Only a small subset of conversations are debates, and personally I don't feel like I'm arguing with anyone (including you!), just discussing