Debate Tactics

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I've been thinking about this a fair amount recently for several reasons, and I wanted to find out the opinions of others on PPR.

What debate tactics do you use? What debate tactics do you approve/disapprove of in others when they use them? Why or why not?

Do you know anything about formal logic, either in the mathematical sense or in the debate sense? (By 'in the debate sense' I mean knowing and understanding the definitions of things like ad-hominem and non-sequitur.) If so, has this knowledge been useful to you in debating things, either on WP or elsewhere? If not, has this lack of knowledge ever been or seemed like a handicap when arguing with others?

To what extent does emotion influence you in arguing? Do you use emotion rather than logic in making or evaluating an argument? Does it work for you? Does logic seem cold to you? Does emotion seem frivolous?

To what extent does the opinion of others influence you? If you see that a particular position is popular, does that make you want to agree with it?

To what extent does liking or disliking a poster influence your opinion of what they post?

Do you think that insults are a valid debate tactic? Do you consider the difference between direct and indirect insults to matter? Does seeing someone else get insulted in a thread irritate you? Does the presence of insults in a post make you think differently about the post or the poster?

Do you find the use of the quote feature of WP to be reasonable? Are there any ways of using the quote feature that you object to? Why?

I seek only the ultimate destruction of my opposition!

I always keep a cool head during debates, and I never lash out at anyone, hurl insults, use cheap tricks or resort to trolling, fallacies, flaming, de-railing or other disruptive tactics. And I *NEVER* resort to BS.

In other words, I am a veritable oasis of philosophical calm, interpersonal/cultural respect and logical serenity.

I always carefully evaluate the statements of those I engage in debate with, and I am more than willing to adjust my point of view in the face of superior counter-arguments.

I post on WrongPlanet with the sole purpose of ever-expanding enlightenment - not only that of others, but especially of myself - through the mutually respectful sharing of opinions and perspectives.

And finally, I place paramount emphasis on giving everyone equal access to arti... ah, what the hell...



You're all a bunch of socialists!

I make my opponents feel stupid, so that they have more trouble articulating what they want to say and come off as less confident.

I frequently use metaphors and analogies. When I think somebody else has worded what I want to say in a much better way I will quote and/or link them. I disaprove of insulting as a tactic.


I know nothing at all about the mathematical sense. I have decent verbal abilities and horrible mathematical abilities. So my understanding of logic is pretty much entirely in the debate sense.



The knowledge of debate logic has been useful here and elsewhere. The lack of knowledge of formal mathematical logic has not been a hinderance. I haven't seen anybody use it in a debate outside of PPR and when it does appear in PPR I just skip over those posts and join the debate in later posts after the mathematicians have hashed it out.



I use both. Emotion steers me towards embracing or rejecting a position (if it pings emotionally for me) and logic helps me define the components of the argument and refute or expand on them. Since logic is a tool rather than a position, it can be used pro or con any argument. Emotion helps me choose a pro or con stance. Logic lets me see the who/what/why/how behind the emotion.



Here is where the NT in me comes out. The opinion of others does influence me. But it depends on which others. I am always looking for the unspoken motivations behind somebody else's argument. This doesn't apply so much on an online debate board such as PPR but it sure as heck applies out in the world. A logical argument can be made for literally any position. I was formally taught this in middle school when students were assigned pro or con positions on various arguments and told to debate them in order to teach us this. As a 12 year old girl, I was assigned to argue why women shouldn't be allowed to vote. Cobbling together an argument against something I firmly believed in taught me for all time that logic and good arguments were mere tools and could be used for any position.



It doesn't because I view PPR (and online debate in general) as a game with no real world stakes. Out in the real world with real stakes, the reasons why I like or dislike somebody are very influential to me since they inform my guess as to what their unspoken motivations for holding a particular position are.


No. They are a pointless waste of time and not actual participation in the debate. They are not arguments.


No. Whether direct or indirect, they are not debate arguments. I consider them a tasteless and offensive debate strategy, designed to disarm the opponent by flustering them rather than actually debating them. I don';t like it when politicians do it either, even when it's a politician I had already decided to vote for.[/quote]


yes


It makes me think they are being lazy at best and cruel at worst.



I find it very reasonable. I use it routinely (as you can see) and don't object to any uses of it.

Last edited by Janissy on 29 Apr 2013, 12:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^ I think some people over-use the quote feature.

When I think of the word, "debate," I think of a formal, eurhetorian contest between opposing pairs of speakers, which is judge as much upon the oratorical skill of the contestants as it is on the substantive merits of their arguments.

What goes on here is rarely debate; is argument, but it's rarely debate.

For my own part, I tend to favour evidence based argument, supplemented with analogy. While I disapprove of insults and emotional posting, I am not immune from resort to them. In a debate, I have a single, limited period of time within which to make my case, and there is no opportunity to return to the substantive case. The free for all nature of internet posting means that I am not constrained, so I am freer to shoot from the hip. Not always a good thing.

I typically occupy the middle ground in most substantive arguments. There are only a few questions upon which my views are extreme, or even significantly polarized. I tend to reject almost any argument that fails to approach the center. But my view is that internet fora tend to polarize discussion. People tend not to look for the nuanced or compromised approach to a question, but rather to hold to an absolutist, "defend the castle" approach. While it is good for framing discussion, it is a supremely lousy tool for identifying practical and practicable ways forward.

I remember team based debating contests in school. I think is a mark of a good speaker, if you can argue a good case for something you don't actually agree with, which was often the case in these competitions.

That's really more of a goal than a tactic...

I was a member of the debate team in high school so I am inclined to want to answer this.

What debate tactics do you use?
I would look into the other side's viewpoint and think of all the arguments they'd expect from me. And then I would never say any of those things (or at least in the same words they know them as) to avoid a whole buzz-word situation.

What debate tactics do you approve/disapprove of in others when they use them? Why or why not?
Strawman arguments. Which were all too common, even if they didn't seem like such in a superficial sense.

Do you know anything about formal logic, either in the mathematical sense or in the debate sense?
A little bit. I read up about it. It helps. You don't need to read several books about it. Just google it and read an article or two and you'll be fine.

If so, has this knowledge been useful to you in debating things, either on WP or elsewhere? If not, has this lack of knowledge ever been or seemed like a handicap when arguing with others?
It's helped me a little bit but being a better debater hasn't significantly improved my life.

To what extent does emotion influence you in arguing? Do you use emotion rather than logic in making or evaluating an argument? Does it work for you? Does logic seem cold to you? Does emotion seem frivolous?
But all logic is based on emotion. Sure, logic decides HOW we get to what we want, but how do we decide what we want? Emotion.

To what extent does the opinion of others influence you? If you see that a particular position is popular, does that make you want to agree with it?
I don't agree with something just because it's popular, but if it is a well reputed opinion, it often is for a reason. Whether it's a sound reason, I don't know. I'm open minded, but that doesn't mean I will always change my view.

To what extent does liking or disliking a poster influence your opinion of what they post?

Do you think that insults are a valid debate tactic? Do you consider the difference between direct and indirect insults to matter? Does seeing someone else get insulted in a thread irritate you? Does the presence of insults in a post make you think differently about the post or the poster?

Do you find the use of the quote feature of WP to be reasonable? Are there any ways of using the quote feature that you object to? Why?

I hit hard, hit fast, and hit often. I try to keep my opponent mired in useless details while I move in for the kill. All while keeping a cool head. The ultimate goal is to make my opponent look like a raving lunatic while I maintain credibility. It's dirty, but effective.

My argumentation here on WP tends to be lower-quality than on other sites. Something about the atmosphere on PPR occasionally makes me snap and get more emotional and/or overtly contemptuous than I usually am IRL or on other debate forums, even other forums within WP, and even other forums devoted to politics and religion.

I'll address this section in a seperate post, otherwise it's going to overwhelm everything else.



A little bit of mathematical logic, a bit more of debate logic. I find the knowledge to be somewhat useful, though more often than not it's simply putting names to things that I'd already noticed or figured out on my own.



I'm a pretty cool debater, I tend to shrug of insults and don't really have any hot buttons to push. I take some pains to keep emotion out of my argument, and when I do use it, I do so purposefully for it's impact, especially given that I don't often display or employ it. I'm fairly hostile to emotion based arguments and appeals, and will go to some trouble to call someone out for using emotional manipulation in lieu of an actual argument, e.g. think of the children!



Quite the opposite, there are few things I enjoy more than slaughtering sacred cows and defending the indefensible.



If they're right, they're right, and I have actually gone out of my way in the past to call attention to points of agreement with posters I usually clash with. It makes me seem reasonable.



Generally, I see them as a sign of weakness, a sign that the insulter can't actually argue his point but still refuses to concede. I have much more of a problem with direct insults, especially the generic ones, than I do with indirect, as indirect includes implication, and many legitimate observations about someone's argument have insulting implications. There is a lot of grey area here as to what constitutes an insult and what doesn't, but in my mind the single most important factor is support; is the charge being made by an insulting observation accurate and supported by evidence? If yes, than I tend to think it's fair game, if not, than it's just a poor loser impotently lashing out.

I'll certainly downgrade my opinion of someone if they engage in such childish behavior, and I'll also give greater scrutiny to a post that needlessly insults or generalizes.



Meh, it's okay. Things can get a little ridiculous after a few rounds of fisking and counter-fisking, and I wish more people would learn to edit quotes down to the last response rather than building huge quote pyramids, but it's not too bad.

A lot of my posts aren't intended to be "debate". Sometimes I'm just expressing my opinion, not trying to convince anyone of anything. People here also don't always understand that I'm just being sarcastic and exaggerating because a certain attitude annoys me. I've noticed the difference between a satirical post and a "straw man" is largely in the eye of the beholder. If you already agree it's satire, if you don't it's an obnoxious mischaracterization. This is behind most of the partisan pissing matches that crop up from time to time on this forum.

When I do debate I prefer deductive logic for explaining the pragmatics. I like to try and deductively explain the ultimate social consequences of political or economic systems. I'm sometimes a little weak on coming up with appropriate examples and anecdotes to further explain my more abstract reasoning, probably mostly because I don't read political opinion blogs and such as much as others. In general though, I disapprove of a lot of anecdotal arguments because I find most of them fundamentally dishonest in the way they are often grossly cherry picked and spread like memes by ideologically motivated hacks.

I also find yammering on about "rights" and the epistemology of moral and legal frameworks to be a joke. If your opponent doesn't agree with your moral premises (which are by necessity subjective) this is an exercise in futility. There are no "natural" or "self-evident" rights. Politics and sociology isn't about "rights" and nothing is ever black-and-white. It's about frameworks that allow large groups of people to get along and prosper.


Yes, but it's not particularly useful for debate.


Of course it influences my views. A lot of aspies with a particular personality type seem to have a problem with the fact that personal values of others tend to come from emotion. However, appeals to emotion are but one type of baseless assertion. Appeals to parsimony or concreteness (often mistaken for logic) are often just as baseless.

At the same time I'm not interested in bludgeoning people I will never agree with over the head with appeals to emotion. I just wish other types of baseless appeals (appeals to simplicity, consistency, or black-and-white judgements) were also admitted to be just that. The real world is messy and people are going to be influenced by more things than the need to follow consistent rules.


I think I'm much more influenced by my own personal feelings than by other people. I feel much more secure and happy with the idea of a world that is just and fair, not based mainly on capricious luck and circumstances. This is why I will never be a conservative or libertarian, though I can empathize with people who are wary of government overstep and find myself in agreement once in a while. I don't think my political opinions have anything to do with me picking an ideology that seems cool or hip. At least not to any extent I am aware. I've never been a "herd" follower and it annoys me to be accused of such.

I'll admit that I am influenced by confirmation bias at times, just like everyone else. I do generally feel better reading the opinions of people I already tend to agree with. I have to find the balance between being open to reading opinions slightly contrary to my own but not reading obnoxious stuff that's just going to intensely irritate or upset me.


It usually seems to happen the other way around. Peoples opinions make me more prone to dislike them, unfortunately. That's why I tend to avoid talking politics IRL as I'm surrounded with people who probably disagree with me. The internet is my release valve to some degree, but unfortunately it can be addicting.


It's not a debate tactic, period. Usually if there are insults it's either because a.) someone is annoyed or offended b.) someone enjoys pushing buttons. That's really all there is to it.


It can be tiresome. I often have to edit a post multiple times before the quotes are nested properly. An emacs-like color-coding feature for internet bulletin board message editors would be nice. I couldn't imagine writing HTML without syntax/markup color-coding and error detection in the text editor.

Same for me.