[1223] Master Debaters

Part of me thinks each time I write I’m looking to round out a “grand theory of communication.” I don’t know what that means. I do know that I continue to notice patterns and experience frustrations in talking with people that steer me in a direction that there’s a better way to account for how we exchange information.

I have a really good friend who, I think it’s still “innocent,” will do this:

I’ll ask her, “If you had 10 people, 5 of them white, 5 of them black, would you be able to separate them into 2 groups based on color?”

Her, “I don’t know if they’re actually black or white! I would just feel so uncomfortable and wrong!”

Sure, but, that’s not really the point. It obscures the simple for the sake of the moral posturing. She knows, I know, we’re all mutts. She knows, I know, I’m not fishing for some racist conclusion. She knows, I know, colors are their own mystery and exist all along the color spectrum. She invites an infinite list of needless-to-qualify sentiments that obscures or obstructs what, at least everyone in our high school, could figure out in self-segregating at lunch. We also both know that she, and I, and nearly anyone on the planet, could do it easily.

This is also a friend who, at least initially struggles to notice characteristics that might be shared by different ethnic groups in general. This could be a form of prosopagnosia. I find I struggle to distinguish cars, maybe similarly defining mechanisms are implicated. Again, she knows, I know, nothing is perfect as there is no archetype “Greek” or “Italian” or “Somalian.” But it would be weird to pretend like traits aren’t shared and passed down, and that some people look like the groups they, in fact, belong to. When I go to Serbian fest, I see my uncles everywhere. When I go to Italian fest, I see my aunts and grandma everywhere.

I don’t know if there’s a discussion that even brushes against racial or ethnic differences that isn’t immediately derailed, so you can reasonably criticize me leading with these examples. They do give you a most visceral window into the nature of the immediacy of the general conversational derailment.

The classic space where this occurs is in religion “debates.” Legions line up to argue facts, science, history, genetics, evolution, psychology, chemistry, philosophy…and they don’t understand they’re up against “faith.” Hours of exchange improperly coded as “discussion” and “debate” and “reason.” No, you’ve been banging your head against their faith. Any topic for any reason can be subsumed by your faith in it.

I think we’re wired to protect “just whatever it is I believe right now.” I don’t recall what the more scientific or accurate way of saying this is. It’s not enough to call it “bias” of our own opinion. It’s deeper than that. There’s a survival mode invoked in the emotional experience of being challenged, contradicted, or “threatened.” We dress up that reactivity in myriad ways, but at bottom it’s a defensive reaction, not an owned and methodically accounted for and relayed relationship. We feel insecure, lash out or shut down.

I listened to comedian Dave Smith word-salad ramble against Coleman Hughes recently. The unironic “I know you are but what am I” sentiments flew out of Dave. The “whataboutisms” the “Sure, but” as though the point didn’t just land or wasn’t true enough to negate and move on from the lazy and incomplete thing Dave just said. It was a masterclass in showcasing how someone who is cursed with an impressive selective memory has no capacity to organize the soup in his brain.

But, there’s an extremely small group of people who are going to listen to the 3.5 hours of that exchange, recognize what’s happening, or translate what’s happening in a way that anyone else might understand it too. What purpose did it serve? Other “intellectuals” got to dip into the pool of “debate” and take their mind off whatever’s plaguing them that day. It’s not “helping” the “public conversation.” It’s another errant play by the attention economy to capture yours.

I do think there’s utility in serious thinkers and academics getting into these kinds of exchanges with idiots, frauds, comedians, propoghandists, and apologists. I don’t think there’s a broader theory of mind and strategy that most are following when they do. A Christopher Hitchens debated differently than a Sam Harris or a Coleman Hughes or a Professor Dave. Notably, most aren’t, even when I think they should, going to just call the dangerous frauds, “fucking dangerous fraud” as explicitly as they could.

Regardless of the topic or debaters, I apply my heuristics. Who’s getting defensive? Who’s asking explicit and should-be-easy to answer questions? Who’s name-calling, not because it’s correct and appropriate, but so they can jump away from what’s attempting to be focused?

This tension between focus and abstract is key.

This debate I just watched between Professor Dave, Dr. Dan Wilson vs Steve Kirsch and Pierre Kory echoed even more viscerally that foundational discrepancy between an errant exchange for attention and good faith discussion.

I think it will need to be part of our cultural immune system, word choice deliberate, to be able to recognize these kinds of tactics and exchanges quicker. We need to move past the idea that someone who is anti-vaxx is “merely skeptical.” We need to stop pretending that an ideologue, of any stripe, is doing “good faith” in their thought exercises. It’s a complete inversion of the words. It’s good for them. It’s self-reinforcing for their foundational faithful position. All you can accomplish is peeling layers of respectability and coherence off of your argument in the minds of onlookers by engaging naively with their position. You need to be able to disentangle, highlight, and embarrass what they’re doing while also educating on whatever the topic might be.

It’s a feat, to be sure. To look and sound reasonable under what is a literally insatiable desire and comfort for destruction, grift, and ego/brand protection is nearly impossible without training incidental personality quirks that not many of us share. Even with those people in our lives that we’d wish the best for our capacity to disagree and misinterpret leads to catastrophic outcomes so regularly, many people just shut down and don’t make waves as an act of self-preservation. Who has the time, inclination, motivation, etc. to combat and deconstruct what might be understood as the death of coherent coexistence?

Yet, I think we all will need to find our own engine of “actual debater” in order to last long term. Right now, we’re letting people die of measles because we’re acting like segregating people by color is hard or unreasonable. That is, we’re letting our fears and unwillingness to designate information as more or less reliable based on evidence instead of assumptions kill our capacity to sustain ourselves, let alone get better. Yes, if you’re having a assumptive discussion about who gets to be a slave, somehow always leaving aside the era or country, you are correct. Horrors would then abound and you’d be right to be deeply incensed and suspicious of the person presenting the exercise.

The nature of lying is what’s being protected. The story of how a lie manifests and contorts stays hidden. The reasons you would resist getting past your own insistence to lie stays a secret. The nature of your always-right, always concerned with your feelings god gets to exercise its power indefinitely. You don’t change. You don’t learn. You don’t grow. You don’t genuinely see the evidence or define that which can cohere between us all. That sounds like the death of us all.

As a counselor, I watch my words get twisted instinctively all the time. I can say, “The door is brown,” and be interpreted as, “That door has never been brown, will never be brown, and if you try to paint it brown, you’re an asshole.” That’s what feelings do. That distortion doesn’t just ignore or destroy our ability to see a brown door, it can take something innocuous and convert it into a feeling of being personally attacked. It instantly builds entire worlds around the subject matter from which “natural conclusions” follow almost as quickly, about the person, the door, the color brown, or why we’d be so bold and disingenuous to invoke the door at all!

Return to your questions and make them excruciatingly specific. It’s excruciating for the person who doesn’t understand they’re lying. It’s important if you’re going to maintain respect and rapport for the people in your life who are otherwise inclined to behave like bad actors, but without the intentionality. Those who are in on the grift will get angry. Those who are genuinely trying to think things through will let your questions linger and hopefully discover how to speak to them either more removed from their initial feelings or after better incorporating what that feeling was attempting to tell them.

I get 2% heated when my friend does the conversation obscuring, abstracting out thing. I have feelings just like anyone else that want to catastrophize and race through my pages of thoughts and experiences of things it rhymes with. I know that’s a thing. I don’t make it personal. I don’t treat her differently. I move on from nights where it’s going to get intractable and needlessly frustrating. She returns to the subject matter later, more specific, sometimes with questions, or with a demonstrated ability to digest more than what was happening at the time. It’s something I’m incredibly thankful for as usually I just have to pretend there’s not some growing well of irreconcilable resentment that tends to erase me from people’s lives.

We’re now in the future where that erasure is rewarded from AI to the attention algorithms. Whether you’re calling out errors in my thinking or vice versa, that whole exercise is gone if you’re not seeking it out. I’m prescribing a debate and communication process 10-steps long after we bother to agree on the nature of the problem or purpose and utility of engaging said process altogether. That’s an accidentally convoluted way of saying I don’t think we’re gonna pull that off. I also don’t know what our institutions would have to look like to mitigate the fallout of it never getting better. As it stands, they’ve proven to be ineffective against popular gish gallop.

Individually, you can recognize in yourself what I’m talking about. I know when I’m getting “elevated.” I know when I’m feeling “defensive.” I know when I need to learn more about a topic to discuss or debate it more effectively. I know when I’m inclined to make a personal attack instead of contend with what’s being said. I know there are real and persistent patterns across subjects that speak to the reliability of the person relaying the information. If your narrative is unconcerned, or incapable of defining, evidence, you lose by default. If you’re unable to build on relevant details, your trapped like a Sims character in a pool without a ladder. You have to figure out you’re playing the game and there’s only one way the part of you that’s struggling to find agency doesn’t drown.