Comment on !debatebro@ponder.cat - Debate me bro
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 6 days agoYeah so I’m a huge fan of the Intelligence Squared series. I think they do debate, excellently.
I highly recommend reviewing this old gem: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEI8CtuSKs, which I think is highly relevant today, which addresses the premise “Has Obama overstepped his congressional mandate?”
The way that this debate program works, is that an audience is polled, prior to observing the debate, with regards to the impression or conclusion of the thesis. So some audience members say “I agree, Obama has overstepped.” some say “I disagree, Obama has not overstepped.”. These data are recorded on a per audience member basis.
Once these data are recorded, the debate proceeds. Now I’m not so hung up on the Oxford debate structure (two teams, prime and secondary, minute based timed sections, etc).
Once the debate is concluded, the audience is polled again. The “winners” of the debate are not the team which has the highest raw score at the end of the debate, but whichever team has changed more minds.
Now I’m not interested in the structure of the debate as being important here, so much as, the registering of a prior opinion, and then the registering of a posterior opinion, as a part of the debate structure.
I’m imagining this as either a secondary web page where a debate can be “registered” and then a bot proceeds to become involved in that thread. Users can maybe use the spoiler tag to register their initial opinions (or maybe they need to go off site; clumsy, but simpler). I dont quite know how it would all connect together, but the way I’m imagining it is that its a separate server with, where a question gets “registered”, which spawns a bot (which manages and monitors that specific thread and maintains polls from within the thread).
“influence” someone else’s communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community
I completely agree. I think that some elements of Lemmy are extremely destructive and toxic because of this. I think communities should be self governing, and that these little fiefdoms are deeply problematic. However, if I was going to develop a fediverse bot app for managing and scoring debates, I would most definitely need mod access to the community.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 days ago
Hm.
Here are my thoughts:
I don’t really care about picking the better debater. That actually seems kind of antithetical: In a perfect world, the truth should win, and it doesn’t really matter if someone’s more “skillful” or forceful or just willing to type and berate more. Actually one of the things that bothers me about the propaganda on Lemmy is that it is often (not always) pretty skillful at changing minds, independent of the validity of the content.
I do like the idea of formalizing it a little bit. Having a limited number of “rounds” is an interesting idea. Right now, one of the issues I see that I’m trying to deal with with this thing is the strategy of kind of blathering endlessly or constantly changing the subject, not really being responsive but talking without end. The current iteration of the bot will call you out on it when that happens, but it might be kind of better if it’s your chance and once it’s done it is done. Kind of like court: If the opponent raises a point, and you just ignore it, than by default they “win” that point and you don’t even have a chance to go back and correct it.
I don’t even necessarily like the idea of picking a “winner.” To me, that’s up to each reader, and often the truth is kind of in the middle or they are both valid arguments. It’s more of kind of a pass/fail on both sides: Are you being reasonable? There are a lot of strategies that look really reasonable, or at worst just like aggressively asserting your side, but if you’re good at using them you can literally make almost anything sound plausible. So, if neither side is doing that, then it’s fine! They just had a conversation, responded reasonably to each other’s points, everything moved forward. I am more on the side of “what truth did we figure out” as opposed to needing to assign a winner and a loser mechanically to each debate.
Yeah, modern day political TV debate is nonsense. Actually, even this format of debate in the video you sent, I don’t completely like. The woman is clearly full of shit. They’re setting up this format structure, this respect, this kind of “objective” format, and then they are welcoming someone to take an honored position within it that doesn’t deserve the respect. I didn’t watch much beyond the beginning, but I can almost guarantee that she is lying and rationalizing, and her underlying position is “red man good blue man bad.” I don’t really know how you can expose that in a taking turns long form “debate” format, that’s just my reaction seeing her. I feel like having something like Jon Stewart interviewing her and challenging her, still being fair and letting her talk but not letting her get away with bullshit, would be better than implicitly pretending that she is upholding the social contract when she is not.
Maybe I am wrong, that’s just my snap judgement seeing the first little bit. Actually, setting up a framework where being unfriendly to that kind of dishonesty is allowed and sanctioned, but being dishonest or shifty in your debating is “not allowed” in the same way that overt incivility is “not allowed” currently on Lemmy, is part of my goal here.
Those are my thoughts about it, in no real coherent order, it just took me a little time to watch a piece of the video and get back to you.