The Mud Wrestling Match
It’s messy. It’s inelegant. It’s full contact and the more you pin the other person down, personally, individually, the better. It can be done by professionals who know the best moves and almost make a match artful, but even the best don’t walk away clean. For most people, it’s not even a little graceful – it’s mustering whatever strength and combat instinct one happens to lose the least.
A mud wrestling debate is barely better than a quarrel. It’s two sides going at each other’s credibility on a personal level. It’s a barrage of ad hominem, invective, and bad-faith. There is little or no constructive material – nothing is built up by a debate like this. The audience may be entertained by the verbal violence, but they walk away having learned little of use. Avoid this type of debate.
The Snowball Fight
A fresh sheet of snow blankets the land, and as the children come out to play, a day of confusing fun is had. Something constructive is built up out of the same stuff that is thrown against the other side. There are decoys and strategems, there are lobs and low-balls, but out of a thousand throws so few make contact. If any hit the constructed forts, it is accidental – the participants are here for the excitement of hitting the people, not their snow engineering.
A snowball debate is one of the most common kinds of debate. Two sides that know they need to build something and usually do so at least crudely, but end up spending most of their energy making noise that lands nowhere. Contact between constructive material is minimal. So much is said that participants seem to think is relevant, but which doesn’t even dent the substance of the other side’s position. A debate like this is practically defined by confusion: What’s the point of this? How do we know who won? Wait, did someone just flip sides? Any time spent surveying the scene to get a better sense of things puts your head in the line of fire, as others take aim on you poking over the packed snow barricades.
The Sandcastle Contest
Ah. That’s better. Something, professional and much less confusing; a contest where the best can showcase their work against at least semi-rigorous standards. You build your castle over there, I’ll build my castle over here, and judges can decide for themselves which is better. Of course, exactly how do you compare a recreation château-de-la-beach against a life-sized sand-mermaid is a bit of mystery.
A sandcastle debate is the sub-optimal place a lot of well-meaning people end up. In an effort to avoid mud wrestling and snowball tossing, the debaters avoid directly clashing at all. Their constructive material might be world-class or rudimentary, but they don’t do apples-to-apples comparison, they don’t communicate their ideas commensurably. They leave all that evaluative work up to the audience, and for that, they impoverish them.
The Robot Battle
Forged in a workshop, custom built to the format, and ideally, the particular adversary. Designs vary in complexity, and often the simplest solution triumphs. The object of the fight is to deconstruct the other side without being deconstructed yourself. The battle bots best each other, never targeting their human operators. Better still, the insights, the logic, the structure of the better robots is transparent to everyone watching - and it can be copied, and improved upon. Successful innovations are a public good.
The best debates are like robot battles. Arguments are open-source tools by their nature – the moment you make them, they become usable by anyone else, and the better they are, the more accessible they become. The arguments are laser-focused on the topic at hand. They directly, substantively, and deeply interact with the other side. A debater who doesn’t understand the workings of the other side is bound to lose. The principle of charity becomes a principle of survival: Truly know your enemy, and only then can you consistently win. In a good debate, there’s little point in targeting the person you are against. You are not your robot. Victory comes from striking at their ideas. Victory comes from being right.