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I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith. I have a soft spot for this. My grandfather, b

I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith. I have a soft spot for this. My grandfather, before he fled Belarus, was trained at a yeshiva and on his way to becoming a rabbi. His explanation of the training was ... Jedi-like, to my young mind. Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind. Any shortcuts to rhetorical passion might be allowed, but learning to parry them and see through them was what was truly valued... well and beyond the ability to convince others (and certainly beyond obedience or conformity). Not surprising that my family in the US became lawyers. This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. That being said, failing to take the unlikeable part of a debate is read as cheating - if not to the judges, who may share your bias, then to the audience who you've alienated and failed to convince. And so it can and should fail in the long run, as an impurity in the art.

shagie 3y ago
> This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. This is a current topic of debate in debate... https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205 https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205 > Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate. > This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.
worrycue 3y ago
> Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind. I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.
- noteboom 3y ago
  Welcome to Judaism.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- noduerme 3y ago
  No - particularly because these debates occurred at many tables simultaneously, like games of chess. Of course the point of rhetoric is to win an audience, but this type of training was much more than that. Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side. Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.
  - bandyaboot 3y ago
    > Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. How does one know when they completely understand the best possible case against their own belief? Or know for sure that they’ve arrived at the best possible case against it? Seems like an unattainable bar.
steve76 3y ago
[dead]
atoav 3y ago
Socrates was already complaining about the sophists and their ability to argue for and against everything (destroying every truth on the way). Don't get me wrong, I love arguing and rhetorics, but there are people who abandoned all sense of truth and rationality in debate. Rhetorics are a weapon, and like every weapon it should be wielded by people who know that with great power comes great responsibility. Sure, one can argue about objective truth and whether it actually exists, but many who wield rhetorics don't give a damn about any truth, be it objective or subjective — they care about winning. And they don't care about the price everybody has to pay for that win. Despite that I still think putting yourself in a different position to defend is a good lesson, but the goal of rhetorical training shouldn't be to form ruthless mercenaries, but thinkers who can wield the word and still admit they are wrong in an actual, real world debate, when they are shown to be so. If you are one of those people (like me) who likes debate for debates sake, you have to be especially careful. Like people who like to use guns we have to be especially aware when we use it and for what reason. Most people who use their rhetoric have never been given the moral compass to wield it.
- P_I_Staker 3y ago
  I agree, we should reserect Socrates from the grave from wince he came, and may him Emporiumor of the universe. For good.
- caned 3y ago
  Sadly, it seems the kind of caution you advocate is conspicuously absent from cable "news" punditry. Even worse, there are millions of viewers who feel that they are being informed by this kind of caustic debate.
  - atoav 3y ago
    Many people value good rhetorics above the truth. And I say that as someone who has a high appreciation of good rhetorics.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
vxNsr 3y ago
Putting aside the whole question of debate this is a such a fascinating misunderstanding of what Yeshiva is. It’s so close and yet somehow entirely wrong. I don’t know if I could explain what happens in Yeshiva in a way that would any sense to this crowd, but I can affirm it is mind bending, and I have never felt more exhausted than when I was in Yeshiva. No amount of work, physical or mental since then has come close.
kalkin 3y ago
> I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith. I'm legitimately not sure whether by "this is an attempt" you're referring to critiques in debate or the article. In practice, for better or worse very few of the people who use critiques in debate are true believers. Even if they're leftists taking a generally leftist approach, a Marxist is likely to take up an Afro-pessimist position or vice versa for tactical reasons. Exactly the sort of "have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor" you commend is involved - only rather than just two sides, the sides include "X would have good consequences", "X would have bad consequences", "you're doing good/harm by talking about X", "X is on/off topic for this year's resolution", etc. As for the article - it may be attempting to defend the virtue of being able to effectively defend opposing points of view, but it's doing so in a confused way at best. Just to give a couple examples: > Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles It is indeed often more effective in debate to respond to a critique by denying or reversing the (often tenuous) link to what you actually proposed than to try to refute an ideology wholesale, but that burden is entirely consistent with the mentality that learning to "defend the opposite side" is valuable. And even so the premise here is wrong - at least when I was doing this <redacted> years ago, it was by no means taboo to simply counter-critique at the ideological level instead. > This drives out students who don’t want to learn about critical theory It's true that competing at the national level in high school or college debate demands quite a lot in terms of research and preparation. It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument. > High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds This is silly hyperbole that suggests (a) Slow Boring could use better editing and (b) the author would have benefited from actually trying to engage with substance of some critiques, such that they might be able to distinguish Karl Marx or the afropessimists from Nick Land or the e/accs...
- noduerme 3y ago
  >> I'm legitimately not sure whether I was referring to the article. >> It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument. Well, both students are unwilling to engage with the material they need to deal with, as unpleasant as it is. I personally don't think one is worse than the other on its face. But if the ground rules of the debate have shifted in a way that forces you to frame everything in a way that implicates the speaker as agreeing with the position they're arguing unless they use a particular category of argument to undermine that position while they're arguing it, then it's not a matter of learning to refute that category of argument but rather being forced to embrace it. Rejecting that artificial requirement to salt your own speech seems rather honorable in the "purest" sense of debate; whereas refusing to play by the rules and do the work of arguing something you don't agree with shows an unwillingness to engage with the subject matter - which is not the topic of debate, but the ability to debate.
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Reminds me of a friend who was invited to appear on Bill O'Reilly's Fox show as a subject matter expert, and told how O'Reilly asked him which side of the "debate" he wanted to take. Kinda funny given how many O'Reilly fans thought he believed in what he was saying!

shagie 3y ago

> This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. This is a current topic of debate in debate... https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205 https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205 > Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate. > This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.

worrycue 3y ago

> Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind. I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.

noteboom 3y ago
Welcome to Judaism.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
noduerme 3y ago
No - particularly because these debates occurred at many tables simultaneously, like games of chess. Of course the point of rhetoric is to win an audience, but this type of training was much more than that. Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side. Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.
- bandyaboot 3y ago
  > Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. How does one know when they completely understand the best possible case against their own belief? Or know for sure that they’ve arrived at the best possible case against it? Seems like an unattainable bar.

steve76 3y ago

[dead]

atoav 3y ago

Socrates was already complaining about the sophists and their ability to argue for and against everything (destroying every truth on the way). Don't get me wrong, I love arguing and rhetorics, but there are people who abandoned all sense of truth and rationality in debate. Rhetorics are a weapon, and like every weapon it should be wielded by people who know that with great power comes great responsibility. Sure, one can argue about objective truth and whether it actually exists, but many who wield rhetorics don't give a damn about any truth, be it objective or subjective — they care about winning. And they don't care about the price everybody has to pay for that win. Despite that I still think putting yourself in a different position to defend is a good lesson, but the goal of rhetorical training shouldn't be to form ruthless mercenaries, but thinkers who can wield the word and still admit they are wrong in an actual, real world debate, when they are shown to be so. If you are one of those people (like me) who likes debate for debates sake, you have to be especially careful. Like people who like to use guns we have to be especially aware when we use it and for what reason. Most people who use their rhetoric have never been given the moral compass to wield it.

P_I_Staker 3y ago
I agree, we should reserect Socrates from the grave from wince he came, and may him Emporiumor of the universe. For good.
caned 3y ago
Sadly, it seems the kind of caution you advocate is conspicuously absent from cable "news" punditry. Even worse, there are millions of viewers who feel that they are being informed by this kind of caustic debate.
- atoav 3y ago
  Many people value good rhetorics above the truth. And I say that as someone who has a high appreciation of good rhetorics.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

vxNsr 3y ago

Putting aside the whole question of debate this is a such a fascinating misunderstanding of what Yeshiva is. It’s so close and yet somehow entirely wrong. I don’t know if I could explain what happens in Yeshiva in a way that would any sense to this crowd, but I can affirm it is mind bending, and I have never felt more exhausted than when I was in Yeshiva. No amount of work, physical or mental since then has come close.

kalkin 3y ago

> I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith. I'm legitimately not sure whether by "this is an attempt" you're referring to critiques in debate or the article. In practice, for better or worse very few of the people who use critiques in debate are true believers. Even if they're leftists taking a generally leftist approach, a Marxist is likely to take up an Afro-pessimist position or vice versa for tactical reasons. Exactly the sort of "have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor" you commend is involved - only rather than just two sides, the sides include "X would have good consequences", "X would have bad consequences", "you're doing good/harm by talking about X", "X is on/off topic for this year's resolution", etc. As for the article - it may be attempting to defend the virtue of being able to effectively defend opposing points of view, but it's doing so in a confused way at best. Just to give a couple examples: > Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles It is indeed often more effective in debate to respond to a critique by denying or reversing the (often tenuous) link to what you actually proposed than to try to refute an ideology wholesale, but that burden is entirely consistent with the mentality that learning to "defend the opposite side" is valuable. And even so the premise here is wrong - at least when I was doing this <redacted> years ago, it was by no means taboo to simply counter-critique at the ideological level instead. > This drives out students who don’t want to learn about critical theory It's true that competing at the national level in high school or college debate demands quite a lot in terms of research and preparation. It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument. > High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds This is silly hyperbole that suggests (a) Slow Boring could use better editing and (b) the author would have benefited from actually trying to engage with substance of some critiques, such that they might be able to distinguish Karl Marx or the afropessimists from Nick Land or the e/accs...

noduerme 3y ago
>> I'm legitimately not sure whether I was referring to the article. >> It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument. Well, both students are unwilling to engage with the material they need to deal with, as unpleasant as it is. I personally don't think one is worse than the other on its face. But if the ground rules of the debate have shifted in a way that forces you to frame everything in a way that implicates the speaker as agreeing with the position they're arguing unless they use a particular category of argument to undermine that position while they're arguing it, then it's not a matter of learning to refute that category of argument but rather being forced to embrace it. Rejecting that artificial requirement to salt your own speech seems rather honorable in the "purest" sense of debate; whereas refusing to play by the rules and do the work of arguing something you don't agree with shows an unwillingness to engage with the subject matter - which is not the topic of debate, but the ability to debate.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

Reminds me of a friend who was invited to appear on Bill O'Reilly's Fox show as a subject matter expert, and told how O'Reilly asked him which side of the "debate" he wanted to take. Kinda funny given how many O'Reilly fans thought he believed in what he was saying!