> Certainly not well enough to debate someone on the topic. This part in particular is tricky, because debate is a specialized skill of its own, and most peopl

> Certainly not well enough to debate someone on the topic. This part in particular is tricky, because debate is a specialized skill of its own, and most people who you might see publicly debate others on a given topic aren't (necessarily) experts in the topic, they're experts in debating it. Story time: one example of how that forms is being a person with strongly held minority beliefs. I have had good friends who were the lone very conservative person among a university left-leaning crowd, or on the other side an avowed Maoist communist among again, just normal vaguely left-of-centre folks. Both of those people got into an argument every single day defending their basic outlooks on life; sometimes 10 arguments in a day. They built up a repertoire of points and phrases, heard the same objections and accusations over and over, and developed strategies over time to handle each of these. In reality they each became experts at debating novices more than true debate experts, but you can see how their type of knowledge, and how it lived in their brains was totally different from reading a lot of books about the topics they knew about, and different from just developing expertise in those topics. One thing that struck me in conversations with these people over time is that they sometimes came to not even really believe a fallback phrase they had developed and would use often, because they came to learn enough nuance to know how it was a flawed take, but they knew it would stop a drive-by-arguer in their tracks. It could make the driver-by realize they didn't know all the details and second-guess themselves, even when the actual details sometimes weren't so bad for them. But at that point, they've lost the debate, and the expert moves on.