Debate Tactics Aren't Really A Thing
Most of debating well is having a well-thought-out view and being concise
I once came across a person who was not very informed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but was viscerally pro-Israel. Seeking to win debates about it, he decided to pick up a book on debate tactics. The internet is full of articles providing general advice on how to never lose a debate. I’m extremely suspicious of these guides—other than by killing oneself, one can’t be guaranteed to never lose a debate.
If you’re trying to win a debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the obvious thing to do, rather than reading about special tips for winning debates, is to read about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so that you have a decently good sense of the history. Make sure that, like every pundit who discusses the conflict, you have partisan interpretations of the goings-on on half a dozen dates memorized. If you have no idea what you’re talking about, it’s very hard to win a debate.
There’s a widespread view among many that an important part of winning debates is debate tactics. Those who dislike Ben Shapiro and Destiny often claim that the way they appear to win debates is by employing special tactics.
But when one actually watches these people, they mostly observe a relative absence of special tactics. There isn’t extra extraneous bluster—there’s just the making of arguments and responding to objections. Such people don’t win debates because they have some special ability to employ tactics; instead, they mostly win because they are decent at thinking and usually informed of the relevant facts.
Debating is a lot like writing. Certainly one can write better or worse. How people assess writers is not solely a function of how reasonable the things they say are. But there aren’t special writing “tactics,” that involve deliberate trickery. Generally the best writers are clear, clever, and write about popular topics.
If you want to get better at debating, don’t focus primarily on clever rhetoric or tactics. Just make sure your view is well-thought out. Read the empirical evidence that might bear on it. Think through the sorts of objections that people provide in response to your position and make sure that you have responses to them.
Of course, debate isn’t just a function of this. Even if your view is quite reasonable, you might be bad at explaining it or bad at responding to objections on the fly. But so long as you can respond to objections well on the fly clearly and concisely, you should be mostly fine. You don’t need rhetoric.
Probably the most devastating debater—undefeated throughout his many public debates—is Noam Chomsky. Just watch the way he crushes his many debate opponents—Silber, Bolkenstein, Perle, and numerous others. Chomsky doesn’t use tactics, nor anything remotely in the vicinity of tactics. He just lays out the facts as he sees them, relatively dispassionately, with occasional sarcastic remarks when describing justifications he sees as particularly facile.
What makes Chomsky impressive is that he has a response to every objection, often with ten potential sources who he can quote verbatim. While most people might write down five responses to an objection in a book, Chomsky manages to remember all the responses, and can quote them rapidly.
There are a few people who seem obsessed with debate tactics, but such people just tend not to be the most effective debaters. If one debater knows what they’re talking about and the other debater just has a lot of bluster, the person who knows what they’re talking about will almost always win.
For example, there’s a fellow called Vaush who is quite fond of rhetoric. But when he debates people who know what they’re talking about, it generally goes quite badly—perhaps most saliently in this hilarious debate with philosopher Tomas Bogardus, well-captured by the title “Vaush Debates An Expert w/ No Prep, Makes Crazy Arguments.” Among other things, Vaush suggested that Mexico doesn’t have water because over there it’s called “aqua.” Not only is this confused philosophically (this confuses the word “water” with the physical thing that fills lakes and rivers) it even gets the Spanish wrong—the real word is agua.
Bogardus wasn’t engaged in any special rhetoric and tactics. He was incredibly laid back during the debate. But he easily won the debate just by being a reasonable guy with a well-thought-out view.
This hubris perhaps is nowhere more pronounced than among high school debaters. When a right-wing friend of mine who’d done high school debate and been critical of left-wing debate insanity joined a discord server, many debaters joined the fray to argue with him. Mostly, this was on topics that they had spent fewer than one minute thinking about previously, like the morality of anti-discrimination laws.
Without exception, they got crushed. They started with the absolute conviction that they were correct, and assumed that anyone who disagreed must be obviously wrong. Because they and their friends spent lots of time mocking right-wing views, they assumed that such views must be so obviously wrong that anyone with even a modicum of sense could refute them on the fly. Unsurprisingly, this consistently went rather badly.
While high school debate does help people research better and learn to argue, it’s not a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about. High school debaters don’t have special argument powers that normal people do not. There are no special argument powers; there is just knowing what you’re talking about and being able to basically respond to objections.
If you want to be a master debater on some subject, don’t read about debate tactics. Learn about the subject. So long as you’re an expert on some topic, you’ll probably be able to win debates about it.
I mostly agree, but want to pick a nit.
I did college debate, pretty successfully. I think one of the best "tactics" is identifying an area where your side of the argument is in fact weak, and then obfuscating. E.g., making arguments that are wrong, but where it takes a good deal of sophistication--sophistication your audience may well not have--to see why they're wrong. The point isn't necessarily to convince the audience that you're right, it's just to convince the audience that this is a tricky enough set of issues that, on this point at least, they can't form a firm opinion. Then the debate can be settled on the points where your side is stronger.
I believe I saw this tactic employed in a published paper in a very good philosophy journal recently. My interpretation of what went on is that the authors identified a devastating objection to their position, clearly raised it, and then offered a response that, while in fact utterly inadequate, was not obviously so. This made it possible for referees--at least, referees who I can only imagine weren't particularly comfortable with thinking probabilistically--to think of the objection as prima facie powerful but not obviously fatal, the kind of objection that you expect to see in interesting and ambitious philosophy papers, as opposed to the decisive refutation it in fact was. (I don't claim the authors were doing this cynically. I suspect they wanted their position to be right, so they were happy enough to leave things be once they found a response to the objection, without really probing the response.)
This is not a general purpose, subject-matter independent tactic. If you're going to use it cynically, you still need to have a lot of substantive knowledge of the subject matter, to know where your side is in fact weak, and to know how to raise objections whose faults are hard for an unsophisticated audience to see. But it is still a "trick" in the familiar old Sophistic sense that it's a strategy whereby the weaker argument can be made to appear the stronger.
If you read Bryan Caplan’s work on social desirability bias you realize there is a huge chasm between what is actually good and what merely sounds good at first blush. The latter has an unfair advantage in brief debates such as anything appearing on television. People are lazy and it is easier to judge policies by their hoped for results than by the second order consequences of the incentives and constraints that the policies create.