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Daniel Greco's avatar

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.

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Jonathan Ray's avatar

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.

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