Partisan Irrationality Knows No Bounds

Your side doesn't always win debates

Unrelated to the everything in this article, I just had a conversation with a guy named Liron Shapira about God, fine-tuning, morality, and more on YouTube. It was lots of fun—check it out! The video is linked below, and is also in a substack episode Liron made. Let me be clear: the things I’m talking about in this article are not at all related to the video below.

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Reading YouTube comments beneath debates drives me completely insane.

Of course, we all know that how people interpret events is majorly shaped by their preexisting views. If you’re a Democrat, you’re disproportionately likely to think that Democrats win political debates. Because you agree with them, you’ll find their points more persuasive than you would otherwise. Likewise, if you’re a Republican, you’ll be more moved by the points made by Republicans. And if you’re Beelzebub, lord of demons, when you read the book of wisdom discuss the evildoers saying “as for the upright man who is poor, let us oppress him; let us not spare the widow, nor respect old age, white-haired with many years,” you might think “huh, these guys have a good point.”

It’s therefore not surprising that some bias slips in. There are even some debates where it’s quite reasonable for both sides to regard their side as having been victorious, because both sides managed to comprehensively present the case for their side. In cases like that, the person you regard as the winner will simply be whoever is on the side that you think is more persuasive.

But still, there are some cases where you’d expect people to be capable of admitting their side lost. And in these cases, they just don’t! Even when their side gets annihilated on every point substantively, they seem utterly incapable of acknowledging that fact.

For instance, I was recently watching a debate between an atheist YouTuber named Tom Jump (TJump) and a philosopher named James Anderson. The debate was about whether there’s a good argument for God from laws of logic and more broadly true propositions. Now, I actually agree with TJump that there is no good argument for God here! But despite this, I think TJump got severely wrecked on every single point. Throughout the debate, he had no idea what was going on, and jumped incoherently from point to point, constantly contradicting himself. As Anderson said in a followup article:

The reason we didn’t get very far, I suggest, is because Tom seemed unable to articulate a consistent position on (1) whether propositions exist and (2) whether propositions are concrete or abstract in nature. Living up to his last name, Tom proved impossible to pin down on which of the following he wanted to endorse:

1. Propositions don’t exist at all.

2. Propositions exist as concrete (physical) entities.

3. Propositions exist as abstract (non-physical) entities.

Watch the exchange and make your own assessment. What exactly is Tom’s position on the ontological status of propositions? I pointed out the problems with the first two positions. But the third is inconsistent with Tom’s professed physicalism. It’s too bad that we couldn’t move beyond the explanatory failures of physicalism and explore the explanatory virtues of theism. Perhaps another time?

Anderson’s argument, in a nutshell, was that the laws of logic, being necessarily true and thoughtlike, point to a necessary mind. Weirdly, TJump denied that the laws of logic were true propositions, claiming that truth was only a property of sentences. When it was pointed out this would imply that nothing was true before we invented language (if only sentences are true, then before there were sentences, nothing was true), he skipped to a different point, only to jump back to the point about sentences when the other point had been debunked. For those with an attention span of more than five minutes, it was clear that TJump was TJumping around, never maintaining consistency, and every one of his points was decisively rebutted over the course of the conversation. It was completely obvious that TJump was entirely out of his depth.

One would think that in such a circumstances, where a guy gets his ass kicked about as badly as an ass can be kicked, that the commenters would recognize this fact. One would think that even those sympathetic to Tom’s position would recognize that he did quite badly. TJump’s circling back to old points that had already been rebutted wasn’t exactly subtle! After all, even those who liked Biden recognized that he got did quite poorly in the debate—why couldn’t TJump’s fans.

But, of course, that was different, as Biden performed poorly stylistically. He wasn’t able to string sentences together. Tom, in contrast, was confident—in order to see that the debate went poorly, one would need to actually listen to the words that were said. Merely listening to the voices of the debaters wasn’t enough to see who won. Though Tom’s performance was about as bad as Biden’s, because it was less obvious—he didn’t stutter much or have a weird open-mouthed look as if he didn’t know where he was—many of his commenters seemed to think that he won the debate:

It’s not just that these people are wrong. It’s that these people’s wrongness reaches almost superhuman levels. It would be like watching the Trump v. Biden debate and concluding that Biden had Reaganesque skills of oratory or describing David Bentley Hart as concise and plainly spoken. It would be like describing me as a proponent of the self-sampling assumption!!

And while this was a particularly severe example, it’s far from unique. When Ben Shapiro had a debate on Jubilee with someone about abortion, the person did not make anything bordering on a coherent argument, but spoke quickly and confidently. It resembled slam poetry more than serious argument. But because he was confident, the Ben Shapiro hating internet is convinced that Ben got destroyed.

People seem to have no ability to evaluate who is actually winning a debate. They can’t seem to recognize when the advocate of their position is losing on substance. If one person implodes stylistically, then that’s obvious to everyone. But if a person speaks confidently, no matter how thoroughly they’re getting pulverized on every point, those on their side will think they’re winning. Lots of people seem unable to grasp the possibility that those on their side might lose, despite speaking confidently and not stuttering too much.

If you conclude that those on your side usually win debates, this should make you suspicious that you’re falling prey to this error. It might, of course, be that your side is just so much more obviously correct than the other side that they usually win debates. It might also be that you disproportionately watch videos with smart people on your side, and those people disproportionately win debates. But still, in most cases, the most likely explanation is bias. Because people rarely know the best arguments on their side, even creationists sometimes win debates.

It’s rare that one person wins all their debates, unless that person is Noam Chomsky or Dustin Crummett. Certainly Tom Jump—a YouTuber with no formal training in philosophy or anything else he talks about—is unlikely to be an undefeated master debater who is better at philosophy than professional philosophers. Far more likely is that he’s very confident and good at sounding like he’s winning, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about.

One pretty good idea coming out of the Rationalist community that of inside vs. outside views. An inside view is the view you come to just by directly assessing the evidence. So, if I do a bunch of reading about whether some drug is harmful, and conclude it is, that would be the inside view.

The outside view is one’s assessment of an issue without directly looking at the evidence on each side of the issue. So, in the earlier case, if I discover that every other person who knows about medicine thinks the drug is fine, and my judgment isn’t that likely to be right as this isn’t my area, that would be taking an outside view.

I think people should take the outside view more often, and debates illustrate one good example of this. If you find yourself constantly in conflict with the consensus of experts, likely something has gone wrong in your thinking. Similarly, if you continually find yourself thinking your side wins every debate, probably something has gone wrong. If you conclude that everyone on the other side must be an ignorant fool, you have likely misidentified who the ignorant fool is.