What to do with opposing views?
Two months ago Dr. Steven Novella, who writes at NeuroLogicaBlog, was invited to be an expert on an acupuncture debate, and directed readers of his blog there to see more and comment. I followed his link and found Opposing Views, a website that hosts debates between experts in the topics debated, and allows readers to comment on individual arguments as well as the broader questions.
There are quite a few debates there that I think readers of this site would be interested in. If debunking pseudoscience is your thing, check out Are Autism and Vaccines Linked? or Does Intelligent Design Have Merit? The more religiously (or irreligiously) opinionated of you might want to take part in Should Religious Symbols be Displayed on Public Property? or even the more fundamental Is There a God? There are of course the classic debates on same-sex marriage and the electoral college, and many others. What’s really nice about the format is that they have verified experts representing their respective sides. While I can’t exactly say I’d vouch for the credibility of some of them (for example, the Discovery Institute), they certainly are experts in whatever it is they’re defending. No one can pout later about how their side was unfairly represented by someone who was unprepared and ill-informed.
So, I’ve been hanging around there for a while, commenting to point out nerdy things like post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies and trying to engage people in intellectual discussion. I like it, but sometimes I wonder if I’m caught in a bit of a “someone is wrong on the internet” trap. (If these crazy people are on a debate website, I think to myself, surely they want someone to explain to them how they’re being irrational. Four hours later….) Incredibly, the site management does moderate comments. They’re successful at weeding out the YouTube sunshine, but they can’t exactly cull all the stupid ones because that would often introduce a pretty strong bias with respect to a particular debate.
Another reservation I have is that it’s tricky to pick truly debatable topics, and to phrase the questions in ways that facilitate debate with actual clash. Consequently, some of the dialogue gets more frustrating than it really needs to be. Should We Recycle? is actually about whether recycling should be government-mandated or market-driven. Both experts in Should Prayer Be Allowed in Public Schools? ended up agreeing that there’s no problem with students who choose to pray on their own in a non-disruptive way, although many of the commenters (and probably many of the users voting in the poll) didn’t get the memo.
Perhaps more important, however, is an issue about debate philosophy that I’ve struggled with for some time. Is it better to challenge ridiculous opinions out in the open, and let them either flourish or die in the marketplace of ideas, or should we instead refuse to dignify certain viewpoints with a formal recognition such as a debate? Some beliefs are so ludicrous that even agreeing to debate them gives them more credit than they’re due. On the other hand, if any meaningful number of people did hold such beliefs, it would be pretty scary — the kind of thing you might want to take action against. (Would you waste an hour trying to convince an audience not to listen to the Timecube guy? Probably not, unless there actually was an auditorium full of Timecube believers. In that case, I might be tempted to spend a lot more than an hour, if I didn’t run screaming.) A few of the questions on Opposing Views are pretty clear examples of this type of gray area. Are Generic Drugs as Effective as Name Brands? Yes. Yes, they are, because they’re chemically identical. There are also the cases where it’s not so much that one side is definitionally correct, but that anyone who’s devoted some intelligent thought to the matter reaches the same conclusion. Debates like those are harder to pinpoint, but they’re the ones I referred to before, in which eliminating the vapid comments would leave the thread sounding pretty one-sided. Is that debate really worth it, or is it making the struggle to educate and convince people even harder?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but I believe they’re worth thinking about and trying to answer. In the meantime, I’ll be around on Opposing Views, and for purely selfish reasons, I hope some of you will be too. There are these structural and philosophical difficulties that may or may not ever be overcome, but I still hate to see someone be both wrong and unchallenged on the internet. (More than 80% of responding users think that acupuncture works, despite the studies that have shown pretend acupuncture to be more effective than the real thing.) If some of you are there with me, we can make a dent in some of those poll results, and fill the comment threads with some higher-level critical analysis. At least for now, I’m naive enough to believe that it makes a difference.
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