Question
In what circumstances or contexts is debate useful?
Answer
Kinda tangential, but Stefan King made a nice trail covering this.
http://trailmeme.com/trails/How_...
See the debating related items near the top right.
Complicated topic, but one of the simplest/shortest insights I've seen on when debate is useful is due to research by Robert Axelrod in the late 70s, in the context of Cold War negotiations. I have the paper somewhere. I vaguely recall the title being "Argumentation in Foreign Policy Settings" or something. Very nice paper, analyzing SALT negotiations at a line-by-line transcript level. I may be misremembering... I read the paper about 12 years ago...
He found that debate (in situations like the SALT talks) was most productive when both sides came in with the expectation that they would discover things neither side knew beforehand. That's a win-win stance, broadly speaking. The opposite is a 'closed' debate where it is a zero-sum game where all the information is assumed to be (or actually) all discovered, and the matter boils down to a win-lose struggle between 2 sides, each trying to use the information optimally for an entrenched position.
I suspect this early work was what let Axelrod to go on to do his pioneering prisoner's dilemma work.
http://trailmeme.com/trails/How_...
See the debating related items near the top right.
Complicated topic, but one of the simplest/shortest insights I've seen on when debate is useful is due to research by Robert Axelrod in the late 70s, in the context of Cold War negotiations. I have the paper somewhere. I vaguely recall the title being "Argumentation in Foreign Policy Settings" or something. Very nice paper, analyzing SALT negotiations at a line-by-line transcript level. I may be misremembering... I read the paper about 12 years ago...
He found that debate (in situations like the SALT talks) was most productive when both sides came in with the expectation that they would discover things neither side knew beforehand. That's a win-win stance, broadly speaking. The opposite is a 'closed' debate where it is a zero-sum game where all the information is assumed to be (or actually) all discovered, and the matter boils down to a win-lose struggle between 2 sides, each trying to use the information optimally for an entrenched position.
I suspect this early work was what let Axelrod to go on to do his pioneering prisoner's dilemma work.