A BETTER WAY TO DEBATE

CORRECTING THE WEAKNESSES OF WRITING AND SPEAKING

The greatest value of controversy consists in the fact that intellectual conflict brings progress in our societal search for truth and happiness (even when we aren’t personally seeking truth). We carry on our controversy both in writing and in speech, but each medium has weaknesses.

WRITING

Others have criticized writing in ways that I do not. For instance, in Plato’s Phaedrus we find a rather academic argument against writing. In this dialogue, Socrates, trying to convince Phaedrus that writing is inferior to speech, tells him a story about the god named Theuth who, the Egyptians believed, invented writing. The great god-king Thamus, Socrates says, refused to approve of Theuth’s invention, claiming that the use of writing would cause man’s faculty of memory to atrophy. Socrates agrees with Thamus.

But in my view, writing simply provides more material for us to commit to memory — and, just as the motor vehicle extends our mobility, writing extends our powers of memory.

In this same dialogue, Socrates puts forth a second unconvincing critique against writing. Writing, Socrates asserts, is lifeless: unlike speech, he says, it cannot answer you when you ask it a question — and writing cannot fight for itself when it is misused.

Although it is true that writing cannot stand up for itself when it is misinterpreted, this is mitigated by the fact that a piece of writing on a topic does not constitute, in the real world, the last word on that topic. The author and his or her followers have substantial opportunities to correct mistaken impressions made by the text.

The weakness I see in writing is this: books (and articles, blogs, etc.) are simply not, on their own, sufficient for facilitating great progress in the dialectical search for truth. This is because authors, in general, end up “preaching to the choir;” and authors are relatively free to ignore problems in their own arguments.

SPEECH

Some forms of speech, namely, speeches and lectures where audience responses are not encouraged, are weak in the same ways that writing is. And speech in the form of debates — that is, debates per se and speeches and lectures where the speaker encourages responses from the audience — is also problematic as a means of controversy: traditional debate is unclear, repetitive, incomplete, rarely concise and often not current; it does not allow the arguments to be gotten ahold of so that they can be carefully sharpened. The result is that particular controversies too often barely evolve so as to be able more clearly to reveal truth.

OUR PLAN

Our plan at the Truth Engine is to avoid the problems of writing and speech by combining the two media in a new way:

Just as the physical powers of many people can be added together by all of them pulling on a single rope, the intellectual powers of the many people of our society can be added together — a great deal more robustly than is possible in traditional debate — by transferring their debates (speech) on a topic onto the pages of a single suitably-formatted and frequently amended book (writing) — in this way, we will become transformed into a single collective entity, a vastly brilliant and good-willed thinker who will, with immense authority, be able to reveal to us what is true, good and beautiful. In my previous article, I described the process that we have invented:

The volumes of the Truth Engine’s Encyclopedia of Truth will fall into three Divisions:

The Truth Division — which covers the sciences and fringe sciences, The Goodness Division — which covers the sociopolitical realm and The Beauty Division — which covers the arts.

Each of the volumes of our encyclopedia, which will be called dialectical books, will be written as a simulated debate and will lay out, in a transparently logical format, the best known arguments, pro and con, pertaining to a single controversy, and will continually be amended by the public, who will be able to read it for free online and send us suggestions for improving it. This suggestion-and-amendment process will be supercharged in the following way: each dialectical book will guide a series of informal, moderated, public, person-to-person debates on the topic, online and in communities, and, in an open-ended cycle of positive feedback fueled by collective intelligence, the debates will inspire ideas for changing the book. This recursive process — the book shaping a debate, the debate re-shaping the book, the new edition of the book shaping the next debate, etc. — will sharpen the arguments more and more over time, clarifying truth with unprecedented velocity. Instead of ropes facilitating the pooling of physical powers, the books will facilitate the pooling of our intellectual powers, because we will, for the first time, all be literally on the same page as we debate the issues. For the first time in history, all participating minds will be completely in sync, able to think as one far more effectively than ever before — finally, we will be fully leveraging all our intellectual powers.

To begin the process, we have produced two such dialectical books, one shows all the best arguments for and against the proposition that the belief that some UFOs are otherworldly devices is justified; the other covers the topic of the Clinton email and Trump alleged collusion scandals* — and we are working on one that deals with formalism and expression in the arts.

Because each dialectical book presents both sides of the covered debate, we avoid the preaching-to-the-choir problem. Also, responses are encouraged and integrated into the record, and the debates become super-clear and very concise with time; they are complete, and they are in no way repetitive — and they are eminently improvable. Using the Truth Engine method, we will be able to increase very greatly the speed at which truth is revealed and greater happiness is achieved.

* These books can be read here.