Thanks for this piece, Chris. Of course, the first thing that leaps to mind is climate change. I lament that no mature debate seems to be in the offing on this subject. There's more mudslinging and name-calling than actual dialogue. I truly wish to see some healing in the world, but how we're going to get there remains unclear.
Thanks Asa. Climate science is certainly the field that most obviously jumped the shark when it comes to excessive certainty, although I think this piece was probably more animated by the scurrilous deployment of computer models to 'predict infections' in situations where absolutely no study of transmission dynamics ever occurred. However, in both cases I already covered the hopelessness of treating computer models as evidence (rather than hypothesis) in "Invasion of the Mechanical Turks":
This piece walks a similar path to that earlier one, but takes an even more broadly sceptical approach ('nothing predicts the future') leading to a more positive conclusion connecting with the 'citizen democracy' leitmotif I've been exploring recently.
Like you, I'd like to see some 'mature debate' on these and other topics, but we have moved away from debate - presumably as a result of the same forces that resulted in the establishment of online censorship. I see debate as central to citizen democracy, and perhaps what distinguishes it from ideological democracy, but to get there we have to re-embrace uncertainty, and there is sadly little appetite for this right now.
Having watched debates over the past ten years, I wonder if the debate format doesn't itself need some tweaking. I recently watched Monbiot "debate" Allan Savory and I would have preferred a conversation or dialogue via which each demonstrated curiosity in the position of the other. Monbiot indulged in name-calling, mud-slinging and anger. It was disheartening. Savory was attempting to draw the debate to a different level of thinking, which I could see was confusing and even infuriating to Monbiot and anyone with leftbrainitis.
This is a great question, Asa! I think that the US framing of a 'debate' as having a proposition that wins or loses is problematic, and not what is interesting to me about the debate format as it seemed to be practiced in the late twentieth century in the UK, where I was at the time. (I'm not suggesting you mean this be 'debate' so much as I'm observing that the US has made debates into competitions, which is not the only format they might take.)
Maybe this is a call for me to avoid using that term, 'debate', and instead talk about 'public discourse' or some other format for pubic discussion. I have been on some great panel discussions... but I see this less and less with each passing year.
I shall ponder further... thanks for the thinking-fodder!
Thanks for this piece, Chris. Of course, the first thing that leaps to mind is climate change. I lament that no mature debate seems to be in the offing on this subject. There's more mudslinging and name-calling than actual dialogue. I truly wish to see some healing in the world, but how we're going to get there remains unclear.
Thanks Asa. Climate science is certainly the field that most obviously jumped the shark when it comes to excessive certainty, although I think this piece was probably more animated by the scurrilous deployment of computer models to 'predict infections' in situations where absolutely no study of transmission dynamics ever occurred. However, in both cases I already covered the hopelessness of treating computer models as evidence (rather than hypothesis) in "Invasion of the Mechanical Turks":
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-mechanical-turks
This piece walks a similar path to that earlier one, but takes an even more broadly sceptical approach ('nothing predicts the future') leading to a more positive conclusion connecting with the 'citizen democracy' leitmotif I've been exploring recently.
Like you, I'd like to see some 'mature debate' on these and other topics, but we have moved away from debate - presumably as a result of the same forces that resulted in the establishment of online censorship. I see debate as central to citizen democracy, and perhaps what distinguishes it from ideological democracy, but to get there we have to re-embrace uncertainty, and there is sadly little appetite for this right now.
Many thanks for commenting!
Chris.
Having watched debates over the past ten years, I wonder if the debate format doesn't itself need some tweaking. I recently watched Monbiot "debate" Allan Savory and I would have preferred a conversation or dialogue via which each demonstrated curiosity in the position of the other. Monbiot indulged in name-calling, mud-slinging and anger. It was disheartening. Savory was attempting to draw the debate to a different level of thinking, which I could see was confusing and even infuriating to Monbiot and anyone with leftbrainitis.
This is a great question, Asa! I think that the US framing of a 'debate' as having a proposition that wins or loses is problematic, and not what is interesting to me about the debate format as it seemed to be practiced in the late twentieth century in the UK, where I was at the time. (I'm not suggesting you mean this be 'debate' so much as I'm observing that the US has made debates into competitions, which is not the only format they might take.)
Maybe this is a call for me to avoid using that term, 'debate', and instead talk about 'public discourse' or some other format for pubic discussion. I have been on some great panel discussions... but I see this less and less with each passing year.
I shall ponder further... thanks for the thinking-fodder!