The Sadness of Debate
Stupid arguments from the golden age of blogging stomping on a human face, forever.
The topic of the moment on social media is Joe Rogan calling for a “debate” between Robert Kennedy Jr. and vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez, which has with depressing predictability driven a resurgence of the eternal argument about whether it’s ever worthwhile to participate in this kind of stunt. I have to say, I was not prepared for the 2020’s to involve quite this many recapitulations of arguments I found tedious when they were eating ScienceBlogs.com back in the heyday of the New Atheists.
This whole thing just kind of makes me sad, for a wide variety of reasons. Way back when I was still a lowly Assistant Professor, in my first few years at Union, RFK Jr. came and spoke at Union about his legal work on environmental issues, and I was really impressed with him. He was under the weather with some sort of cold/flu, but spoke for an hour and then took questions, and came off as both passionate and mostly rational. He had a case for his position, and more importantly had a program for actually doing stuff to advance it, which was a striking contrast to a lot of the purely vibes-based politics that was prominent then and arguably dominant now.
I think he had only just started to flirt with the anti-vaccine stuff at that point, but his descent into absolute bugnuts conspiracy theory territory is sad to see. In no small part because it makes me wonder whether he was this crazy all along and I just didn’t notice when hearing him live.
Which, of course, is the core of the argument against engaging with him at all: that he’s so glib and charming that he’ll end up mopping the floor with anyone who agrees to “debate” him, despite being demonstrably wrong in a whole host of ways. I suspect that’s not really wrong, though it’s a bit depressing in what it says about the people who go out to communicate science to the general public and the ways they go about it. There’s a tendency even among the smallish number of folks within science who recognize the importance of public engagement to look askance at charisma and framing arguments to suit the audience, which at some level means not only going to a gunfight with a knife, but hot-gluing the knife into its sheath before walking out into the dusty street to an Ennio Morricone score.
I also have some issues with some of the common framings of the argument against participating in such a debate, some of which are reasonably well captured by this Twitter thread (screencap for those who can’t be bothered to click links)
By the time there’s a mainstream argument about whether a “debate” should happen, the issue has already been “elevated” to a level where there’s not a lot left to lose in that respect.
At the same time, I’m not in any hurry to take up this kind of “debate” for the side that I favor, because as my kids regularly remind me, I’m old. I’ve seen this circus before, and I find it stupid and exhausting. The “debate” format is dumb and artificial, as you can kind of see between the lines of this thread of strategy tips, and I just don’t have the stomach for a series of “gotcha” games about edge cases and outliers. I don’t even care to watch or read anybody else doing it, at this stage of my life— I’ve got a family, and a job, and a dog, and grass outside that I can go touch.
Which is not to say that if Joe Rogan (or, more realistically, his people) called me and asked me to come on his podcast and talk about science I would decline on principle. I’d happily go on his show and talk about whatever, just not in this dumbass “debate” format where each side is trying to score points on the other. The universe we live in is huge and weird, the things we know about it are amazing, and the ways we know them are fascinating, and I’d happily go on just about any show willing to have me to talk through as much of that as they’d be willing to hear.
But in a way, that kind of ties into another sad-making item, which is the way the most massive media properties all seem to go batshit at some point. I find it particularly sad in the case of Rogan (and to a lesser extent folks like Jordan Peterson and the IDW crowd), because it seems to me like there’s an opportunity being squandered there. There is (or ought to be) room for a podcast that takes a kind of curious and searching approach to the world that isn’t weighed down with elite lefty signifiers, without tipping all the way into Ancient Aliens territory. We’ve got no end of folks with high-end academic credentials who talk about how the world works in very elite-coded ways that all too often come off as contemptuous of a kind of normie masculinity. We need some more stuff that looks at the systems of the world in a way that doesn’t sound like it’s been run through a DEIB focus group before the final cut, and the few people who sorta-kinda worked in that space have mostly gone Full Nutjob at this point.
(I don’t think this is entirely restricted to the political right, for what little that’s worth, but the liberal lean of academia means that there’s a steady supply of new people in a kind of center-left space to replace those who wander off into fringe leftist nonsense.)
In the end, though, I think the most depressing part of the whole business is well captured by this tweet:
At the end of the day, this really is pretty much a story about nothing, ginning up a stupid fight because the actual news of the day is some linear combination of “pretty good” and “same old, same old.” Nothing significant is happening in either party’s primary, the economy is okay-but-not-great, Congress can’t do anything exciting, the war in Ukraine is grinding slowly— people who are excessively online are faced with a choice between going outside or arguing about insignificant nonsense, and they’re displaying the decision-making skills of the Nazi collaborator in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
And that’s just sad.
Yeah, I’m super upbeat this morning. Anyway, here’s a button if you want more of this:
And if you want to debate me, you can try putting something in the comments, but I don’t guarantee that will get a response:
I remember a debate held at Swarthmore about the proposed Iraq War just post-2001 between Leon Wieseltier and Mark Danner. Wieseltier absolutely crushed Danner with a range of incorrect facts, misleading hypotheticals, fast-talking cherry-picking of Danner's arguments, etc.; Danner's need to stay a respectable part of the public sphere that respected Wieseltier had him tied up in knots, conceding far too much to Wieseltier's manipulative assertions, apologizing for his own analysis, etc.
And yet by any standard imaginable, in retrospect, Danner was the absolute winner; everything he said was completely on-target and everything Wieseltier was not only incorrect but in many cases maliciously so.
"Debate" in this formal sense rarely does anybody credit. It's only interesting as a form of entertainment akin to wrestling. I'd like to think that nobody imagines Triple-H really beat Steve Austin through greater skill that was spontaneously exhibited in an open-ended match, and it's the same with 'debates'--it's all about the showmanship.
TBH, that's one of the reason I like Sam Harris (or Richard Dawkins) without even needing to be as anti-clerical as they are. I may not agree with all of their positions or all of their framing but they never went cuckoo.