Five Principles for Productive Debate

If two parties can not agree to the following five principles of debate, then the debate is unlikely to reach a correct and reasonable conclusion. Even with these principles in place, a debate may be unsolvable, as evidenced by apparent paradoxes in the perfectly logical and rigorous framework of mathematics.


1 : Both parties must be open to convincing by rational argument

2 : Both parties must argue for both sides of the debate

3 : Sloppy logic will lead to 'reasonable' but useless or incorrect results

4 : All evidence must be considered with equal statistical weight and fact-checked

5 : No Faith except that which is common to both parties

If these principles can not be agreed upon, then a productive resolution of the debate can not be guaranteed.

If principle 1 is violated, then the debate becomes a pointless exercise in contradiction.

If principle 2 is violated, then the debate may be decided based on who has more charisma or better rhetoric, not on which side is more correct. Adhering to principle 2 also ensures that both parties have respect and understanding of the opposing viewpoint.

Principle 3 is impossible to attain absolutely ( except in math ), but both parties should be disciplined and adhere to as rigorous of reasoning as is possible.

If principle 4 is violated then your debate has no firm ground to stand on, and it will devolve into an exercise in manipulating the truth rather than finding it.

If principle 5 is violated, principle 1 is automatically violated simply by use of contradictory axioms : the union of your reasoning frameworks automatically contains a contradiction, and no sound resolution is possible.

Some debates or arguments are too poorly defined to meet these five criteria. Some debates may contain within them an inherent contradiction to these five criteria.

Catastrophic Futurism

A brief overview of current futurism shows that most of it is predicated on a notion of catastrophe. Global warming, energy, finance, radical terrorism, the Singularity, all of these concepts have at their core the idea that mankind is held hostage to unpredictable events beyond our control. Taleb's influential Black Swan theory posits infrequent, large scale events as the causal driver of history. There is of course a large degree of validity to this point of view. We undoubtedly do face major problems, but is catastophism a useful futurist model?

Futurism's obsession with the catastrophe has distracted us from the real goal of the discipline. The job of a futurist is not to predict the future, his job is to create the future. If a visionary is right, it is only by accident. Instead of aiming for correctness, we should aim for visionary impact and power. Mankind wants to hope. We must be allowed to dream.

Forget predictive power, these are the axioms we must build on:
1) Which human values are important?
2) What technological means are available?
3) What does a world that embodies our values and means look like?

The seventh (and most paranoid) possible reason why serious people no longer write about hallucinogens

A variant of [4] below.

Mutual Disrespect

"Do you have anything besides... existential destruction of all attempts at reasoning this evening?"
"... Yeah, it's a bit bleak isn't it."
"Can you articulate what if anything is problematic with religion?"
"The usual response is that it's the enemy of reason, etc., but then you have to argue that reason is a good thing.
I would be more inclined just to state that religions are groups of replicators which manifest a great deal of power and use it in ways often contrary to the interests of 'humanity,' and other replicator-groups with the same power and the same human-orthogonal utility functions are much more readily criticized, e.g. nationalisms, political ideologies, secular traditions, technologies, 'globalization', but religion is uniquely sacred, and 'respectable' members of society are obliged to pay lip service to it.

We act like the solution to religious strife is some kind of limp 'mutual respect', where a rabbi and a priest and an imam sit in the same room and say nice things about each other. I'd prefer mutual disrespect. I'd prefer that they sit in that room and argue about total nonsense until they turn blue, and let the rest of the world see how utterly silly it is."