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A couple months ago, Bjorn Lomborg, one of the more sophisticated skeptics of action to combat global warming, cornered Al Gore at a conference and challenged him to a debate. Gore smiled back tightly. "I want to be polite to you," he replied. "But the scientific community has been through this chapter and verse. We are long past the point, as a society and in the U.S. where we afford to treat this as an on-the-one-hand on-the-other issue."It was a good response. More debate is not always better. I bring it up to provide a concrete example of the conceptual issue that Julian Sanchez elegantly examines in this post:
Sometimes, of course, the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often—and I feel pretty sure here—that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone—at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself. Actually, I have a plausible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.This category of thing called "expert debate" ends up including a lot of different types of arguments. There are conversations between experts meant to settle, or at least elucidate, empirical disputes. There are conversations between experts meant to inform the public. There are conversations between experts meant to misinform the public. Which type of conversation you're dealing with has a lot to do with how you should treat it. But it's just not the case that all debate is informative debate. This is best demonstrated, I think, by the fact that there is such a thing as a competitive debate circuit in which people are trained to debate things they don't necessarily believe and judged on their facility at calculated persuasion. A lot of those people, as it happens, eventually go into politics. Some of them proceed to use those skills for evil. And the media is fairly complicit in this: There are a lot of attempts to hold debates but few attempts to score them on accuracy. This means that the people who win debates often win them because they're better at debating rather than because they're actually right.
