I did competitive college debate for four years (American Parliamentary format, which is similar to the BP format used in the EA Debate Championship but not identical) and I think that the extent to which it does/âdoesnât encourage truth-seeking is less important than the way it pushes people to justify their values.
Oversimplifying broadly, debate has two layers: one is the arguments about what the impacts of a certain idea/âpolicy are likely to be, and one is arguments about which impacts are more important (known as âweighingâ). In order to win rounds, you have to win arguments at both levels. This means that debate requires people to engage with one of issues that is most central to EA â a relatively consequentialist understanding of which issues matter most. In regular life you can say, âI support government funding for the arts because art is goodâ and not think very hard about how that trades off with, say, funding for healthcare. But if you do that in a debate round, the other team will point out the tradeoff, estimate the number of people who will die as a result of there being less funding for healthcare, and you will lose the round.
I think this is the main benefit of debate from an EA perspective, and I suspect that it has meaningful impacts on people who are forced to confront, over and over again in countless debate rounds, the actual effects (in lives lost and other very serious harms) of different ways of weighing between issues. Anecdotally, a higher-than-average percentage of the debaters I know are EAers, or at least interested in EA. And even debaters who donât personally support EA very often use EA weighing arguments in rounds. As a result, for some people (I suspect many), debate is the first place they hear about EA. To me, this makes debate leagues a fertile recruiting ground for EA.
I did competitive college debate for four years (American Parliamentary format, which is similar to the BP format used in the EA Debate Championship but not identical) and I think that the extent to which it does/âdoesnât encourage truth-seeking is less important than the way it pushes people to justify their values.
Oversimplifying broadly, debate has two layers: one is the arguments about what the impacts of a certain idea/âpolicy are likely to be, and one is arguments about which impacts are more important (known as âweighingâ). In order to win rounds, you have to win arguments at both levels. This means that debate requires people to engage with one of issues that is most central to EA â a relatively consequentialist understanding of which issues matter most. In regular life you can say, âI support government funding for the arts because art is goodâ and not think very hard about how that trades off with, say, funding for healthcare. But if you do that in a debate round, the other team will point out the tradeoff, estimate the number of people who will die as a result of there being less funding for healthcare, and you will lose the round.
I think this is the main benefit of debate from an EA perspective, and I suspect that it has meaningful impacts on people who are forced to confront, over and over again in countless debate rounds, the actual effects (in lives lost and other very serious harms) of different ways of weighing between issues. Anecdotally, a higher-than-average percentage of the debaters I know are EAers, or at least interested in EA. And even debaters who donât personally support EA very often use EA weighing arguments in rounds. As a result, for some people (I suspect many), debate is the first place they hear about EA. To me, this makes debate leagues a fertile recruiting ground for EA.