Personal experience note on formal debate (high school, college): It can really be great. I doubt I’d be an EA if not for it, it’s been probably the single most educational thing I’ve done. If you’re reading this post and wondering whether you should participate in your high school or college debate team, I’d give it a pretty strong recommendation.
It’s certainly not ideal, it pits you in zero sum competitions where finding truth is always less valuable than winning by any means necessary. And culture-wise, the people who enjoy it most often become more concerned with winning and competition than finding truth. But still, 90% of your time is spent deep in the weeds of difficult substantive questions, where the best arguments are often the true ones. If you enjoy the level of discourse on something like the EA Forum or LessWrong, you’d probably love spending hours highly incentivized to get to the bottom of interesting and difficult questions.
One caveat: if you’re someone who personality-wise is conflict-averse or uncomfortable with aggressive disagreement, you might be put off by some debate communities. Norms are very different place to place, but some places have a substantial minority that’s pretty aggressive and rude.
Personal experience note on formal debate (high school, college): It can really be great. I doubt I’d be an EA if not for it, it’s been probably the single most educational thing I’ve done. If you’re reading this post and wondering whether you should participate in your high school or college debate team, I’d give it a pretty strong recommendation.
It’s certainly not ideal, it pits you in zero sum competitions where finding truth is always less valuable than winning by any means necessary. And culture-wise, the people who enjoy it most often become more concerned with winning and competition than finding truth. But still, 90% of your time is spent deep in the weeds of difficult substantive questions, where the best arguments are often the true ones. If you enjoy the level of discourse on something like the EA Forum or LessWrong, you’d probably love spending hours highly incentivized to get to the bottom of interesting and difficult questions.
One caveat: if you’re someone who personality-wise is conflict-averse or uncomfortable with aggressive disagreement, you might be put off by some debate communities. Norms are very different place to place, but some places have a substantial minority that’s pretty aggressive and rude.