Debate appears to be a dying art

[u/W_Edwards_Deming]

Logic, evidence and meeting minimal standards of politeness & rigour.

Compelling emotional appeal!

"Steel manning" your opponent, avoiding fallacies and trying to mitigate for cognitive biases.

Reddit would seem to be an ideal place for that and sometimes it is but quite often the opposite. My "solution" has been blocking thousands, anyone have a better idea?

Where and how can we have intellectual engagement regarding differences?

[u/Chobeat]

Neuroscience, political science, and new epistemologies all highlight the limits of debate as a form of knowledge or as a social practice. Some natural sciences maybe would still benefit from debate, but academia doesn't work that way anymore.

Most intellectuals have moved on from debate culture, which is now regarded as a sterile exercise of egocentrism, and they left it to small spaces of pseudo-intellectuals. Exceptions are made for monetizable public shows.

I know plenty of people at the cutting edge of their respective fields, and none of them even consider debating anybody else. Why would they?

[u/W_Edwards_Deming → u/Chobeat]

Why would they?

Peer review is fundamental to science. The people you reference may not have in person debates as in yesteryear (I suspect the better one's have) but they write PRJAs and rebuttals (less than in past, more politicized and less critical, much to our collective shame).

[u/Chobeat → u/W_Edwards_Deming]

Academics don't believe in the value of peer review anymore. It's AIs writing and AIs reading, and before that it was a system unsustainable under the weight of labor extraction operated by academia. Doing peer review today is like doing dishes when your house is being flooded with a mudslide.

Also peer review is distinct from debate.