What I Got From 1.5 Years In Slightly-Competitive Debate

I got an enormous amount of personal and intellectual value from my 1.5 years in the TU Delft Debate Club. I did British Parliamentary debate in the Netherlands in 2022-2023, about twice a week. I went to ~5 external tournaments. It made me wiser, more personable, more open-minded, and, I think, a substantially better scientist. I didn’t get very good at it, but I treasure the time I spent and the knowledge I gained.

My very ‘truth-pilled’ friends often assume competitive debate is inimical to truth-seeking, as the topic of, and your position in, the debate, are assigned at random. There is no presumption of ‘good faith truth-seeking’. This could be bad for your rationality, but in practice it is quite the opposite. In this post I’ll show how slightly-competitive-debate can in fact do the opposite of making you an oleaginous post-truth hypocrite. I’ll touch on three main points: debate as meme-vaccine, debate as epistemic kata, and debate as humbling reminder that we are but tiny things grasping in the dark after what we call truth.

(please note the anecdotes are all metonymical - true in spirit only)

First a brief description of the format to give you an idea what I’m talking about.

What Is BP Debate?

In British Parliamentary (BP) debate, four teams of two speakers each compete on a motion announced fifteen minutes before the round. The teams are divided into two “halves” - Opening and Closing - and two “sides” - Government (for the motion) and Opposition (against). Each speaker gets seven minutes. A panel of judges ranks all four teams from first to last. Crucially, you don’t choose your side - it’s assigned at random.

Example motions: “This House Would abolish the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy” “This House Believes That it is immoral to become a billionaire”

The one in which I received a truly unforgettable asswhooping: “In a monogamous romantic relationship, insofar as partners cannot love each other an exactly equal amount, THP to be the one which loves the other more.” (paraphrased)

Truth-Seeking and Memetic Vaccination

I found debate to be essentially anti-ideological; it’s roughly a fact about how argument works that you cannot argue well from unadulterated ideological dogma. You’re free to make a Maoist argument; you just need to spend 3 of your precious 7 minutes convincing the judge that Maoism is obviously right, and if you fail at that, you will lose. If you’re the opening half and your closing-half counterparts make a better Maoist argument than you, you will also lose. On the other hand if your plausibly-deniably-fascist case is obviously-the-best-standing-case, you will win. The deep social taboos against, e.g., nazism, racism, etc., are mostly enforced only in extremis. Argumentation is usually technical enough that you can adjudicate arguments on their merits. With a bit of experience, bad arguments for neoliberalism sound about as bad to the Reaganite as to the Marxist.

In my experience, debate functions much more as an ideology-vaccine; two main mechanisms:

First, being able to present an exhaustive list of good reasons that the thing you believe is wrong means you at least have to believe the thing with nuance, which already defangs most really virulent memes.

Second, the random assignment of which side you argue. This isn’t because it makes you a hypocrite rhetorician, but because every time you make an argument, you can see in real time how saying these things makes you really intensely believe that the Dutch fucking definitely obviously should privatize their railroads for about 30 minutes after the curtain falls. This is, to the reflective person, deeply humbling - you get to watch, live, repeatedly, as the gap between “feeling right” and “being right” looks you in the eye and laughs at you for placing last.

Rigour

Burden of Proof

This one is simple but important; there are other ways to get this, but debate is a good one. Debate helps you build a feel for something which feels like “what evidence would I have to adduce to change the mind of someone I regard as an intellectual equal.” Importantly, as you get better at arguing, this standard goes up - I can tell you exactly what you would have to show me to get me to disbelieve the second law of thermodynamics. I also have an estimate for how likely there are to be good arguments I don’t know on either side.

(for the second law, see Grandy, Entropy and the Time Evolution of Macroscopic Systems - he doesn’t exactly argue that it’s untrue so much as show you how conceptually fraught the claim actually is)

Argument Literacy

As you become a little better, you develop something like working memory chunks for arguments. Chunking is a superlinearly valuable process - a bigger library of chunks means you can take in and synthesise more information more effectively. You can make bigger chunks from the smaller chunks. In short, you get good. To debate well, you need to basically have a handful of argument chunks, and live fill-in-the-blanks with whatever you’re talking about.

The Meta-Question of Values

Another important aspect of debate is that you are allowed and obliged to debate the meta-question of which values should be important and why. It is a fact of life that different values ask different things of us. It is not a rule of the universe that Utilitarianism cannot impose concentrated harms on those-suffering-greatly in exchange for diffuse benefits accruing to the already-well-off. Most people, expecting correctness to feel univalent, settle this by winner-take-all in a vibe competition - they’ll treat one or the other as obviously correct and the other as at-best-misguided-at-worst-villainous. In debate, multiple incommensurable values are always at stake, and typically different arguments actualize more of one than the other; “should minority populations be given disproportionately more representation in legislative bodies?” - you can’t have this debate without determining which set of values should take priority - you have to debate the values too! When and why should A be more important than B? How much concentrated harm must befall group C before their interests should assume disproportionate importance?

The classical rationalists and the superforecasters ought to nod here - if I am asked “will X happen in Y days,” I’d better give a think to how my answer changes as I change Y. This is just one of many parallels.

Humility

Most people arrive at their beliefs by receiving some input, passively evaluating it, and either endorsing or discarding it. This isn’t necessarily an ignoble thing - life is short, time expensive, time to just think rare. When you start debating, the first few times you get whooped, you can blame it on the topic, or having the wrong side. Eventually, you’ll hit jackpot and get to argue pro for something you believe in very strongly. You will stand up, stutter for 90 seconds, and gesture wanly to perhaps two things that could be arguments (of the “war is bad” variety), and then sit down shamefacedly as you realize that you cannot actually justify your beliefs. Optionally, if you’re not speaking first, you can spend the rest of your time saying why your opponent is definitely wrong - this can feel a lot like being right, so you’ll think it’s bullshit the first few times you take last place. But still, get dunked on enough times by someone visibly-better-at-this-than-you and you’ll get the idea.

Epistemic Humility

It is a fact of life that nontrivial non-science questions (“should I ask so-and-so on a date?”) are not very truth-asymmetric - there should be good arguments for either side (see Yudkowsky, Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided). By default, people tacitly assume that being right “feels like” having 10 good reasons to believe as you do, and there being essentially no good reasons to think the other thing. A subtler version of this is to assume that the marginal piece of evidence will make you look more right with high probability - some things, e.g., atoms, only begin to be evidenced after centuries of collective physics-doing.

Put yourself in the shoes of, say, Newton. You want to figure out if things are made from atoms, so you think, read, and perhaps come to a tentative conclusion. But we know that the evidence that mattered was not available - the correct answer wasn’t a tepid “yeah, probably, but I’m not sure”, it was “I definitely don’t know and I think I shouldn’t know based on my current read of the evidence” (pace Bayesians).

To what percent of ‘important questions’ do we have the guts to give a hard ‘I don’t know’? Arguendo, the median American has an opinion on tariffs - should they? Are they reasonably well-informed, at least enough to make an honest guess? Lmao, you tell me.

Ontological Humility

For a quite different kind of humility, back to the “THW be the partner that loves more.” Suppose you think this is a category error, that love is obviously incommensurable between people. You are faced with a stark, and really quite fun, choice:

Door A: swallow your pride and argue as if you didn’t think it nonsense - you’ll quickly learn you were wrong to be that certain, it’s at least not that nonsensical. Also you probably still will lose. Serves you right for believing things.

Door B(ased): if you really definitely think you’re right, you can bet it all - you can try to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt - the judges nod, the pen falls from your opponent’s hand as their jaw drops, your crush in the audience swoons - that this motion is a category error. I doubt this ever happens in real competitive debate, but the idea, the challenge, always electrified me. I often think I’m right - am I so obviously transparently right that I could argue and win in the teeth of “debating the motion is assholeish-until-proven-otherwise”? Lol. So you learn. My friends will tell you I am notoriously bad at “ontological generosity” - thinking about things in someone else’s terms rather than how I would. But I used to be even worse!!!

Humility, but the Regular Kind

Spend long enough in the debate world and most people’s arguments will have about 2 bits of entropy to you: ~1 bit of good/bad + ~1 bit for which is their favourite reason why. You can tell this dumbass who thinks ‘Pareto’ is something that goes on sandwiches exactly how they should be arguing for tariffs before they even get to mention China once. Depending on your disposition, this leaves you with two options

Door A: disdain normies

Door B(irtuous): call to mind the time that random Croat chemistry undergrad gave you 15 reasons you’re wrong about the EU’s harmonised agricultural whatever-the-fuck, and 10 reasons why even if you weren’t wrong, he was still also right anyways, and 3 reasons why if he’s even the teensiest wee bit right, his thing is so much more important that your thing doesn’t matter. Remember how that same guy took you to drinks afterward and never once intimated he thought you were fucking dumb. He taught you something new about international finance, and still also said the dumbest fucking nonsense about quantum mechanics you’ve heard in months. You made a friend.

Pause.

Breathe.

Let the normie finish their tariff thing. Nod thoughtfully. Smile warmly.

People can learn if you help them - isn’t that how you got here? Try to make a new friend.

Summary

Debate is not the art of fatuous rhetoric. It is one of few things where, even modulo selection effects, I think it reliably makes people smarter to do it somewhat seriously for a few years. I’m probably on the far end of the bell curve for how useful I’ve found it (I’m writing about it - that selection effect is real ofc), but I think that the friends I’ve seen stick with it grew more as people than their peers. I hope I gave some visceral feel for why this is the case.

Everything I’ve described is contingent on the community of practice - I remember seeing a quote from an American judge to the approximate effect that their convictions as a Maoist meant they could not count arguments based on reactionary-imperialist propaganda. This commitment to argumentative technique as a propaedeutic to truth-seeking is not the default outcome - it is a deliberately, imperfectly, cultivated living tradition. There are not many public fora where one could advocate violently establishing a repressive military dictatorship to a handful of slightly-left-of-center white-collar workers and probably still be welcome at drinks after. This is a fragile and beautiful thing.

In a world friendly to all beautiful things, I would say that the experience of debating is so Damascene that anyone who sticks around long enough to run a debate tournament will have internalized these values. And this is maybe even a little true! But I do not think debate is so intellectually robustifying that the torch cannot be put out; there are ways to do debate that are exercises in spouting fatuous nonsense very quickly; my guess is if you started a debate club without experienced debaters, it becomes this by default - the difference is a community of practice. If you have tried debating and found copper rather than gold, I hope now you will find it plausible that there is at least a version of competitive debate which is deeply enriching.

As I said, I never got very good at debate, but I got a lot out of it. I owe this to my mentor and friend Albert, who, despite my being a bit of an intransigent little shit, forebore and taught patiently and kindly. For this, I am deeply grateful.