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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32899 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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I don't really get these videos either. I suspect they are entirely jury-rigged to make the 1 look infinitely more prescient than the 25. My wife complains about these same types of videos coming up on her feed but they are always Charlie Kirk debating a bunch of liberal college kids. There are 'owns' galore, but does it change anything? Perhaps. If you watch these vids, at a minimum it can reveal unconsidered problems and different perspectives. Maybe that's enough to justify the entertainment value of naifs looking stupid.

I suspect they are entirely jury-rigged to make the 1 look infinitely more prescient than the 25.

I think the format is just inherently rigged, and in the opposite direction you'd immediately think. The implication of a 1 vs 25 is that the 1 is in the worse position (as in a physical fight), but I think when you have the real-time debate format the inverse is true.

Consider what participating from the 25-person side looks like. Unless you have a very non-real-time debate, the 25 need to share time between themselves and also need to carry on each others' arguments. They need to defend positions another person raised and follow through on a path of attack another person started. And being real time removes the main benefit of having numbers, which is being able to workshop a response and pull out the best ideas from all 25. The result is an inevitable mess.

In practice I suspect the single guy only needs to be moderately consistent with his own statements, not get stumped for a response on anything, and do a passable job of poking holes in the jumbled political positions of 25 people combined in an ad-hoc manner. These aren't trivial tasks but they're well within reach for an experienced debater.

I agree with that.

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