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I think this is why I prefer to read cross-examinations of text against text. A huge advantage for live cross examination is that it’s easier to game. I can’t go look for better evidence. I am forced into publicly speaking, where my appearance, demeanor, and off the cuff word choices are the meat of the discussion. These things are not necessarily germane to the topic at hand. No truth can be derived from how I look or sound on camera, my poor off the cuff word choices, or my delivery. The audience will absolutely judge people on these things, which is why those who wish to persuade in the public arena tend to look the part.
This is something that hurts a lot of good ideas, even true ones. I think, while I disagree on his conclusions, Curtis Yarvin actually has a pretty good understanding of how power and incentives work in our society. The problem is that his rambling style, his deadpan demeanor, and his appearance absolutely poisons the well on his ideas — even before you pit him against anyone else. Put him up against a practiced public speaker, put him against Obama for example, and there’s no way anyone would ever listen. They’d look at Obama in a suit and tie, listen to his delivery style, and he’s carrying the day, not necessarily because he’s correct, but because of things that are irrelevant to the truth of the issue.
This is actually a problem in trials. If you know how to make your opponent sound like an ass or your client sound sweet and innocent, you can move closer to victory. This is something touched on in “A Few Good Men” much earlier. The attorneys are preparing their clients to take the stand, and one thing the tell them point blank is to not call Santiago Willy. The reason is that such a choice of words “Willy” instead of “Santiago” subtly reminds the jury that Willy Santiago is a formerly living human being, dead at the hands of the accused. Even if they’re not supposed to think that way, human psychology works that way. And thus bringing in an audience brings in the very human biases of those humans.
Writing removes the human from the equation, leaving only the argument. It doesn’t handicap the author to only the information crammed into his brain before the debate. It doesn’t allow extraneous information about the speaker themselves to change the public’s perception of the content apart from the quality of the actual argument. Writing also has the advantage of allowing citations that the reader can cross check. I can come at you with citations, references to ideas, mathematical equations, or other logical theories, link to them, and let the audience see and understand where I’m going. Writing, because you can edit, also allows these arguments to be presented as well as the writer is capable of. They have full control of the wording, and have plenty of time to polish their writing style and present their ideas in their best light.
Having two people argue in writing tends to keep the debate honest and about the ideas rather than about stylistic choices. I love reading the rat-sphere debates for just that reason. I read one side of the debate, look into the sources, and then look into the other side, then the original rebuttal of the contra, back and forth as they argue about a topic. They have to have the logic and the facts because they can’t sway the audience with anything else. They can’t put the other guy on the back foot by bringing up a new angle, the opponent has time to research it and find a rebuttal. He can’t simply be better dressed — there’s nothing there but the words themselves. The victor is determined by his argument, whether it’s true or not.
There's not much I disagree with you here. My point was not to sing the praises of "live debate" uber alles but to point out specific aspects that remain useful and difficult to replicate in the written form. Namely the ability to tease out someone's position with higher precision, and a better opportunity to root out dishonesty. There's obviously quite a lot of aspects of live debates that are easy to game or just distractions.
I don’t see why you can’t tease out specific aspects of an argument. The argument is laid out before you, and if something is poorly defined, or inconsistent, or a logical leap is made, you can point to that explicitly and point out the mistake. If in paragraph 3 you’re arguing that freedom means “freedom from external control,” than in paragraph 5 argue that people in America are less free because they are not provided free healthcare and education, there’s at least a potential inconsistency, and it’s easy enough to notice and point out. In fact, especially in papers where citations are used, it’s relatively easy to point out if a source used doesn’t say what the person using it in an argument says it does.
The thing I like about written arguments is that they don’t give you ways to hide. If you make a mistake it’s there on paper or on the website, and anyone wanting to question your ideas can do so at his leisure. He doesn’t have to catch you saying it at the time, he can read it, reread it, check your sources, work through the logic, and find it.
I'm not saying you can't! It's just harder to do with asynchronous written exchange. If you tried to transpose any of the verbal exchanges I highlighted into a discussion on the motte, they'll quickly become impossible to follow threads that are several comments too deep and that take several days to play out. I think people realize how annoying it is to be repeatedly pestered by small questions over time, so the reaction with written debates generally tends to be to package clarifying questions with multiple arguments that anticipate potential responses (e.g. "Can you explain what you mean by X? Because if Y then [words words words] but if Z then [words words words]"). Even if both people are acting honestly, this is a lot of work and can get quite tiresome because you're wasting a lot of time on arguments that were never going to come up in the first place. It's even worse in the case where someone is acting dishonestly, because the medium makes it much easier to just ignore vexing questions, or one of the preemptive arguments gives away the blueprint for how to continue acting dishonestly and evading detection.
I suppose i can see it in online fora, though, I don’t really find it too hard personally, as I said since everything is public and easily read through from beginning to end. I find following things like YouTube videos much more difficult simply because it’s almost impossible to go line by line without missing something. This is one reason I tend to be more suspicious of people who cite YouTube videos or podcasts as evidence. It’s a bit more difficult to really dig in (at least for me) because I’m constantly needing to pause and back up and see if the person really said what I think he said.
What I’m mostly thinking of is blog posts that directly oppose other blogposts. Scott Alexander does these on occasion and other bloggers do as well. So in that case, you’re reading the entire argument in one go as a multiple paragraph article about something, then someone else writes a contra-[blogger_name] on [topic] and they go back and forth until they are satisfied with the outcome.
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My concern is chiefly that video and theatrical debates tend to allow magic tricks and chicanery that a text simply doesn’t allow. A person giving a speech can easily elide parts of his argument he thinks (or knows) are false by stating the forcefully or pounding the table. If I’m doing a video, I can select images of my opponents that make them look stupid, evil, or weird (this is often hilarious during American political campaigns when they tend to show a photograph of their opponent mid snarl, or take speeches completely out of context highlighting the one line in a ten minute speech that sounds bad). If I’m selling a dubious idea on video I can use computer graphics to make it seem like it will work, and carefully avoid mentioning the physics and mathematics that show it doesn’t.
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