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Notes -
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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