What Is Being Open to Debate for a Public Intellectual?
What does being open to debate mean for a public intellectual? At lease one of these:
- You have public records of past debates you've had.
- You are looking for debate, e.g. you have an open invitation for people to debate you. (The invitation may have reasonable conditions or requirements.)
Note: This essay is addressed to public intellectuals using "you". If you're not a public intellectual, this kind of openness to debate may not be for you. In that case, this essay can help you understand how rationality works, evaluate public intellectuals, and see if this sort of openness to debate is something you'd be interested in doing in the future.
You (if you're a public intellectual) should have either actually participated in debates, or be clearly looking for debate. If you've haven't had debates, and aren't doing anything to show you're seeking debate, then you're not open to debate.
Being open to debate should also include at least one of these:
- You will debate a smart person who requests a debate.
- There is a reasonable process a smart person could go through to qualify for a debate.
If you're Chinese, you might only debate in Mandarin. That's reasonable if you aren't fluent in other languages. Someone could qualify for a debate by learning Mandarin to fluency. If you instead said you only debate people who are born Chinese, then there would be no way for most people to ever qualify, and that would be unreasonable.
You can have conditions or requirements for who you will debate, on what topics, in what format. But there should exist some series of steps a smart person can do to meet your requirements for a debate. That means you don't only debate people you feel like according to a non-transparent and presumably biased decision making process. It means you don't just debate people who you judge to be high social status or non-threatening. It means there's transparency about what your debating conditions are, and they're reasonably possible to met be intelligent, hard-working members of the public. Qualifying should not require a PhD or other credentials that exclude any smart outliers who prefer learning online or in libraries. You shouldn't say "I will never listen to arguments from someone without a PhD no matter their accomplishments, knowledge or wisdom."
It's OK if you're busy and too many people meet your requirements, so you publicly debate on a regular basis but not everyone would get a chance to debate you. You could, for example, have a monthly forum topic for debate requests and then do debates with the most upvoted one or more requests. That's a process there which a smart person could go through of basically being elected to the position of debate challenger. Similarly, if you're busy, you could have a process where they have to debate one of your associates first and if they win then they qualify to debate you. That debate could use an imperfect but reasonable judge. The person who debates instead of you should do a job you're satisfied with, or else you should assign the task to someone else or do it yourself. The goal here is reasonable processes, not perfect processes. Most public intellectuals today don't have reasonable processes for this kind of thing, and aren't trying to, and aren't open to debate, so there is a ton of room for improvement.
If you won't debate a person who asks, you should say who you will debate and why you have those rules or conditions. You ought to post the rules or conditions on your website so anyone can see what they are, evaluate if they're reasonable, and consider if they want to try to meet the conditions.
You can make the conditions a lot of work. What could someone do that would get your attention? Want them to read several books? Want them to write 100 pages about the matter? If you're busy enough that could be reasonable. It's certainly achievable if they care enough. By saying what your debating conditions are, you let potential debate challengers and your audience judge whether you're being reasonable.
If you want to be paid a million dollars per debate or will only debate people who get over a million YouTube views per video, you're excluding most smart people from debating you, and people will see that you're unreasonable.
If you can't or won't answer what it'd take to get a debate with you, then there's a problem. If you give criteria, people can judge if they're reasonable. If you won't give criteria, then maybe your criteria are unreasonable and you're hiding them. Or maybe you just don't want to debate (and don't want to admit it). Or maybe you don't know what your debating criteria are and lack the introspection skill to figure it out, in which case maybe you shouldn't be viewed as a great public intellectual.
If you won't give criteria that people could meet to debate you, then it looks like either you're avoiding debate or you're giving out your debating attention in a biased way and rejecting transparency to hide your irrationality.
Or maybe you just didn't know better and will change your approach after reading this essay. That's fine since debate policies are (to the best of my knowledge) my original idea. They're not a standard idea that educated people in our society should already be familiar with. I do think these ideas are similar to standard ideas, and people ought to quickly see why they make sense; what I'm advocating here isn't weird. You could see the upside and agree with my goal but also want to bring up some potential problems and get those addressed before having a debate policy; that's fine; feel free to read some of my other essays about these topics or ask questions on my forum or by emailing me.
Debate Formats
Also, the debate formats you participate in should be reasonably good for reaching conclusions rather than just bickering for a short time then giving up. We want to have ways to end discussions that are better than "I just decided to stop responding" (which allows anyone to just quit when they're wrong and biased or losing). But we don't want debates to take forever. The solution I developed and used in my debate policy is impasse chains. Many other reasonable solutions are possible.
Here's another debate ending policy that's fairly reasonable and is simpler than impasse chains. At any time, either person in the debate can announce that they'd like to end the debate. They must then write a closing statement: an explanation of why they're ending the debate, what their conclusion is, and their post mortem comments on the debate. Then their debate partner gets up to three followups: questions or criticism which the person ending the debate is required to respond to. Then the person who didn't end the debate may write a closing statement. Then the debate ends. Under this policy, you're always four messages away from being done with a debate: your closing statement plus three followups. This policy would prevent people from leaving in the middle with no explanation of why they're leaving.
The number of followup questions or criticisms could be changed flexibly for different scenarios. The number can be agreed on at the start of a debate or changed in the middle with mutual consent. For a really important debate between two famous scientists trying to settle a major controversy in their field, maybe they'd want to raise it to five followups or even more. To enable lower stakes debates with your fans who aren't used to writing a lot, you might reduce it to one followup or even zero. But if you're busy and want to filter out the people who are less serious, then using a larger number will help.
You can also change the length of the closing statement and followups. The length of three followups could vary from three sentences to three essays. A debate policy could say that someone ending a debate should write/say around 10% as much as they said in the debate, with a minimum of 300 words and a maximum of 3,000 words (writing/saying more is fine, just not expected).
Group debates involving more than two people are possible but policies for how they end would be more complex (some people could quit without the debate ending) and it can be hard to keep them organized and productive in the middle. I'm not opposed to group debates but I don't know how to make them work well. I've focused on figuring out how to make two person debates work well because I think they're an easier problem to start with and they're more important.
I favor text debates for the most hard, serious issues because text is more precise. Asynchronous communication is convenient for multi-day debates and for debates where people take their time thinking over and writing their next reply (so it takes too long for the other person to want to wait around the whole time). I also think debating in multiple formats is good, and people should do a variety of different things rather than stick to just one format. People should be flexible and interested in trying stuff out since in general different debate formats have pros and cons rather than one being strictly best.
Conclusion
You've now heard about concepts like public intellectuals being open to debate, transparency regarding debate, written debate qualification conditions, and debate formats. I hope that you (if you're a public intellectual) or any public intellectuals you respect will be interested. Public intellectuals who won't debate are making it hard for people who know about their errors to correct them. They're setting up the conditions that let bias thrive. Maybe they're overconfident and think they aren't biased or think that just trying not to be biased, with no structured anti-bias policies, is good enough (I don't think that's very effective).
In general, suppose someone has a criticism for you and they're correct. Consider what they can do to get that information to you. If you have no real answer, maybe that doesn't matter much since your friends and family can speak to you and no one else cares about you. But if you're a public intellectual who blocks correction from the public, that's a real problem. Intellectuals like that unnecessarily spread errors years after better knowledge exists. If someone is going to share ideas with the public, they ought to listen to the public some too, not have it be a fully one-way relationship.