Can internet debate be "solved"?

30-minutes of feisty discussion between Brandon Hendrickson, Matt Arnold, and Ross Richey, followed by 30 minutes of (even feistier?) audience participation.

A few months back, Scott Alexander argued that attempts to "solve" debate are doomed. Brandon thinks that's wrong — though he agrees that a lot of people who are trying to solve it are going about it the wrong way.

He's been experimenting with a new form of debate that embraces the messy, frustrating work of helping other people change their minds... and think that it shows potential for making communities that disagree beautifully. The trick is to

1. do it in friend pairs,
2. dramatize the conflict, and
3. use Bayes to keep score.

He's written this up as "Can internet debate be solved?", which he'll summarize at the start of the session. (Content warning: a lot of stuff about the Shroud of Turin.)

Matt begs to differ! He thinks that debate itself may be the wrong container. A claim like "the Shroud is authentic" looks isolatable and scoreable, but it's usually embedded in a posture: a whole way of attending, trusting, dismissing, and affiliating.

A staged fight, however well engineered, tends to discipline propositions in a claim out on the tip of a branch without surfacing the load-bearing posture. What gets underneath a stance is a different set of moves: listening, noticing, curiosity, and checking assumptions, from Authentic Relating games. Until "Why does this matter to you?" is addressed, debating the Shroud of Turin changes no one.

Fight us! (And watch us fight each other.)