I¹ recently got into a debate on Discord - a thing that I never recommend doing - but something I did yesterday nonetheless. The topic of the argument (accessibility in videogames) is not all that relevant for the purposes of today’s post / vent / rant, but I did want to get some incomplete feelings out about a question I’ve been thinking about: “when are you right, and when are they wrong?”

As the old saying goes, if everyone you meet in a day is an asshole, you’re probably the asshole. My position in the debate (more accurately positions, because as in all Discord arguments, you get dragged into different rabbit-holes by random passersby) was largely unpopular, and quite strongly so in some corners. There is a part of me that wants to be sensitive to this - with some exceptions, I generally respect the intelligence, dignity, and character of the people in this server, and some people I respect seemed to vehemently disagree with the position that I was taking. Maybe I really was barking up the wrong tree?

On the other hand, I’ve been in actual rooms with people who I’ve respected the intelligence, dignity, and character of, and I’ve taken similarly unpopular positions, and I have disregarded those positions out of deference only to find out (sometimes years later) that I was not only right on the specific issue at hand, but my respect for the other people in the room was ill-founded.

It probably goes without saying that it is very difficult to know whether I am in the former situation or the latter. I am already aware that many positions that I believe strongly in are deeply unpopular, and many positions that I think are stupid are very popular. “I should trash a major component of my worldview because some people on Discord didn’t like it” seems like a very ill-advised intellectual policy, but part of the reason I was considering it in the first place is because of the sort of life I’m living now - especially when compared to what my life used to look like.

My life now is fairly insular - I mostly only talk to (and in some cases live with) a very select group of likeminded peers, who are almost universally left-wing, queer, and broadly anti-establishment. More specifically than that, they’re people who care a lot about art and art criticism, and they share a lot of my core views about artistic cohesion and responsibility. I was aware these views were unpopular in some corners (including the Discord server where this flare-up took place), but I had no idea how unpopular they were. The tenor of the conversation quickly turned confrontational, which of course prompted me to ratchet up my defensiveness, which of course led to people sixty messages down encountering the argument for the first time through me frantically and aggressively firing off responses to every single good and bad faith response that I was receiving, which of course led to those people assuming I was the aggressor and reflexively adopting the misinterpretations of the other participants… etc. (This is why you never get into arguments on Discord.)

In contrast, towards the end of high school and the beginning of college, I was heavily involved in organized debate organizations. I was routinely tasked with becoming an armchair expert on every topic under the sun on a weekly-to-biweekly basis, I was constantly around people who challenged my beliefs and who I challenged in turn, and I was literally getting regular quantitative metrics about how well I was persuading people. (People, in this case, mostly being suburban parents who volunteered to judge tournaments - which is not a bad index for the general population as things go!). On top of that (and sometimes because of it), I had a much more intellectually diverse group of friends, which made it so I more regularly had to test my theoretical ideas in the real world.

I don’t regret having made the friends that I’ve made or assembling the social world that I have - it’s been pretty tremendously great for my mental health and day-to-day comfort. I do wonder, however, if that insularity has made me less capable of persuasion. I feel myself impotently grasping towards ideas far more often than I did then, and it is generally not a great feeling to feel like you’re being outclassed by yourself at sixteen years old. I certainly have more knowledge than he did, and I think my worldview is nuanced and well-founded and his is stupid - but I do sometimes feel like he was a lot better at articulating his stupid worldview to others.

Of course, that’s a judgement based on me trusting the memory of how good sixteen-year-old me thought he was at debate and persuasion - maybe he was also shit at it and just didn’t have the self-awareness to recognize it². It’s also me assuming a lot of things about how well I’m doing in the present. Friends and acquaintances still complement me on my rhetorical ability, or at the very least they recognize it as one of my strengths. Granted, these friends were almost all made after the “Debate era,” such as it is, and so they don’t exactly have a reference point to compare to, but it’s at least evidence that I haven’t become actually bad at discourse.

I guess in a perfect world I would like to have the C.A.S.I.E. social enhancer upgrade from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which pops up little prompts on the screen to show you whether you’re winning at conversation or not (a thing that is of course normal to want and possible to achieve). I would at least like to be able to conclusively know whether an argument is failing because my articulation is bad, or if the ideas are bad, or if the person I’m trying to convince is bad, and not have to make that judgement on my own as a helplessly biased party.

My core frustration (and the thing that motivated me to continue the original argument long after the point where I should have hung it up) is that organized debate was my C.A.S.I.E. social enhancer - it was the thing that let me know why arguments succeed or fail, and for as much as I’ve been writing about complex ideas in the last few years, posting takes on my blog(s) has not been a sufficient replacement for it. It’s almost like being part of a serious, participatory institution where you’re constantly in dialogue with other people is more a more effective way to engage with and learn about something than doing it on your own. Who would have guessed?

Footnotes

1. You can tell I’m serious today because I’m capitalizing proper nouns. ↩

2. I doubt it, because if there’s anything I’ve never had any shortage of, it’s constant, sharp, and occasionally debilitating self-awareness! But it still may be possible. ↩