We need to fight against debating society journalism. Facts and opinions should not land based on who has the most articulate phrase or pithy quotation. A thread. 1/? https://twitter.com/keirshiels/status/1346744919797493760

Sticking two people on a stage together, with different oratory skill levels is like placing a heavyweight against a featherweight boxer. It’s deemed an unfair fight. So people like Toby Young pop up as “heavyweight opponents”

However Toby is more akin to an unskilled untrained heavyweight. The boxer expects a fight by certain rules. Toby will kick and throw and grab and the referees can’t enforce the rules. And the crowd love the dirty fight.

Some facts are hard to explain. The earth isn’t flat. It goes around the sun. The sun is unimaginably far away. T Rex lived closer to our own time than to stegosaurus. Explaining how we know these things to be true takes time. Paragraphs rather than a sentence.

School and university debating societies encourage people to develop opinions on the fly, to research quickly and to back up opinions with “referenced quotations” so whether George Orwell said something similar becomes an arbiter of fact.

Here’s the thing. Orwell was a novelist. He was not a psychologist. But make a comment about how people respond to rules and I GUARANTEE that you will have more Orwell flung at you than modern political scientists, sociologists and psychologists combined.

Debating societies don’t question the accuracy, relevance or context of a referenced quotation if it has enough punch. If it lands on the audience well it can overcome any solid fact. “Rome wasn’t built in a day” doesn’t mean “take time”. Its second half is “but it burned in one”

Context is key. And Toby Young has a debating society approach to evidence. Establish your opinion FIRST. Find evidence in favour. Become expert in it. Present it. Rebut/refute the opposition. The weighing of argument is the audience’s responsibility, not his.

Toby can hold his hands up and say he was wrong til he is blue in the face. But how he presents his evidence and his opinions has consequences. His position is always one of being right until he’s lost. There is no discussion. Only argument.

Two referenced quotations from scientists you have never heard of placed against two referenced quotations from scientists you have never heard of is peak commentariat debating. It takes DAYS to establish the context and background of a single sentence pulled from a paper.

It becomes pointless to debate people who don’t understand scientific statistics. You can’t argue against people who read “no statistically significant benefit” and whose opinion is “that sounds pretty decisive to me”.

(Footnote on above: flip a coin three times Lands on heads 3 times. There is no statistically significant data to suggest it’s a weighted coin. Flip it 100 times and get 99heads 1tails, there’s significant evidence. Sometimes you need more data to prove a true effect)

But commentariat debators would rather read a paper WHOSE CONCLUSION said “this should not be used as evidence against wearing masks” as evidence against wearing masks. Because they can quote one sentence both out of context and out of their scientific understanding.

Toby Young MUST be entitled to his opinion. He MUST be able to expostulate his opinion freely when he has an opportunity. He’s entitled to his opinion. But free speech doesn’t mean the right to an unfair fight where rules and truths are bent.

Toby Young’s argument should not land or fizzle dependent on the quixotic sophistry of his “opponent”. It should land or fizzle based on how much of it is bullshit.

It’s much easier to oppose in a debate. You just have to find a hole and keep poking. Sure but how do you know the earth is round? What if it isn’t? What about this theory? What if evidence is fake? Do you understand the physics? Explain the physics in a sentence? You can’t? Well

See? You just ram your fucking skeptic truck at someone until they fluster. You win. Throw in a shitty quotation “Author X said ‘ when the world can only listen to science, we’re doomed to have knowledge without life or soul’” (I just made that up)

But say that as an ad hominem attack on Chris Witty and you start to gain traction in a debate.

The problem is that life is not a debate. So many parliamentary debates are for show. People rarely change their minds because they’re used to being debators. Having their opinion and justifying it an barking at the opposition. It’s still the way we govern.

Debates are fine for philosophising. But they’re not the right strategy for nuanced discussion of complex information. There ARE important discussions to be had about the economic impact of lockdown, the safety of vaccines, mental health. But not as FIGHTS.

The unlicensed boxing matches between opinions pretending to be facts has to stop. It’s costing lives. It’s encouraging people not just to believe lies, but to deliberately seek out false or blinkered evidence. Like the person photographing empty OUTPATIENT corridors on SUNDAY.

We can’t pit scientists against climate skeptics, democrats against election conspiracists, the medical establishment against Toby Young. It elevates the authority of one and reduces the authority of the other by pretending that they’re equal.

I know that all opinions are born equal. But some are more equal than others. I think Orwell might have had something to say about that.

Fin.