clash

What’s good, world? Now, imagine that I said that in binary, like all computers do, obviously — that’s why all those TikTok ARGs with seventy likes use binary to encode stuff, right? Super cryptic, I’m always really freaked out by them man, yeah; the day somebody makes an easy-to-google web-based tool for decoding binary, those are gonna be cooked, but it’s nice not living in that world at all. For now…

Yes, I am this bad at introductions in the real world as well. I know you weren’t wondering that, because you’re very polite (after all, you clicked on the link to this article, didn’t you?) but you may find it affable of me to disclose that.. maybe. Hopefully. I’m Geosmin, and I’m here to rant about anything that fits under the obnoxiously wide umbrella I’ve casted for this whole blogging effort. I’ve tried this a couple of times, have never stuck to it, and am hoping that a shorter format — and more peer pressure — is able to make it stick this time. Now, I’m not gonna waste any more time as I usually have in previous attempts at getting into this; let’s chat about arguments.

Arguments and Debates

These might be synonyms to you, and probably for good reason given how the general experience of being alive has gone over the past few eons. In the realm of this post, however, they aren’t. I want to examine the value of discourse, but to do that requires acknowledging that almost nobody values discourse and aims to implement its benefits in their day-to-day lives, nor are we actually prioritizing implementing it into our wider society in a healthy manner — this is why the overwhelming majority of people have a negative experience with debate, discourse, or rhetoric in general. We’ll get to that though. I’m not here to give you a thesis statement, though; I’m here to rant. I’m complicated, I guess. Also, as I alluded to at the start, examining the value of discourse is gonna require some definitions. Sorry. You can call whatever I describe whatever you want; it doesn’t matter that Thing A is called ‘an argument’ and that Thing B is called ‘a debate’ here, but that you come away knowing how to participate in a healthy Thing B using well-constructed Thing As, and don’t categorize everyone who is passionate about the value of Thing B as a Thing B-bro. But man, fuck debate bros. Just know that no kid running around asking you to ‘debate them’ is lasting a second in actual competitive debate, which exists and produces adult children that are annoying in entirely different manners. Yep, that’s right — finance majors. Getting off track, though.

For the purposes of this blog post, an argument is an individual point you want to make about the world. This can be something that is absolutely true (“The sky appears blue”) or something that is absolutely not (“Human rights are weird”) — you may be used to thinking of ‘arguments’ at least a little bit in this way for more complicated things that aren’t really observations but points made based on observations, but really, any judgement made based on an observation or other measurement of the world should be considered an argument. Arguments make a claim about the world and then back it up with a warrant, the reason for why the claim must be true — anything not expressing both a claim and a warrant is not an argument. Arguments are benefitted by a stated impact, why you should care about the claim provided that the claim is true, but lacking an impact does not prevent a rhetorical construct from being an argument; it just prevents it from being a useful one.

An argument need not seem necessarily debatable because even all near-absolutely true arguments, such as the sky appearing blue, are still arguable. Nothing stops you from running up to this sort-of-normal conversation between strangers and saying, “No, it actually doesn’t. It seems green to me, even.” An argument made in bad faith is still an argument; far be it from me to advise you on how to deal with bad-faith arguments this early in my treatment of discourse, but I will say, saying “that’s a bad-faith argument” goes a lot further than you might think, and it would certainly qualify as engaging in a discourse — when you define a discourse like I would, at least.

A discourse, throughout my discussion of all of this nonsense, is going to refer to the exchange and interaction of arguments. They might be totally opposing, or not opposing at all, but the odds are that most arguments made about the world introduced by two different people about the same thing are going to clash somewhere. My use of the word “clash” here comes from my background in extracurricular NSDA-organized debate as a high schooler — there, where two teams are placed on diametrically opposed ends of a resolution for action by the United States government, ‘clash’ refers to when arguments directly interact in conflicting ways, and it is most useful as a noun. In technical debate, a generally-accepted rule is that if you do not respond to an opponent’s argument at your first opportunity [1] then it is to be treated by the judge as true. This is obviously completely intractable for a real-life debate (which I’m using as a synonym for discourse here and in the future when used by its lonesome) but does present some useful insights: even in a debate where sweaty high-schoolers have prepared for hundreds of hours just to survive the round with dignity, a pretty substantial portion of the opponent’s argument is accepted as true. This is at its worst extreme when you impact to something horrendous like nuclear war and they only impact to, like, job loss or whatever — Who cares about jobs when the entire world faces nuclear winter? [2] — but there are also debate rounds where both of you draw impacts from the exact same root cause, immediately rendering large swathes of the ‘flow’ [3] completely off-limits.

Enough with the technical end note B.S., though. I’m telling you all of this because it is hopefully useful. It will certainly be useful for understanding the series of posts I’ll be writing about discourse, rhetoric, and their utility in our day-to-day lives. In fact, I expect a really annoyingly large proportion of my science writings to reference this post / series of posts. Seriously. I also just think rhetoric is a wildly useful tool for everyone to possess and improve. I feel that that is obvious enough to not feel like I need to write an exposition section justifying, like, caring about how you communicate with others. The utility of, like, arguing with other people, though… I can see how that might be more nebulous! Let’s chat about it real quick.

Clash is a Measurement

Competitive debate is a zero-sum activity: at the end of the round, one team wins, and another loses. If you engage in zero-sum discourse in the real world, you are, at best, a doofus. This doesn’t always include instances where someone has agreed to do that with you, but it certainly can. As a result, the function of clash varies between discourse in a zero-sum format and discourse where you’re both acting first and foremost as human beings. In competitive activities, clash represents the frontlines; this is where you spend the overwhelming majority of your speaking time, or you’re behind. The goal of this speaking time is not to resolve the clash as it occurs in the minds of you and your opponent, but rather to resolve the clash in the mind of the judge. Indeed, entire debate ‘careers’ can flop on arrival simply because you have no way of knowing what the judge is thinking — reading judges may perhaps be the only reason I learned to read body language, and I get worse at it every year I am removed from doing that.

In a real-life interaction, clash simply represents where you differ on an issue with another person. Honestly, no matter how bad the opinion is with which you are clashing, there’s never an expectation that you actually make an effort to resolve that clash. What most people want out of a discourse-type interaction is to feel that the totality of their opinion is heard and respected, not just the clashing proportions, and what people get the least out of these is respect and true attempts at listening to the parts of their opinion subject to clash with others. [4] Thus, the idea of clash in a real-life discourse provides a very useful tool for providing that — it helps you pick out the parts of their argument that matter, provide them the most attention instead of the least, and generally improve interaction between the two parties — but also a useful way of measuring exactly how you differ from another person on a given issue. This is, of course, pretty obvious — I’m not saying it to you now because I think it is new or brilliant, but because I think you might not be using clash in this way. Even without going into arguments wanting to win or deliver a loss, we still tend to treat clash as where the “action” is, myself included; and that’s just not productive. Instead, clash should be viewed as where the data is. Generating and perceiving clash is just another way of finding out the exact shape of the gap between you and another individual on whatever the issue it is you’re clashing on; and this gap is what you should be using as a metric if you’re interested in persuading people effectively — which, more often than not, involves judging someone as being far outside the realm of being influenced by persuasion. Truly, the most useful rhetorical principle is the one they don’t teach you in speech class: kairos. Typically understood with respect to time, space — here meaning the individuals targeted by your persuasion — is an important dimension to it as well. Your breath is best wasted where it has the smallest chance of being wasted. It doesn’t matter if the difference is 86% vs. 90%; if you’re gonna waste some breath, you waste it on the 86%er.

Conclusion

But shit, I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I am a little bored of being self-righteous about argumentation; that’s not even why I’m here. This series of blog posts (but not the whole blog) will explore my feelings on rhetoric and persuasion, and will eventually grow to encompass the general moment we live in as well. My next actual posts will be.. hm… well, a science article is a must, I’ll probably focus on something like that in the immediate term. After that, lord knows… something, current-event-y? Truly, lord knows; we’ll see. Thanks for reading my rant, and the approximately 800 billion semicolons contained within it!

End Notes

[1] This is a between-speeches paradigm. You get a set amount of minutes to speak per speech, and speeches are organized by block. The specifics of how this is handled vary by event; in public forum, a particularly haunted format, claims made as early as the very first position speech may be responded to as late as the last rebuttal (which is technically the second opportunity for the opposition, but the first in which people expect them to actually respond). Events in which only the affirmative can be said to truly adopt one position are much more strict about this, as the negative solely exists in opposition to the affirmative. In public forum, the negative is expected to provide exposition / original positions as well. Why is it like this? Honestly, a bit of “both-sides”ism. The idea of two ideological opponents duking it out in the marketplace of ideas is much more idealized in the collective unconscious than the more-judicially-tilted structure of affirmation and negation in policy and Lincoln-Douglass forms of competitive debate; other appeals to this in public forum include “cross-fire” questioning periods that are different from the cross-examinations and direct-examinations of policy yore, as well as the stated goal of having the NSDA PF Final Round be judgeable by the parent of pretty much any competitor — an admirable and certainly well-intended goal.

[2] Because of the information in [1], this is a much less effective argument in public forum than it is in policy. It is also less effective in Lincoln-Douglass because the value/value-criterion structure is an inbuilt buffer to the utilitarian frameworks that yield nuclear winter as the end-all be-all impact it is in policy debate. The more technical / “national circuit” the debate tournament is, the more likely your judge is to treat nuclear war arguments the way they would in a policy round.

[3] A ‘flow’ is a sheet of paper, or sheet of a digital spreadsheet, used to keep track of the progression of arguments speech-by-speech in competitive debate.

[4] If you’re reading this and going “that’s not true, I give this out like candy!” — Congratulations, you are not most people. The fact that you are even making an effort to read on your own places you well outside the league of people who get too caught up thinking about their own opinions to truly listen to those of others. Also, as I say above this; nobody is expecting you to offer this to homophobes or any other bigots of that general milieu, or anything truly objectionable. In fact, they’re expecting you to provide as little quarter as possible to these folks.