Wednesday: debate

I was wrong about my thinking that i was successful at debating.... Rab totally destroyed all of us.

The way he managed to outfox us reminded me of a slippery eel. i would really like see rab debating rab if you know what i mean.

Do debates ultimately have any real social value? I think this brings up ghosts of Nisbett.

i used to stay in a dormitory in high school, and we often had debates about what to do about our policies ( it was a self-governing dorm) . When i was dorm president, i was what you might call conservative reformer. I kept jougeikankei in place , but i emphasised the responsiblity of the seniors more than my predecessors. The system worked well because everybody trusted me as the dorm pres. the next term, the new dorm pres ( my classmate) was a radical. He involved the students in a debate about jougeikankei . after lengthy debates, i lost and jougeikankei was abolished, at least experimentally. Instead of the authority of seniors, we depended on everyone's good will for the dorm to function. I had pointed out that the pressure on everyone to perform their duties would dramatically decrease, while my friend said that it was better to rely on everybody's conscience to provide the pressure. Naturally, everybody wants to be the master of their own fate, so i failed to convince.

Ultimately, however, we admitted to certain failures in the new system, but this was after we graduated from the high school.

The bottomline is that i am a bad debater, and i want to improve, so i want rab to teach us about debates and convincing arguments.