Giving Weight To Online Words
It seems to me that political debates nowadays are a waste of time. Two people come together to debate an issue and wind up either talking about different things or don’t address what the other person is saying, much less provide concrete support for their arguments. There’s just too many tricks to fudge your way out of really committing to something and sticking to it. I blame the dependence of our electoral process on audio/video media. You can’t slow down what they’re saying and pick apart their words, weigh their meanings, and make reasoned judgments if their words are flying past you at the speed of speech. One candidate speaks, and the others have to scribble quickly on a paper pad to remember what to say in their rebuttal five minutes later. There’s no provision for going back at leisure and examining the merit of every spoken word. This isn’t just a disadvantage for candidates, it’s a detriment to the electoral process: it diminishes our ability to correctly choose the best candidate.
What we need is a shift from audio/video media to written text and an emphasis on constructing and critiquing arguments using logic and verifiable facts. No more hand raising. No more thirty-second answers to loaded questions. No more Jack Johnson versus John Jackson (see Futurama). In order to participate in the electoral process, candidates should have to present formal arguments on a range of precisely-defined topics. Then all the other candidates can take turns inspecting and critiquing each premise and argue whether their argument is valid and sound. It is only through a system like this that you can really get down to the heart of things.
I think a cool experiment would be to build a computer system, maybe a web site, that could facilitate arguments like these. It wouldn’t need to be used solely by electoral candidates. If you could guarantee that only real people contributed to the arguments and critiques in the system, then judgments made in that system could have real logical and political significance. Imagine if the system was very popular and many people read it, contributed to it, and deferred to it. Judgments made in this system could have an impact on real-world decisions.
I would pair this system with a public forum that facilitated interesting and relevant political discussions, where posted articles may be rated somehow by quality of their content, and highly-rated authors may rise to prominence and be heard by the rest of us. I’m not aware of any other such system.
Tags: arguments, debate, discourse, discussion, elections, online, politics, words
February 4th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I agree that if candidates were allows time to respond to questions in a thoughtful, logical, direct, and timely manner it would be a great addition to the political arena. However, there is one problem with your system. How do we know that the candidate is actually the one asking and responding to questions? I know that it is probably impossible to find a candidate who writes his/her own speeches these days, but at least by delivering the address personally a candidate offers the illusion that he/she does put thought into the stance on the issues. I don’t want to debate with Obama’s aid, I want to debate with Obama (and I *really* want to debate with Hillary). How would I be assured that the actual candidate is the one participating in the democratic exercise?
February 17th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Universities only create email addresses for real people, and only give them one. Facebook uses this assumption to guarantee that there’s a real person behind every profile, and thus each person has just as much invested as every other, which fosters trust and interaction. The proposed web site could assign email addresses tied to a subdomain (e.g. name@subdomain.domain.com) of the web site’s name, which are guaranteed to only be assigned to candidates. Or you could tie an account to a publicly-known email address, e.g. barack.obama@senate.gov.
February 17th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
As you’ve pointed out, the same problem arises with speeches: most candidates don’t write what they read aloud. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe it, or weren’t convinced of it when they first read it. In the scenario I described, it doesn’t even matter, because the system would allow people to come to definitive conclusions/solutions, or agree that one is not possible. Progress is made, and we can’t go back.
For example, candidates nowadays might say they’re for or against abortion. But if a valid, sound argument arises through this system that proves one side or the other is correct, or that neither side is correct, or whatever, then it doesn’t matter if each candidate believed what she or he said, because the issue was settled, and there’s nothing left to say. Either you were right, you were wrong, or there’s no point it talking about it ever again until something changes (like, say, the morals we can afford).