A Primer on Debate Etiquette

I would first like to make it clear what the purpose of this topic is. Unlike the Boiler Room Forum Rules, the information listed here are more guidelines and generally not reason for disciplinary action if violated. However, this is not to say that they should be ignored. By following these guidelines, the quality of your argument and the quality of the debate as a whole can be drastically improved.

1. Do not post if it contributes nothing to the discussion. Examples of this include just posting "I support this position" and especially "I really don't care about this issue". The latter you should not post at all; the former you should provide reasons for. Unreasoned statements do not provide any form of debate.

• *eats popcorn*
• "I am pro-choice." (Being the whole post).

2. Avoid Rhetoric. What I mean by Rhetoric is statements that are often clichéd and mean very little, as well as frequently being intellectually insulting. Regardless of whether you consider them to be correct or not, it is best to avoid such phrases. Statements such as

• ”Abortion is murder.”
• ”Conservatives hate freedom.”
• "Liberals hate America!"
• ”God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!”

Are all examples of rhetoric to be avoided.

3. Avoid generalisations. Generalisations are frequently incorrect, or at least not entirely correct. They are often based on stereotypes and thus hardly accurate.
Examples of generalisations would include:

• All supporters of welfare are lazy and/or unemployed.
• Every middle-easterner lives in a mud hut.
• Everyone from the Deep South is a redneck.

4. Avoid generalisations of a political position. You should also avoid generalising a political position, as you must remember that although a particular label such as 'liberal' or 'fascist' have positions on issues that they traditionally follow (for example, liberals are often seen as pro-choice), it is relatively rare to meet an individual that agrees with every single position attributed to their ideology. Assume nothing about the views of your opponent that you do not know they definately believe.

• "You're a liberal, so you must be for affirmative action!"
• "How are you a conservative if you don't support gun rights?"

5. Have and use sources. This is pretty much a given. Have sources for anything that needs it. Sources must be available to view by other posters. It is not good enough to say that your teacher told you it, or that you read it in a magazine article you found. How you present your sources is up to you; you might embed the link in a statement when initially posting, or may only provide it when asked. Either is acceptable, provided that you do actually have and provide it when requested.

• My teacher said that most Muslims are extremists.
• I read this article in a magazine that I lost, but it said that most crime in Norway is committed by immigrants.

These are both not acceptable as sources.

6. Be careful about calling bias on a source. A source being biased does not immediately discount anything it has to say, and believing such is actually a logical fallacy (ad hominem argumentum, for reference). It does, of course, call the source into question and if no supporting unbiased source can be found (in particular for news stories) it is reasonable to not accept such a source.

• "NARTH is supported by conservative Christian groups who hate homosexuality, so that study must be wrong!"
• "Everyone knows that Michael Moore is biased against the right-wing, so everything he says is therefore incorrect."

7. Avoid logical fallacies. A logical fallacy, as the name suggests, is a common pitfall that an argument often falls into. An excellent list can be found at the Nizkor Project, and I highly recommend at least giving it a look. Logical fallacies weaken or actually cripple your argument, and it is best to avoid them to begin with (though they are not always easy to spot.) A special mention for the Red Herring logical fallacy; ALWAYS avoid this, as it has a reputation for derailing a thread rapidly.
A few examples of logical fallacies are:

• "All Muslims are terrorists." - Spotlight Logical Fallacy
• "Lots of people believe in God so therefore God exists." - Appeal to Popularity
• "If we allow gay marriage, we have to allow people to marry their dogs too!" - Slippery Slope fallacy
• "We don't know where all the matter in the universe came from, so God must have done it." - Argument from Ignorance

8. Debate is based on logic and reason. You are expected to be able to bring reason and logic to all your arguments. Using the reasoning that your faith tells you it is best is not acceptable in a debate, as the opponent can use exactly the same argument for their own side, rendering the entire faith argument worthless. The only exception to this is when you are discussing the nature or logic or faith itself.

<clap>

ROFLMAO

Socrates, meet Cadian Empire.

What do you find so hilarious? Your input would be valued in improving the primer.

While I grant this, there are some sources not even worth considering as accurate. If someone links to Stormfront.org for information regarding ethnicity, for example, are we really expected to hunt down our own sources to counter it? It seems to me that an additional responsibility should fall on those posting sources to use something at least defensible as the backing for their information instead of the assumption that any and all links provided are worthy of consideration.

I'm glad someone posted this. I almost did it myself, but I'm glad that a Mod did it first. I would also like to point out a few other things, which you may feel free to add to the first post:

Either-Or giving two choices, of which only one is correct. Example: We must invade Iraq, or we can have a mushroom cloud over New York.

Appeal to Setiment using emotion to overpower reason. Example: Picture of baby pandas being slaughtered, caption says "Become vegatarian"

Flaming attacking someone's character instead of their argument. Example: "Bush is a liar," instead of "we found no WMDs"

Non-sequitor no logical connection between two points. Example: 2000 Americans died in Iraq, so I hate Bush.

Circular Argument see name and example. Example: "Communism is bad because it failed. And it failed because its bad."

Socrates, did I feel a little liberal leaning in your examples? I trust that you'll be completely neutral in your Moding.

Socrates was invited to the moderation team because of his neutrality. There is no reason to question it because of a perceived political leaning.

But what is Socrates' position on Hemlock?
ROFLMAO

Sorry, I had to do it.

He found it preferable to escaping from his sentence. ;)

Socrates was cool, he was a revolutionary of his time. You on the other hand are so new, liberals don't exist on this forum.

A very valid point, which is why I draw attention to this part of my guide:

Either-Or is more correctly known as the False Dichotomy, which is a logical fallacy and thus already under guideline seven.

Appeal to emotion, which is also covered under the logical fallacy guideline.

Either an ad hominem or a personal attack, both of which are logical fallacies noted in the Nizkor Project Fallacies page. These are also subject to the forum rules, rather than being usable guidelines like most of this guide is intended.

I will add this if I see it happen a lot. Often, things are not non-sequiturs but indeed statements that are logically fallacious. It is also a logical fallacy, albeit not one covered by the Nizkor Project’s page.

Also under logical fallacies.

I purposely used both left-leaning and right-leaning for examples. I take every precaution in avoiding bias in my decisions, and if you feel you have been treated differently due to your political affiliation please feel free to contact me and I will explain my reasoning.

"Transcripts of eary Athenian policy debates reveal a populace moved more by eloquence and rationality than demagogues and fear-mongering. Thankfully, this type of human governance wasn't allowed to take root. Athen's great experiement ended after less than two centuries, when, in 338 B.C., Philip of Macedon's forces invaded the city, inflicting on its inhabitants the eternal fate of the noble and enlightened: to be brutally crushed by the armed and dumb.--America (the book), The daily show

The internet is not a really good place to promote eloguence and intelligence, those who are truly interested in meaningful debates have being following these guidelines long before you posted them, those who are not interested will not take them seriously even if you tatoo those lines on to their genitalia.

Maybe, but I do not take such a fatalistic view on this matter. If this guide helps a single person to improve their argument, then the time I took to plan and write it was well spent. I disagree with your conclusion about the internet; where else it is so easy for people of different cultures and values to come together and have them be largely free to express those ideas with lessened fears of social stigma? Socrates may well have approved of how the internet allowed reasoned views come to the forefront without the pressures of popular opinion.

umm... can't you just tell them to use the dialectical process?

And why does it matter what Socrates thinks, the laws he discovered are more important than his possible opinions on the internet.

So then what action are we to take? It seems on the one hand you say that sources being overtly biased does not mean they can be disregarded but a lack of supporting unbiased sources is grounds for dismissal. Wouldn't that mean then that without unbiased sources to begin with sources should not be accepted if they are severely biased, something contradicted in your guide?

In other words it seems you are saying simultaneously that you can't dismiss sources for bias but can dismiss sources for bias.

It is a rule of thumb and it really does depend on what the source is about. A biased source quoting a news story that cannot be found at an unbiased source is one that should not be accepted; a scientific or logical argument should not be disregarded due to the site it is on. It is more a call for care in regards to the latter, whereas the former is something that is acceptable to disregard with lack of a unbiased source.

agreed to almost all of this.

I think, though, that it is reasonable sometimes to call a source into question. Not just to to say that because they support a particular position they're wrong, but it is reasonable to suggest that, say, in-house data from a particular agenda group needs to be backed up

Good advice. I look forward to the debates!

I think what you're getting at is that just because an unreliable source makes an assertion, it doesn't automatically mean that the assertion is wrong. However, an unreliable source shouldn't be accepted as proof of the assertion it makes either; rather, demonstrating the unreliability of the source merely discounts it as a legitimate source of evidence, whether the assertion it makes is true or not.

May I suggest that wikipedia be in that list. ANYONE can write an article there, and that makes the truth factor exstremely skecty.

A study on Wikipedia found that it has approximately 3.9 errors per entry. Encyclopedia Britannica has 2.9 errors per entry.

Actually, I would suggest that depends on the specific article. Checking the history of the article, the discussion page, the citations within the article, and checking for things like peer review, as many of the articles are, can tell you if the article is worth taking seriously.

True, I just mean as a general statement, don't say "Oh...a wiki article" and immediatly say: "Well, he's right."

Thank you. I look forward to a well-moderated Boiler Room. :))

EDIT: after reading your post a seond time, I realize that some of the things that I listed as "not included" were implied. But hey, it was late.

I look forward to these new rules. Good luck Socrates!

No source is unbiased however. Those claiming to be such, are usually the most biased in reality.

*

Abortion is murder, is more like the logical basis of an entire factions argument, rather than rhetoric per se.

"Abortion is murder" is literally untrue, and in any case Socrates means using that and ONLY that as your arguement--IE, arguing with only pure rhetoric/morality and no actual, you know, facts.

So would be the statement, "Hitler is a murderer" aswell.

I think this is entirely the wrong place to start this debate.

EDIT: Lamuella is right, this doesn't belong here. Disregard this post.

What about sources not available via URL, such as actual books? Not everything is online.

Include a citation useful enough for others to locate it. In the Big Book of Facts by John Doe, Pages 87-89, it said...

I would take this opportunity to point out that a "slippery slope" is only a fallacy if one does not establish the existence of a slope and that it has a low coefficient of friction.

Basicly, if past actions in a given area show a trend towards a envisioned conclusion, then to ignore the probability of that conclusion occuring is its self irrational and illogical.

however, as any situation can be argued to have "a trend towards a envisioned conclusion" if you are fanatical enough, it's best to avoid this line of argument altogether and find one that bears no resemblance to "man on man -> man on kid -> man on box turtle"

Micheal Wong's essays on debating.

Every logical fallacy and dishonest debate tactic known to the common man is shown and with examples. Worth bookmarking for reference and reading.

Actually Wong's is one of the lesser fallacy guides. Here is are better ones:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/

Hmmm... It seems I have a reply that is past due.

This is an online forum, not the works of Adam Smith. You cant possibly expect people to follow all of those rules.

They're not rules, they're guidelines. And all of them are common sense in debate, really; there is nothing on here that is incredibly outlandish.

at least, not since we removed the rule about only being able to post if you are holding the conch shell.