> I wish we could have a formal debate...
I've thought for some time about the nature of present debates, and why they are useless and not entertaining. The web offers us a great opportunity to do better, but we haven't. As much as I might admire the motives of Foresight's Crit, Third Voice, and similar products for web commentary, they are doomed to failure. A disorganized collection of repetitive comments from self-selected hotheads will always be nothing but noise, so readers will turn it off (if not physically then mentally). Talk is cheap; /quality/ talk is where it's at, and that requires human judgment to craft into a product.
I'd like to see pages where debates on "tough questions" are presented. But they should be presented as a work authored by the judge/organizer from contributions by the participants. Here's how I envision it might be done:
The judge selects a topic question worded appropriately. Opening statements on either side are solicited, and the judge picks one or two from each side that are done well. These people will be the participants. The judge selects them based on how well they present their case, not their passion for it (except insofar as that makes their presentation good). The participants read all the opening statements, the judge makes private commentary to each author about their quality, and the participants then edit their opening statements for content based on that input. The judge then makes final edits and posts them.
Now that the opening statements are fixed, the judge solicits points of argument. These, too, are selected and edited for quality and relevance, and then presented for rebuttal. This continues until the participants run out of interesting and relevant points of debate in the judge's opinion (or perhaps when the judge decides that volume merits narrowing the scope of the debate and starting over). The judge then selects and edits the best points and best rebuttals and publishes them. Finally, the process for opening statements is repeated for closing statements, and those are edited and published.
The web allows a debate to take place over days and even weeks, with participants taking the time to carefully craft each response and give the judge time to organize, and still result in an orderly and artful presentation that takes the customer only minutes to read. That respects the value of the reader's time and gives em a reason to read the debate instead of a useless live chat or email flame war.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC