Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

This is really, really, really bad. @HeatherEHeying @BretWeinsteinhttps://twitter.com/michaelmoreno2k/status/1188175155240947712 …

Proceed with extreme caution. "Debate" as a formal school activity is a very strange phenomenon. The fact of a position being sophistry is immaterial. And there are strong hints in the full recording that the positions being advanced by the prof are put forward as an exercise.

An exercise toward what?

If that's what it is, then the professor is loosely playing the role of an opposing team, advancing arguments his students might face. He uses some terms that suggest that's what's going on. That said, the exercise feels way off target, but 'off target' isn't the same as bigoted.

"Off target" or even "bigoted" seem sort of beside the point, except on an exceedingly tilted playing field — the arguments are *really weak.* Is that not enough, in the context of formal debate?

As to the narrower point I think you are asking about, a transparently weak argument is not likely to be a winner, BUT obvious sophistry can be, and often is, in a formal academic debate.

I guess I'm still left wondering why we're making a subsidized, trophied event of creating Terrible People.

That's why I Ieft debate and then many years later blurted an attack on the very concept while cornered by students in a hallway.