Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

If you could set up a debate between any two figures on any subject––and could be guaranteed that tens of millions of Americans would watch––what proposition would you want debated and who would argue each side?

The podcast host Joe Rogan made news this week by offering the vaccine scientist Peter Hotez $100,000 to be donated to a charity of his choosing if he participated in a no-time-limit debate with the vaccine skeptic (and 2024 presidential candidate) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hotez has appeared on Rogan’s podcast before, and says he would be happy to return and to talk one-on-one with the host about vaccines, but he declined to participate in a debate, likening such an event to a Jerry Springer episode. MSNBC’s Medhi Hasan, the author of the best-selling book Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, endorsed that decision, arguing that “experts” should not debate “cranks” and analogizing the situation to a historian of World War II debating a Holocaust denier.

The economist Tyler Cowen came down in a similar place in The Washington Post:

As a general rule, one should not debate publicly with conspiracy theorists. Some conspiracies may be true and should not be dismissed out of hand. But any discussion needs to start by demanding the best available documented evidence, and then subjecting it to rigorous scrutiny. This is very often impossible to do in a public debate, where the unverified anecdote is elevated and methodological issues are obscured or unexamined. Furthermore, it takes more time to rebut a charge than to level it, and in the meantime the rebutter has no choice but to repeat some of the other side’s talking points.

So when someone demands a public debate on an issue, be suspicious. Why can’t the supposed truth be established by other means? Is it really helpful to throw so many scientific questions into the boiling cauldron of our delightful but chaotic culture of public debate?

At The Daily Beast, Ben Burgis took a contrary position:

If a large chunk of the public is in the grip of mistaken ideas about these issues, part of the job of experts is to wade in and correct those ideas. Sometimes that means getting your hands dirty by engaging directly with people you might not like or respect.

Not every scientist is going to be a gifted scientific communicator, of course. Some people who do amazing work in their labs are barely capable of explaining to their relatives what it is that they do for a living. But that actually makes it more important that people like Hotez, who combine scientific expertise with a flair for communicating to the public, not shun debates with influential anti-vaxxers. Someone’s got to do it—and if not them, who? …

Hasan says that historians of World War II shouldn’t debate Holocaust deniers. Fair enough. As things stand, Holocaust denial is a fringe position, so there’s no particular reason for real historians to have to engage with it. But imagine a world where Holocaust denial was so popular that state legislatures around the country were debating proposals to remove any mention of the Holocaust from the World War II chapters of textbooks. In a world like that, I would want historians—or at least those historians with the requisite skills in communicating to a general audience—to debate the deniers every chance they got to expose their terrible arguments and educate anyone who was still educable.

It's far from an exact analogy, but anti-vaccine views are already too popular for there to be any point in holding out hope, in June 2023, that these views will go away if scientists refuse to “elevate” anti-vaxxers by talking to them. “Just trust us and don’t ask for details” is clearly not a winning strategy.

I am sympathetic to both of these arguments. Debates are not always worthwhile, but they are presently underrated, in my view, so long as certain preconditions can be negotiated. What specifically is the proposition being debated? And what is the format? (Written debates are most underrated. I am not interested in who has quicker recall or is a better speaker. I want the considered views of two people subjecting each other’s positions to scrutiny.)  

My advice to Hotez: Rogan back-footed you with that $100,000 offer, generating publicity for his show and causing some observers to imagine that you’re afraid to defend your ideas. Learn from his tactics. Reply that your reluctance to debate stems from your belief that RFK Jr.’s statements about vaccines are riddled with basic factual inaccuracies that would be difficult to litigate in real time, but that your reluctance is surmountable: If Rogan agrees to spend the money hiring a reputable firm to fact check all of RFK Jr.’s past statements on vaccines prior to the debate, and if Rogan issues corrections to his audience for any false statements RFK Jr. utters on his podcast, then you’ll come on for a debate, which will be subject to the same fact-checking process. Make reasonable truth-seeking requests. If they are granted, follow through and debate in service of the truth-seeking you negotiated for. That is how to back-foot RFK Jr. here.

The Lab-Leak Theory

After noting that a lot of what we now know about the work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes from independent researchers, Zeynep Tufekci urges more transparency from public institutions:

So far, some of the details about the Wuhan scientists who were sickened, including their names, have come from news reports citing unnamed sources, so some skepticism is required. But why hasn’t the Biden administration confirmed or denied these details?

Even though President Biden signed a law in March requiring the declassification of information about Covid-19’s origins by this past Sunday, his administration has yet to release that information. It needs to quickly declassify as much as possible of what it knows about the pandemic’s origins. In addition, the National Institutes of Health, which reportedly funded some of the research in China under scrutiny, need to be forthcoming too, rather than waiting for more leaks or laws forcing its hand.When people lose trust in institutions, misinformation appears more credible. The antidote is more transparency and accountability.

A Sea of Trouble

In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke argues that the plight of those aboard the Titan submersible is a reminder of humanity’s stature relative to nature:

We are clever, we human beings, but, in the grand scheme of things, we are small and procumbent before Nature’s God. The work that is being done by our rescue teams is remarkable, and worthy of our prayers and our applause. And yet each time I refresh my browser for more news of its progress, I am struck by a feeling of profound technological inadequacy. Most of the surface of our planet is covered with an element against which we are helpless. We cannot breathe in it; we cannot see through it; we cannot communicate when it is in the way. If it is warm and calm enough, we can swim along its surface, but, if we sink just a little beneath the waves, it will instantly crush us to death. Our machines pale in comparison to its power and size. At an air show, those enormous P-3 airplanes that are now circling the coast of Newfoundland seem miraculous. Above the vast expanse of the Atlantic, they resemble bluebottles. The search area, which has expanded since Monday, is now twice the size of Connecticut. The vehicle that is being sought is 22 feet long — a little over the size of a giraffe. Moments such as these put the world into perspective.

Should PornHub Have to Verify the Age of Visitors?

Last year, Louisiana passed a law mandating that adult websites require age verification. As part of a First Amendment challenge to the law, Elizabeth Henson, a military veteran and the spouse of an active-duty service member, submitted a declaration arguing against the requirement.

Her argument:

While pornography might be a luxury for some, it’s become an essential means for me (and many military spouses like me) to alleviate the mental strain and tension experienced during the prolonged periods of separation from my husband when he is deployed. Deployments can lead to loss of human comfort and intimacy, and a great way to ease the difficulty of this separation and meet our natural physical urges is through pornography—whether viewed alone or, especially, together as a shared experience. Similar to a dinner-and-a-movie date night, mutual masturbation while watching the same sexy video together has worked to alleviate our tension and keep us close as a couple during these difficult times apart.

Upon arriving in Louisiana, I learned that my ability to access pornography in this state would be significantly jeopardized. I do not have a Louisiana ID—meaning that I cannot use LA Wallet as proof-of-age online. Because age-verifying via vendor interaction with LA Wallet appears to be the chosen method for most complying pornography sites, I am left without access to this material ...

Even if there were a logistically simple way to prove my age and obtain unrestricted access to non-obscene content on the internet, I would be too concerned for my privacy and troubled by the government overreach to comply. Just this past week, Louisiana’s Office of Motor Vehicles was one of many government entities and major businesses to be affected by a massive data breach of third-party data transfer service MOVEit. Breaches of this sort seem to be increasing in regularity and severity, and I have no reason to expect that my sensitive information will remain secure with other vendors going forward. Although I am comfortable admitting here that I (along with millions of other adults) view pornography, I am deeply wary of providing my identity to any entity that will effectively open the gate to adult content on the internet just to then follow me around once I’m inside. I can think of few greater intrusions upon the liberty that I served this country to protect.

“Colleges Should Compete on Free Speech”

That’s the argument Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor Jr. advance at Real Clear Politics:

The University of Chicago and Purdue have a history of promoting free speech. The University of North Carolina and Vanderbilt have recently demonstrated a strong commitment to free speech by adopting institutional neutrality. While some colleges are now focusing more on free speech, they should go further and develop a strong reputation for promoting free speech values.

Why wouldn’t students want to attend great colleges that have cultures of free speech and academic freedom rather than Princeton, Stanford, Yale, or Harvard, where the culture stifles the free exchange of ideas? Why wouldn’t parents want their children to choose schools where students are not afraid to say what they think? Why wouldn’t more faculty want to teach at schools where academic freedom flourishes? Why wouldn’t employers want to recruit at schools where students are taught how to think for themselves, rather than to bow to orthodoxy? Why would alumni want to continue to give to schools that no longer support the core values they were created to promote? ...

As parents, students, faculty, and employers increasingly look to colleges’ records on free speech and academic freedom, more resources will become available to meet the demand. The annual FIRE free speech report will become more influential, and other measurements and reviews of colleges’ records on free speech and academic freedom will be developed.

Is the Culture War Upstream of Politics?

Kat Rosenfield is alarmed by the prospect of Donald Trump winning another term and argues in The Boston Globe that progressive overreach in the culture wars is making that outcome more likely:

The reactionary bent of our current political discourse has led progressives to adopt various positions that most people simply don’t find persuasive and that many would be reluctant to vote for. Organizing third-graders into racially segregated affinity groups, deriding things like literacy and punctuality as “white supremacy culture,” enabling the social transitioning by teachers of gender-questioning children without their parents’ knowledge: These things make normal people nervous, and you can only shut them down with shrieks of “racist,” “fascist,” or “transphobe” so many times before those words lose their power.

It is also probably not a coincidence that this penchant for rhetorical overreach on the left comes alongside a loss of trust in virtually every institution in which liberals currently wield power, from academia to media, public health to public schools. And while that loss of faith may be mainly manifesting right now as mere skepticism of certain progressive orthodoxies, it’s unlikely to end there. Indeed, the latest Gallup poll suggests that given a binary option—as we are in the voting booth—the stridency of our current moment will eventually be met with backlash, in the form of a population-level shift toward conservatism. This is how it unfolds: First you lose trust. Then you lose elections.

For more about the body of work on white-supremacy culture referenced in the article above, I recommend this analysis by Matthew Yglesias at Slow Boring and The Intercept’s interview with Tema Okun.

Provocation of the Week

Are we sufficiently ambitious in the subjects we debate? Samuel Kimbriel doesn’t think so. In a recent essay and a debate defending it, he acknowledges that there is risk in questioning the foundations of society and taking positions on how it ought to be, but argues that we should do so anyway.

He writes:

Whether you call it decay or decadence, the general feeling is that the experiment America has been running is flawed somewhere, and we are finding it very difficult to figure out where.

The left, where I largely operate, has been split on this question. One view is that the central areas of expertise that helped steward the American dream—economics, political science, Rawls style political philosophy, natural science—are basically sound. The burden of blame falls largely on those who have started to be alienated from these paradigms. The other faction on the left—which encompasses a variety of groups from Black Lives Matter to Bernie supporters—tend to think that there is something legitimate in the critiques of the status quo ante, and that we need space to consider those concerns honestly.

My own view is that our issues around both democracy and decadence stem from an understandable—but ultimately flawed—attempt to sidestep the intrinsic risk of thinking … In being entirely honest about what we do and do not know, and what we do and do not value—we are opening ourselves up to debate not merely where it’s comfortable (on data regarding inflation) but where it is more difficult (is economic growth a good theory of life?). I’m defending the space for these latter questions because we are already answering them and should do so honestly, but also because  these are matters about which many more people—not just those who went to graduate school—have a stake and feel the question with force. As I have argued elsewhere, any democracy worthy of the name has to open debate about ends, not just means.

That’s all for today––see you next week.

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