The art of debating is not to be openminded to delusions being true and truths being false, the art lies in making your audience fall victim to that and to end up believing your opponent's ideas and opinions are brutally flawed (regardless of your own being true).
My approach has as a foundational idea that debating is far more about destroying and mitigating the opponent's ideas than it is about having good ideas yourself. Once in a while you will lose a debate by following this philosophy of debating but it's not about winning nonstop, it's about playing the game of debating like a bloody canvas on which all blood shed by you had to be shed and all strikes you direct at the enemy demand a lot of time and energy from them to defend against.
I will never be the best debater at just writing a tonne of points/text and coming out a champion from that alone. I am the one to annihilate ten lines of what you wrote with one sentence. It is not easy to debate like this, it just looks easy because it revolves around efficient, minimised effort in actual written debate (the real effort is in the thinking and strategising).
If you step to me in the debating arena, know that I am seasoned, tactical and will rip your ideas to pieces while giving you ideas that are slanted so that you don't quite know how to fight them without putting in a lot of text and effort.
New 'about me ~ RM's philosophy of debating.
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The art of debating is not to be openminded to delusions being true and truths being false.
I admire your enthusiasm and self-confidence.
But there is something fundamentally amiss with the above statement.
And I will refrain from making any further comments concerning the article which is #1 of this thread.
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@zedvictor4
People often confuse the science of reasoning with the art of debating.
It's something I do not personally believe in or agree with and have found great success in separating the two, both in terms of my elo on the website and in the way I approach a heated debate.