by Tim Sommers
Back in June, Dr. Peter J. Hotez, an expert on neglected tropical diseases and vaccines, made a splash when he categorically refused to participate in a public debate on vaccines with vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Dr. Hotez had been on Rogan’s show before, more than once, and said he would go on again – but not to debate. Among those “urging” him (to put it politely) to do so were Rogan (who offered him $100,000 dollars), Elon Musk (the richest man in the world) who said that Dr. Hotez is “afraid of a public debate because he knows he’s wrong,” a social media mob of thousands, and finally a pair of stalkers arrested outside his home.
Why didn’t Dr. Hotez just do the debate? I don’t know. But I think it’s because he knows that experts should not participate in public debates against nonexperts.
Maybe, I should mention why I feel qualified to address this topic. I participated in competitive academic and public debates, of various sorts, as a debater, a judge, and a coach for ten years. I have used debate to teach philosophy courses, and have written four academic papers on how to make academic debate more relevant to teaching and scholarship.
So, here we go. Top ten reasons experts should not debate nonexperts in public debates.
(10.) Science and scholarship do not advance via public debate.
As Dr. Hoetz said, “In science, we don’t typically do debates. What we do is we write scientific papers. We present our findings in front of a critical audience of peers to solicit their input and suggestions.”
(9.) Expertise on a subject matter is not necessarily correlated with rhetorical ability.
Charles Darwin discovered evolution via natural selection, but Thomas Huxley did so much more to help the idea gain public acceptance that he was more well-known than Darwin, in their time, and is now often referred to as “Darwin’s Bulldog.”
(8.) Knowingly are unknowingly, in debates debaters frequently end up making logically, causally, or statistically flawed arguments that still sound good.
That many people are not sufficiently well acquainted with logical fallacies like ad hominem, straw man, or false dilemmas is attested to by the fact that the fallacy of using premises that already assume the conclusion of the argument (“begging the question”) is constantly used these days to mean “raising the question.” Also, most people, including me, are terrible with statistics already without trying to evaluate them on the fly. Furthermore, try explaining the difference between cause and correlation to someone in two sentences in the middle of a debate.
(7.) There are a variety of rhetorical techniques that persuade without proving.
Back when I was convincing the Philosophy Department at Michigan State University to house the debate program (rather than, as is typical, the Communications Department), my main obstacle was the charge that debaters are Sophists. Philosophy was more or less founded in opposition to those who taught people to speak and persuade, not for the sake of the truth, but out of self-interest – because that is a thing that can be done.
(6.) Public debate rewards people who are willing to say anything.
Donald Trump.
(5.) Confidence and certainty win debates while expertise is all about qualifying and hedging.
In debating with an expert, you will hear things like ‘The best evidence currently available suggests…’, ‘Such and such is more probable, on certain assumptions widely thought plausible in the field…’, or ‘As far as we can tell the probability of this or that is around some number [much less than 99%]…’ How can that compete with the nonexpert who will tell you that ‘It is clear to any reasonable person…’, ‘No one can deny…’, or “With 100% certainty…”?
(4.) A debate implies a winner and a loser.
What, according to Musk, is Dr. Hotez wrong about? That the COVID vaccine prevented COVID completely? Or that it slowed the spread of disease? Or that mitigated COVID’s harms? That it was good or bad public policy for the government to spend some specific amount on vaccines rather than some other way? What other way?
A debate involves picking a particular resolution, the settlement of which will constitute “winning.” But in real world discourse on important matters, there’s no winning or losing because their no clear-cut final resolution – there’s just more discourse.
(3.) Experts can’t defeat nonexpert “spreads.”
“Spreading” is a technical debate term for an age-old technique. RFK exemplifies it. The debater simply puts out point after point at top speed without regard to the quality of the individual arguments, so that it’s impossible to respond to all of them. Whatever answers the experts give, questions remain! (as they say).
(2.) Such a debate implies that the nonexpert is on par with the expert on the subject of the debate.
Dr. Hotez has a medical degree and a Ph.D. He is a practicing physician who publishes his research in top peer-reviewed journals. Why would he debate someone with no discernable expertise in any related field, as if maybe RFK could also just walk into the Departments of Pediatrics or Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor (where Dr. Hoetz is Dean) or Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development (where he is a Co-Director) and offer some useful criticism of the work they are doing there. There’s nothing elitist about this. If I go down to a Laker’s practice and challenge LeBron James to a game of one-on-one and he won’t play me, does that suggest he is scared to play me because he knows I’ll win?
(1.) A public debate implies that nonexpert members of the public are competent judges of that debate.
How do we know the vast majority of what we know? Is it via intuition, reasoning, or experience? Nope. Most of what you know is what someone told you. Most knowledge is testimonial. The biggest problem with experts debating nonexperts is that most people are in no position to judge between them, to judge, for example, the efficacy of a vaccine or the cost/benefit analysis of the vaccine and various other mitigation measures. We need an expert we can have some reasonable faith in to tell us. No one can be an expert in all the various aspects of life in a modern complex society. Or if even one could, they wouldn’t have the time to be. Think about how much time (and trust, again!) it takes to pick out a college or health insurance. Having experts engage with nonexperts in public debates is the last thing we need. We need public institutions and experts that we can trust, at least to some extent or maybe debates between experts. But debates involving nonexperts don’t help. Such debates exacerbate and encourage the corrosive view that no expert can be trusted or, worse, that there’s no such thing as an expert.
A Short Postscript on “The Death of Standing”
Since I wrote this last month, there’s been a new and final, or possibly superfluous, nail in the coffin in which the Federalist Society’s handpicked Supreme Court is burying the once mighty and powerful doctrine of “standing.” Recall, standing is one of the main things that prevents courts from legislating, rather than judging, and under our Constitution all courts, including the Supreme Court, are empowered only to decide “cases and controversies.” Now, get this.
In April U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk banned the sale of the safest and most widely-available kind of medical abortion drug – a pill with a mix of mifepristone and misoprostol – not just in his jurisdiction in Texas, but across the US. Now, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has basically agreed with that decision (while keeping the injunction on hold). Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit majority claim that the FDA wrongly authorized the use of these drugs over twenty years ago. This can only mean that the courts have decided that they can do a better job of screening and setting standards for the availability of pharmaceuticals than the FDA (apparently, even without running new drug trials).
But the question is, for our purposes, where did they find people with a real harm sufficiently related to the relevant law to have the standing to challenge it?
Believe it or not, it wasn’t anyone who took the pill and had a problem. And of course it wasn’t people who didn’t take the pill. So, who was it? It was doctors who don’t perform abortions and don’t prescribe the abortion pill. How were they harmed, you might ask? Theoretically, they could have patients who if they hadn’t taken the pill, because it was banned, would now have a baby as a result. How is the baby that someone else had, because they were forced to, a benefit to doctors that might hypothetically see them in the future?
“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” according to the court, “Plaintiffs’ declaration illustrates that they suffer aesthetic injury” as a result of abortions. Aesthetic injury.
No standing? Just say you do/don’t like the look of something and I guess you are all set now.