The art of debate | Avery Morris | TEDxLFHS
Transcriber: Leonard Ryunosuke Reviewer: Mujtaba bakhet When I tell people that I’m on the debate team, I generally get one of two responses. The first being I could never do that. The second. Wow. People have always told me I would be great at debate. I love to argue. Well, both of these responses illustrate a real problem with how we view debate today. Debate is seen as a fight somewhere. An argument is seen as a fight, and the winner is the person who can talk the loudest, who looks the prettiest on stage, or who can garner the most support. Yet debate is so much more than that. It's about who is the best speaker and who can illustrate their points the strongest. Now, this isn't all just a shameless plug to get you to try and join, to try and get you to join the debate team. But you should join. This is a shameless plug to get you to reevaluate the way you form an argument and an opinion. Because real debate needs facts, logic, reasoning and refutation to hold up. So I'm going to tell you the story of the first time I remember losing a debate. So I was with my mom and my younger sister in the car or my older sister in the car, and we were driving home from school and I told them what I learned that day, that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the whole world. My sister immediately shot me down. She said, Actually, Monica in Hawaii is way taller than that. I started screaming at her. I said, No, you're wrong. Little spoiler alert. I was wrong. So actually, Monica is a mountain in Hawaii, but it's like a volcano. And if you go below sea level, it's about a mile taller than Everest. I didn't know that at the time. And I had learned from my teacher that Mount Everest was the tallest. So I believed it. And I fought to defend that, to defend that point just with words. My sister would win, but in a fight. But I fought to get that point together even though I didn't have all the information. So how can you avoid looking like a complete idiot in an argument? Well, you need to learn how to build an informed argument, and the first step to that is understanding the question and the context to the question. So if we look back to the mountain example, if we had posed the question what is the tallest mountain, including below and above sea level heights, I would have had the chance to think, to examine my position because I was would have thought that my does my statistic apply to above or just below sea level? And I could have understood that in the context my statistic was irrelevant and there were other possibilities to what the answer of the question could have been. And this doesn't just apply to mountains, because when you are building a point in a discussion, you need to know what you're saying. You need to understand what the question being asked is for this question. I was I didn't understand if we were including below and above sea level, so I wasn't able to build an informed argument. And as we come to topics that people are more passionate about, people more often forget to look at the reasoning and the context behind the argument, which is very important to formulating and defending an opinion. Secondly, you need to understand the argument from multiple and all relevant perspectives. So if we go back to the monarchy example again, I Mount Everest was the only mountain that I knew the height of, not the height, but I knew that I was the tallest. So it was the only mountain I had heard of. But if I had examined other mountains, I probably would have come across mountains. That height was included below and above sea level. And in that case, I would have been able to re-evaluate my argument in the context of the question and understand why my sister thought that I was wrong. Furthermore, this applies to lots of arguments. Often people come across as ignorant or in in discussion because they have not considered all the people who are involved in the argument. Everyone. There are lots of different opinions than yours, and even an argument that can seem black and white in your opinion, can be seen as very colorful, colorful and someone else's. So in order to form an argument, you need to look at all the responsive perspectives. And lastly, and most importantly, in order to form an argument, you need to look at the side that's opposing yours. This is extremely important in debate. We call this the con to your pro or the affirmation to your negation. This person inherently thinks you're wrong. The fact that there is a debate means that there's a person who thinks that you're wrong. And this this is very important because this person has a reason why they think they're right. They think this reason is very right and they are going to defend it. Yet, if you look at the reason why you’re right and discover why they are wrong, you will be able to prove your point in an argument. So if we go back to the mountain example again, we can see that my sister thought she was right because she was looking at the statistic from below and above sea level. Yet, if I rephrased my argument to be that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world above sea level, I would win that argument every time in the status quo. When we debate, we use quick judgments and we make and we avidly defend those, even though we later often come to find that we were misinformed and answered it wrongly. Real debate requires you to slow down and become a better consumer of information in order to prove a point. An argument. In order to do this, you need to look at all perspectives and contexts in order to answer the question, and you need to look at the question in a context. Additionally to looking at the opposing side of the argument, if you do all these, you will learn to debate what's in your heart with your mind and letting your instead of letting your heart dictate how your mind perceives information. So the next time you're in an argument or a discussion and you're getting frazzled, I implore you , don't raise your voice, but improve your argument. Thank you so much! Join the debate team!