Last week’s debate had before-and-after voting. Here are the results for the resolution, “The current pandemic makes it all the more necessary for the federal government to tighten restrictions on immigration.”
Though I won, my general view is that the standard debate voting mechanism is deeply flawed.
Notice: If you defend a position no one initially agrees with, you cannot lose. So as Robin Hanson explains, one of the strongest predictors of victory is simply defending an initially unpopular position. Alex Tabarrok also points out that the “undecided” debate vote share is usually implausible huge:
[T]he number of “undecided” swing massively in these debates and in every case the number of undecided goes down a lot, itself peculiar if people are rational Bayesians. A big swing in undecided votes is quite odd for two additional reasons. First, when Justice Roberts said he’d never really thought about the constitutionality of abortion people were incredulous. Similarly, could 30% of the audience (in a debate in which Tyler recently participated (pdf)) be truly undecided about whether “it is wrong to pay for sex”?
The other major predictor of debate success, I suspect, is which side can appeal to more gripping forms of slightly-less-than-obvious Social Desirability Bias. “Slightly-less-than-obvious” is the sweet spot. If the Social Desirability Bias is totally obvious, the initial vote captures it. If the Social Desirability Bias requires extended argument to establish, the audience won’t follow it – and neither will the final vote. The best way to boost your vote total, then, is to say something that instantly sounds great once you here it.
When you’re debating immigration before typical young Democrats today, for example, highly effective arguments include, “Immigration could hurt poor Americans,” and “All countries have the right of self-determination.” What makes these sophomoric debating points so effective?
1. The typical young Democrat rarely hears either argument, so it’s not reflected in their initial vote.
2. The typical young Democrat grasps the point with little intellectual effort.
3. The arguments superficially sound good.
If you want to win debate votes, you’ll figure out analogous arguments for whatever audience you’re facing. But once you realize how sleazy these tactics are, hopefully you’ll forget about winning – and focus on deserving to win.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
May 14 2020 at 11:03am
I think another issue is that there are likely selection effects that aren’t adequately conveyed in the initial statistics. For example, the average Soho Forum debate attendee probably leans in the libertarian direction (more so than the average person at least). It’s likely that the average pro-immigration attendee is much more sure of his position than the average anti-immigration attendee. This would give Bryan an advantage going in. A succinct way of putting it: it’s probably easier to convince a pro-immigration Republican or an anti-immigration Democrat to reverse their positions than it would be to convince an anti-immigration Republican or pro-immigration Democrat to reverse their position. The former two are likely more moderate, unsure, and/or less attached their current position by partisan mood affiliation than the latter two.
One way to deal with this of course is to ask people to give a percent value of their confidence in their current position, rather than just which one they prefer, before and after the debate.
Steve Brecher
May 14 2020 at 5:18pm
“all the MORE necessary [emphasis added]” — the topic framing itself reflects a bias for restrictions.
David Shera
May 15 2020 at 9:33am
I think you need a 3 x 3 table, rows are pre-votes and columns are post-votes. Then you could see how many (if any) moved from Yes to No or from No to Yes. Right now you are only getting the margins of the 3 x 3 table.
You also need the number of voters. I can’t really tell by the % alone.
Those pieces of information would give a much clearer picture, but not necessarily a clearer result.
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