Most politicians know that in any public debate, persuasion, charm and oratory count more than do mere facts.
Viewed through this seductive lens, it’s understandable how one could feel that any topic would be rendered clearer through the filter of debate. In today’s polarized society, though, the desire for debate is not so much to render a final truth as it is to see one’s own side represented. It is often entertainment via conflict, with little regard for any truths that might be squeezed out in the process.
In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates concludes that rhetoric is no more than flattery, wherein a speaker wins over an audience by causing them to identify with that speaker, and not necessarily by presenting a superior argument. And indeed this appears to be the tack taken by all modern political debaters, for whom facts are fluidly convenient, necessitating a retreat to practised charm.
While surely flawed, peer review’s imperfections are flattened out by the scientific requirement of reproducibility. A new truth is not accepted until the observation is repeated multiple times in multiple environments by different investigators. And even then, the caveat is that all of this is true only until further notice, when new data offer the opportunity to unseat the dominant paradigm.
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