I keep a perennial list of topics that had made me think, “ooh, that would make a good post.” The present one has sat there for years, but I never was inspired to flesh it out until now, prompted by a couple posts over at Dynamic Ecology.
Meghan Duffy wrote about teaching with in-class debates, in which (grad) students are assigned different positions on an academic topic and will be expected to argue for one position and against an opposing view.
I mulled over writing a thing how I thought debates were possibly more harmful than educational, but I also didn’t want to look like I was picking some kind of fight. (Nor do I want to pick one, either, but a dialogue, on the other hand?).
Then Jeremy Fox asked, “Why don’t ecologists have big arguments anymore?” in which he observed that the literature used to be filled with people taking oppositional stances on a variety of ecological questions, but of late it seems to him that we’re not arguing like that much anymore.
After both of these, I feel just a little bit like my hand has been called. and it’s time to channel these thoughts through my fingers. Not in the bolt-of-lightning way, just the typing way.
I’m not a fan of debates and arguments because I think they rarely help us achieve what we want, and while there is some utility, there are enough adverse consequences that may go along with the approach that it’s not a thing I like. I prefer dialogue. I understand debating is useful for people who go into professions that require convincing people to make dichotomous decisions, so I suppose this is important education for trial attorneys. But for the rest of us? Asking folks to argue for one side and against an opposing side, or choosing to do so because that’s what you think is true, just isn’t that constructive. Because when we’re looking to find solutions to problems, and when we are trying to understand the perspective of other people, the oppositional approach to two contrasting outcomes is either an oversimplification or false model of how we go about solving actual problems or learning how the world works.
In debates and arguments, what flows after the initial statements is the expectation that you continue to advocate for your side and and that you should be arguing against the other side. If you’re assigned to debate, you’re not expected to demonstrate intellectual growth beyond your initial positional stance. You might have a more nuanced understanding from the debate, but usually that’s a side effect rather than the central outcome of a debate. Even if you are confident that your side is wholly correct, doing this as an argument is not going to be as effective in convincing the people you’re debating, compared to a dialogue in which you work to find a common understanding.
With respect to this post that you’re (still) reading: Yes, I’m here to disagree with Meghan and Jeremy, or at least, I’m saying that arguing and debates are generally bad for education and scientific progress, and that’s not what they were saying. If we end up having more dialogue about our posts, then my goal wouldn’t be to prove them wrong, but to have a conversation in which we try to understand one another’s positions and try to position ourselves in the other person’s role. I am open to changing my mind, and they should be open to changing theirs, and after this dialogue, then I would imagine that all of us should have a better understanding of the situation and have our viewpoints evolve a bit. That doesn’t seem to happen with debate and argument, but it does with dialogue.
I concede that sometimes we need to decide to be in favor of a thing or be opposed to a thing, but in most circumstances, isn’t dialogue best? A good example about a situation where debates aren’t helping as much as dialogue would is about solar development in the deserts of the southwest of the US. As I am writing this, big energy companies and other developers are pushing hard to destroy large stretches of the Mojave desert to turn them into big solar farms. Those who don’t want these massive solar installations see this as needless habitat destruction. They look at all the urban rooftops without solar panels and argue that we should fill our cities with solar panels before paving the desert. I see their point.
As for who favors plowing over the desert for solar farms? Aside from the fatcats who want to extend their monopolies on energy supply, some environmentalists are in favor of these solar farms because ramping up carbon-neutral energy is a greater priority, and that eventually we’ll need solar power from our cities and from solar farms in the desert. While the people who want to stop all desert solar farms might argue that this is a straightforward and simple issue about corporate greed and desert protection, others will point out that there’s a lot more going on here and if we really want to learn about the situation — or come to a sociopolitical resolution — then we best struggle with the messy details. Those messy details won’t come out as well in a debate as they will in a dialogue. A debate accuses the other side of getting it wrong, but a dialogue interweaves information to come to a more sophisticated understanding. Of course, when this issue goes to court, one side will argue one way, and the other will argue the other. But if we’re trying to identify real-world solutions and deal with complexity when coming up with workable plans, then arguing from two poles isn’t going to help us as much?
I agree with Jeremy that the literature in ecology isn’t filled with the big arguments like they used to happen. What’s up with that? Jeremy brought out a number of examples of earlier arguments about competition v predation, density-dependence vs. density independence, null models, plant competition models, the utility of microcosm experimentals, bayesian statistics, and so on. He lists some main players in these arguments that took place mostly across the prior century:
Robert MacArthur
Bob Paine
Alexander Nicholson
Victor Bailey
Herbert Andrewartha
Charles Birch
Ted Case
Jared Diamond
Don Strong
Dan Simberloff
Dave Tilman
Phil Grime
Jim Brown
Peter Kareiva
Steve Carpenter
Brian Dennis
Rob Peters
Steve Hubbell
Does anything strike you about that list? I couldn’t help but notice that there are three more Roberts than there are women.
At that time, weren’t women ecologists too? Yes, they were. But maybe we’re not talking about them as much, because they weren’t allowing themselves to be drawn into these arguments?
Does an increase in gender representation in ecology in recent decades have something do with the waning of the argumentative spirit in the literature? This is the first thing that came to mind for me. Jeremy presented 9 hypotheses to account for the decline in argumentativeness, and number 9 was gender. (For the first eight, plus more in the comments on the post, see here.)
Even though Jeremy hypothesized that gender might play a role, I disagree with him on the proposed mechanism. He suggested: “Ecology used to be a male-dominated field. As the field has become more gender balanced, norms of scientific communication have changed. Publicly criticizing the work of other ecologists is now widely frowned upon, or at least less widely accepted than it once was.”
I don’t imagine that gender representation has changed much about the acceptability of public criticism. I don’t think that men nowadays are somehow refraining from criticizing the ideas of other men because a higher proportion of their colleagues are women. After ll, there is still a ton of highly-frowned-upon-behavior perpetrated by men nowadays in ecology, and how it might look doesn’t stop it from happening.
My favored hypothesis for the decline of arguments in the ecological literature is tied to an increase in collaboration, as well as gender diversity. Papers have far more authors than they used to. Those earlier arguments in the literature were about a small number of guys arguing against other guys, and they were the only ones authoring their papers for the most part. And there were other guys egging them on and taking sides. Nowadays, papers have a lot more authors, and those author teams are more likely to have women. Back in the day, journals could be filled with manuscripts handwritten by argumentative men who send it off to their typist to send by post off to their favorite journals. Nowadays, when we write up manuscripts, it’s usually a team of authors collaboratively working together. In this team, is there as much hunger to systematically write takedowns of other research teams. Teams are not single-minded, and because teams are more creative and come up with better ideas. This is especially true when women are involved.
What I mean to say is that perhaps we are doing science better nowadays because women and more diverse teams are involved. A lot of those historical arguments in ecology were stupid in the first place and it was folly to pick a single side in those debates1. I think the contemporary collaborative teams that we run nowadays are not going to get into such purposeless arguments because they see that nobody wins those arguments and they don’t move the field forward. Instead, we get together and have working groups, and write synthesis papers and actually wrestle with the complexities and solve these problems together, and develop new problems together. So I think more women involved has made our field all the better as these arguments have gone by the wayside and we now can act more likely deliberative adults who can dialogue rather than debate.
Which is why I’m not too keen on having debates happen in the classroom. As best I can recall, I only was involved in a single in-class debate, and that when I was an undergrad in Evolutionary Biology. I was assigned the debate position of creationism while some others in the class were assigned evolutionism2. Let me tell you, I kicked so much butt because any student of these culture wars knows that young-earth creationists, in the pure absence of facts, can out-debate evolutionary scientists. When we were done, my professor asked me with some level of concern if I believed any of that stuff. I replied, “Of course not! But that’s what you assigned, eh?” I didn’t learn anything about evolution and I didn’t even learn what creationists might genuinely think, but I learned a lot about their debate tactics. I imagine if I assigned classes something similar about (say) solar developments in the desert or about the utility of null models in ecology, we’d get similar debate tactics rather than a more high-minded dialogue.
How can we get prompt dialogue? I think it’s fine to bring students together to represent different perspectives or positionalities and discuss them with people with opposing views. I think it works best if you have several different perspectives, so instead of working from polar opposites, you have the opportunity to explore a variety of views and then discuss the merits of how they fit together (or don’t fit together).
In support of this claim, please note that in all of these debates, the resulting outcome has ended up being some combination of “it depends,” “it’s more complicated than that,” or “it all depends on your perspective.” I would say the one exception is a debate in eco/evo that wasn’t mentioned before, and that’s about the importance of mutualism between bacteria and eukaryotes as a critical factor in evolution. History has shown that one had a clear winner, and her name was Lynn Margulis.
yes, this was bad pedagogy.
Totally agree, Terry. I've been thinking many of these same things since reading those other two posts. I approach understanding different points of view and engaging them to share science quite differently in my scicomm courses and workshops. The central ideas are articulated in this paper that details a values+goals+storytelling approach to inclusive scicomm: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/hwi/vol15/iss3/27/. I've also been pondering how to write up how I facilitiate this for students, but that's not alive in the world yet. All this stems from me (a) doing competitive speech and debate in high school and (b) coming from an extensive family that loves to debate but is also very conservative. Debating has *never* worked, but dialogue with individuals has. Most of the people I work with, teach, or train these days have similarly fraught situations and actually want to do more than argue. It's important we give them models and skills for that. It's also vital that we don't imply to students (or colleagues) that debate works. (See all the literature on why the deficit model is a dead end.)