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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

> nationality

I mention it specifically because, in all the nationalities i have talked to, i.e. in my personal experience, the USA is the only one to have a high school debate club culture that's widely spread.

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Decades ago, 70's & 80's, saw a progression from the more respectful, objective debate style to the linguistic attack scoring style popular today. It's too bad, because back in the "early days" it taught how to collectively arrive at a solution. Today, not really.

At a minimum, I personally know of active school/university debate societies in the United Kingdom and Australia. And while it sounds like you've had some bad experiences, my personal sense is that the majority of people with formal debate experience are actually better, on average, at staying within the bounds of civil discourse.

Having said that, there is indeed an overly aggressive subset of the population that is, as I think you're suggesting, attracted to debate for all the wrong reasons. But based on the literally hundreds I've met, I'd say as a population they are on average more civil and more likely to follow norms of "fair argument". They are much more likely to aspire to be erudite policy wonks than to be angry talk show pundits. YMMV obviously.

Notably both of these countries are english majority. I went looking for german debate clubs and found that we have some, but also that they're relatively young (the national debating org in germany was formed only in 2001), and were mainly formed based on inspiration by the english language sphere.

I'm also curious what exactly you mean with civil discourse? I don't know which style you're referring to, but i've seen people who cared primarily about discourse being "polite", even if the most horrible ideas were being presented as valid.

There are many norms of civil discourse represented in debating traditions, but there is substantial variation. Still, two that are enforced in all formal debate I know are:

1) all participants have equal access to present their views, usually uninterrupted for at least some portion of time

2) all participants have equal access to rebut their opponent's views, so neither side has an opportunity to present an uncontested idea

These are important norms to keep more powerful, obnoxious, or charismatic people from having (as much) undue advantage in the contest of ideas.

I see these formal characteristics as orthogonal to whether someone has horrible views. Without guarantees of this kind you may find yourself on the wrong side of a power imbalance, and then you have no right to challenge said ideas in a fair contest.

Normaly there are rules of debate the main ones are

All debates are to a propesed motion.

Motion must make sense.

Time limits on speach for all participants.

Debaters must speak to the motion.

Pious motions normaly ruled out of order

No wreaking amendmenst are acepted.

No non relevent amendments.

I checked the same for France and they are a few but this is not something common.

There are debates at law schools (horrible exercise of corporatism favoritism, having attended to a few of them) though.

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