I do not think you should ever expect the Chamber of debate to be well used compared to other forums. Obviously, debates like this take considerable time investment and aren’t going to occur every day. But, in my view a forum that produces the occasional gem is probably more worthwhile than one that produces eons of crap.
This debate was pretty excellent. The standard very, very high throughout. I enjoyed both positions and think both were very well explicated. The heavily metaphorical approach worked well and was entertaining. I also appreciated the break from the ‘quote and shoot’ approach.
Here is my breakdown:
In Tab’s first post, he argued that there was room for indivdual maneover, but that his verision of ‘inveitabilism’ leads to the view that the path of societies as a whole is determined:
What I mean to say by this is, throughout history, despite there being implicitly a diversity of choices to be made at any one point, overall, mimicking pre-determinism, only a select section of the starting populations would ever remain in existence, namely the ones who acted to follow exactly the path delineated by the best solutions to certain problems. Solutions which existed, in hypothetic form, prior to the event.
I felt this initial line of argument had promise. However, I feel the response from Pav somewhat missed a key element of Tab’s argument - that Tab was allowing for personal freedom and for decisions freely made to have an effect. The cheerio’s example, for example, was about how one person could trigger something in a society to happen - an example which Tab correctly defeated with his response that he has already allowed for this: that his argument was that this can only happen when the socitey at whole was in trouble. I couldn’t see much trouble for Tab’s position after Pav’s first response.
However, in my view - Pav delivered a surefire real hit a bit further on:
Inevitabilism would indicate that anytime a fucked situation exists that there will be a trigger to set it off, however, this fails to take into account the fact that an unstable system not presented with a trigger will still maintain.
This point may be devastating, and I feel it is something Tab should have explicitly answered. However, if Tab does answer this in his final post, I can not locate precisely where (perhaps a disadavntage of his eccentric style?). This is certainly a disadvantage, in my eyes, for his inevitablism theory and a hit well scored by Pav.
That said, I do not feel that Pav’s one mighty blow was enough, and during the debate I personally felt that much of Pav’s posts were skirting round the edge of relevency. I think it was a tough one for Pav - you let Tab start which means he got to define the debate, and in my view Pav never fully caught up with the way it had been defined - preferring to talk about the freedom of individuals and the limited scope effect of that freedom, without latching on fully to the debate about societies and the general path of human kind. This is probably seen best in his final statement:
The Compatabilist believes in mobility, horizontal, vertical, rotational and circular mobility. In other words, the Compatabilist understands and accepts that there are going to be aspects of his own individual experience that are beyond his control, but that there are also aspects fully within the realm of his control. To wit, while some things have been determined, many things (quite possibly, most things) have not.
Thus, despite the fact that Pav defined, defended and supported his own theory excelently, I personally feel the debate went to Tab.
Post Edit: I’ve just read Anita’s commentary (I didn’t read other commentaries before - I thought it fair to give mine uninfluenced). I agree with everything Anita is saying, I guess we differ on votes cast as I am going more the style of debate-marking which says that the first speaker gets to define the motion, as it were, and thus it was Pav’s responsibility to respond to Tab’s arguments about societial inevitability. The fact that I am also struggling with the idea that the two sides are mutually exclusive (Anita) is a weakness for Pav as he did no set his account up clearly in a way that would refute Tab’s initial position.