I often joke about being against things I’m actually in favour of. I’m close to the stereotype facts and logic bro in my actual opinions, I have an almost religious pacifism and devotion to reasoned inquiry.... https://twitter.com/annieknk/status/1286952268265336838

...So I just want it to be clear I mean it sincerely when I say: debate is not a good method of truth seeking, consensus formation, or social resolution of doubt and does not deserve the high esteem it is held in in centrist circles...

... I think about things for a living, and have day to day experience of thinking through disagreement. I study what works and what doesn’t for inquiry. There’s no reason to think settling matters by ritualised quasi-adversarial disagreement will select for truth...

... the incentives it creates are the opposite of consensus building. In fact the good debate does is incentivising the production of strange new positions or exploring logical space. This genuinely has its uses but it’s not how we generate support for action on climate change...

... I suspect that the real fantasy is something like introducing some niceties and pleasantries into the condition of percent culture war. So we still all argue online all the time, but the ideal of debate is that we generally recognise ad hominem as bad while we do so...

... maybe that would be nicer than the status quo. But be that as it may there’s no particular reason to think it’s a less fractious, better informed, or more accurate state of being.