Debating conspiracy theorists

And my reasons for declining

A prominent conspiracy theorist has recently been chasing me to do a public debate on various topics, and somehow tracked down my home address. This is my explanation to him for why I refuse to debate him, even though I love doing public debates in general.

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Hi XXXX, I got your stuff in the mail yesterday. Not sure how you got my home address.

I’d like to reiterate that I am not interested in debating you on any of your pet topics. I admit that these topics are interesting to me, but I do not believe it would be fruitful to debate things like your claims of Hillary Clinton having murdered dozens of people personally, nor your 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc.

Given my former professional background, I do admit that I’m something of an armchair expert on conspiracy theories, and that they fascinate me. I used to run a website devoted to them, and I think belief in them offers an explanatory lens for much of our polarizing politics today.

But, I must decline your invitation. Here’s why:

I believe debating conspiracy theorists is generally a fruitless thing, especially for a skeptic like me who prizes evidence-based discussion. Don’t take my refusal personally, but here are my main three reasons.

1. Gish Galloping: You often engage in a debate tactic known as the “Gish Gallop,” named after creationist Duane Gish. This is when you overwhelm your interlocutor with a rapid succession of numerous arguments, claims, and pieces of evidence, no matter how spurious, always shifting to a new line of argument the instant the last one is debunked. But the sheer volume of these successive false claims makes it all but impossible to refute each one in real-time in a debate setting, creating the false impression that the your conspiracy theory arguments are stronger or more substantial than they actually are. This tactic actually exploits the very format of public debates, focusing on the quantity of arguments rather than the quality, which detracts from a genuine examination of the facts and evidence.

2. Legitimization of your fringe theories: By agreeing to debate a conspiracy theorist like you in a public forum, there is a likelihood I would legitimize your views. Public debates confer a sense of equal validity to both sides of the debate, regardless of the evidence. This can elevate your fringe theories to the same level as my well-established positions on these questions (in all due immodesty), misleading a lower-info audience into thinking that the conspiracy theory deserves the same consideration as scientifically or historically validated information. People can’t be expected to be experts on these topics, and that’s something you exploit, knowingly or not— a public debate effectively places the conspiracy theory on an undeserved pedestal, giving it unwarranted exposure and credibility, if that makes sense, and viewers wouldn’t be equipped to know otherwise.

3. Promotion: In addition to legitimizing them, participating in public debates with conspiracy theorists can actually promote their theories to new and wider audiences. I have nearly 200,000 folks connected to me on various social media platforms and a debate with you would provide a platform for spreading your misinformation to them, many of whom may never have encountered your fringe views before. The nature of these debates can also make folks feel they have to immediately pick a side, rather than further evaluate the evidence critically, which can have further promotional effects. In other words, these debates tend to be polarizing, which creates further promotion on social media; should I debate you, when you and I and our viewers would share the debate online within our social networks, in order to show what a good fisking I gave you, it would further amplify the reach of your misinformation.

I love public debates and have engaged in well over 100 over the last 25 years, mostly on college campuses. But they were on legitimate academic topics, areas of inquiry, or social issues (things like the proper role of religion in public life, gay marriage (at The Matthew Shepard Symposium on Social Justice in Wyoming etc.), the existence of God, the historicity of Jesus, secular vs religious morality, evolution vs creationism, science and the magician’s art vs the paranormal, and the like).

But precisely because of my love of public debate, that’s why I’m politely refusing to debate you: my reasons are grounded in the understanding that the goal of a productive public debate is to foster truth and understanding based on evidence and rational argumentation. And when debates are hijacked by tactics that prioritize obfuscation and the pushing of unsubstantiated fringe claims, they cease to be a meaningful method of public discourse. This is especially relevant when it comes to harmful conspiracy theories where the aim is generally not to engage in genuine inquiry but to promote a particular ideological narrative wholly divorced from the evidence. (Similarly, I would never debate an adherent of QAnon, or a believer in the Satanic Panic.)

Respectfully,

D.J.