Showerthought: Spending $25 on a used book of classic debate fallacies completely changed how my club argues

I dropped $25 at a library sale on 'The Art of the Argument' by a random old professor, thinking it'd be a dry read. It actually gave us a cheat sheet for spotting straw man and ad hominem attacks mid-conversation, and our last two meetings were way more productive. Has anyone else found a cheap resource that leveled up their group discussions like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

abby83611d ago

Dug through an old forum archive once and found a PDF called 'The 25 Rules of Disputation' from some medieval university. Completely free and it basically showed us how to stop wasting time on people who just repeat themselves louder. We started timing everyone's turns at five minutes max and suddenly nobody could afford to ramble. Feels like the cheap stuff is always the real game changer because you're not trying to force it to work to justify the price.

lily57411d ago

Right there with you. Snagged a PDF of "On the Art of Debate" from some 1500s rhetoric professor. For free. It had this thing about "three strikes" - if someone repeats their point without adding new evidence, you just move on. Started using it in our local group and it cut the circular arguments down by like eighty percent. Nobody gets to just say the same thing louder and call it a win. Cheap stuff works because you actually use it.