Jim talks with Jonathan Rowson of Perspectiva about a new social practice they're creating, the antidebate. They discuss the nature of debate, the spectacle of endemic polarization, why debate may be irredeemable, multiple ways of knowing, the Oxford Union debates, the debate apocalypse of 2020, the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate, the elitist aspect of debates, longtermism, the dialectic fallacy, presencing confusion, anti-debate as a practice, developing the form & facilitation skills, anti-debate trials to date, the current state of the art, setting a positive tone, choosing the question, the question bomb process, tableauing, why answering the question isn't necessary, swarming, epistemic seduction, drawing on Quaker Speaking, recruiting the enigmatics, prefiguring the culture you want to live in, scalability, disaffection with the ambient internet, and much more.

Episode Transcript

JRS Currents 041: Jonathan Rowson on Our Metacrisis Pickle

JRS EP127 - Jonathan Rowson on The Moves That Matter

JRS Currents 068: Jonathan Rowson on the Chess Drama

JRS EP154 - Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things

JRS EP155 - Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things

"What Our Politics Needs Now: Anti-Debates," with Peter Limberg & Conor Barnes

"The Anti-Debate: Experiments in the Art of Sensemaking for a World Gone Slightly Mad" - a film by Katie Teague

"Is War Natural? (and other questions)" - YouTube

Jonathan Rowson is co-founder and director of the research institute Perspectiva based in London. He is also the former director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and is a chess grandmaster and three-time British Chess Champion. His books include The Seven Deadly Chess Sins, Chess for Zebras, Spiritualize: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges, and, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life.