Which, I agree, doesn’t necessarily make him smart. That’s why all these easily impressed idiots who have fallen for the Jordan Peterson/Ben Shapiro Potemkin Village of Intelligence are always bleating “debate him! debate him!” Somebody told these chumps in high school that structured debate was the highest form of discourse and that “winning” one was de facto proof of one’s intellectual superiority… and they ran with it well into adulthood.
IMO, if someone demands a public, structured debate, they’re not to be taken seriously. Debates favor the person who is able to communicate their ideas, good OR bad, effectively. They do not determine the quality of the idea, the efficacy of the policy or ideology being discussed, nor the moral rightness of the debater.
Some of the most foul human beings to ever have existed have been master rhetoricians, able to convince thousands, even millions, to go along with their objectively awful ideas.
