IP

Devil’s advocacy injects normative rigor into a group inquiry—but in quite a specific way, namely by containing a predictable well of enthusiasm in a given direction.

Groups tend to “cascade” in the direction of least resistance (...)  (... )Thinking together is riddled with pitfalls, but we can’t really claim to live together without doing it. That is why we need devil’s advocates: they safeguard group-deliberation from the inside. The devil’s advocate defends faith and justice by being in the group but not of it: by keeping the group divided against itself, she holds a space for truth against the pressure of consensus. A devil’s advocate is, for instance, well set up to hunt for as-yet unshared information, since for her the sharing of information is never an attempt to be on the same page as other people.

Indulgence in excess is so easy, self-restraint is so hard. If social media exaggerates these problems, that is also a kind of virtue: perhaps we have never been able to see, so clearly, what it looks like when we all try to get along. It’s not pretty. You can leave Facebook or Twitter, but you can’t really leave the ugliness behind. Technical skill is essential to informing our judgments, but it cannot be the ultimate ground of our getting along with one another. We cannot ask the authorities, experts or science to do all our thinking for us. Sometimes, we need to think as a group, and that means we cannot afford to cynically dismiss “devil’s advocacy” as a term of opprobrium. It has to become an honorific.

by  Agnes Callard in  Examined Life. Daqui