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"The vote will be conducted as follows: Before the debate, the audience will be polled to see what percentage favor each speaker. After the debate, the same poll will be conducted again. The winner of the debate is whoever can shift the initial percentage in their favor."

This makes me a little nervous about voting NO as much as I'd like to. I suspect all sorts of fringe positions would be likely to shift people in their favor, if you give two competent debaters equal standing in front of a crowd. I think the consensus view is almost at a disadvantage.

@MingCat Excellent point, and you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason their way into, which is the case for most conspiracy theory believers.

@WilliamGunn Yeah! That said, this is the audience of a debate convention, so the average attendee may have reasons to believe the moon landing was a hoax that are at least a bit more principled.

@MingCat Can you imagine what one such reason might be? I'm having trouble getting past the "huge government cover-up involving thousands of people who kept a secret for decades" part.

@WilliamGunn You could argue that's survivorship bias. There are government programs that we only found out about many years later, like PRISM. And both of those were ongoing operations rather than one-and-done. It's implausible that there'd be no whistleblowers but I could see someone not wanting to rule it out.

Also, I'm expecting some of the votes to be from skeptics who haven't looked into it too deeply and just have a vague sort of general distrust of the government.

@MingCat That's a good point. The vague general distrust won't go away, but they may change their mind on this specific issue.