PhronesisWe apply the displacement framework developed in earlier Phronesis Issues to the phenomenon of compulsive debating—the habitual restructuring of intellectual exchange into adversarial combat where a winner and a loser must be determined. We identify the ground state S^0 as calibrated genuine dialogue: intellectual exchange aimed at mutual understanding and truth-seeking, in which winning and losing are structurally irrelevant because learning is the operative goal.
Compulsive debating constitutes a wrong attractor W that captures conversational agents through a self-reinforcing basin in which victory over another's position substitutes for the epistemic gain that genuine inquiry would provide. We define a displacement cost function D() measuring distance from calibrated dialogue and analyze the accumulated displacement = D()\,dt produced by chronic argument-seeking behavior.
We characterize the four-part architecture of the wrong attractor: the disagreement-as-threat trigger, the adversarial framing mechanism, the winning-move repertoire, and the inquiry-foreclosure dynamic. Nine formal propositions formalize basin depth, social isolation cascades, and return conditions. The paper concludes with the return path: curiosity-first reframing, position-change-as-success tracking, and the Socratic commitment that the goal is to know what is true, not to be found right.