Not tied by necessity to my previous posts on the Hambone vs. Nye-larhotep debate, but wouldn’t a debate be more productive if it placed a burden of proof on one side and not on both sides? I don’t know if the Nye/Ham debate was presented in this context and I don’t know anything about proper debate culture, but it seems that if both sides are presenting their case it would just end up a confused mess of dialogue and statistics; numbers fornicating with language and giving birth to semiotic hell.
Debater A should give his reasoning for P, while debater B should counter with his view ~P, and not for view Q. This is similar, to my knowledge, of thesis defense. It takes advantage of the falsifiability aspect of the scientific method and helps dig a moat around the problem of induction—the epistemic risk of offering two different (not necessarily antithetical) propositions is halved by just presenting one.