I really enjoyed this. A related thing is about a possible reason why more debate doesn’t happen. I think when rationalist style thinkers debate, especially in public, it feels a bit high stakes. There is pressure to demonstrate good epistemic standards, even though no one can define a good basis set for that. This goes doubly so for anyone who feels like they have a respectable position or are well regarded. There is a lot of downside risk to them engaging in debate and little upside. I think the thing that breaks this is actually pretty simple and is helped out by the ‘sorry’ command concept. If it’s a free move socially to choose whether or not to debate (which avoids the thing where a person mostly wants to debate only if they’re in the mood and about the thing they are interested in but don’t want to defend a position against arbitrary objections that they may have answered lots of times before etc.) and also a free move to say ‘actually, some of my beliefs in this area are cached sorries, so I reserve the right to not have perfect epistemics here already, and we also recognize that even if we refute specific parts of the argument, we might disagree on whether it is a smoking gun, so I can go away and think about it and I don’t have to publicly update on it’ then it derisks engaging in a friendly, yet still adversarial form debate.
If we believe that people doing a lot of this play fighting will on average increase the volume and quality of EA output both through direct discovery of more bugs in arguments and in providing more training opportunity, then maybe it should be a named thing like Crocker’s rules? Like people can say ‘I’m open to debating X, but I declare Kid Gloves’ or something. (What might be a good name for this?)
I really enjoyed this. A related thing is about a possible reason why more debate doesn’t happen. I think when rationalist style thinkers debate, especially in public, it feels a bit high stakes. There is pressure to demonstrate good epistemic standards, even though no one can define a good basis set for that. This goes doubly so for anyone who feels like they have a respectable position or are well regarded. There is a lot of downside risk to them engaging in debate and little upside. I think the thing that breaks this is actually pretty simple and is helped out by the ‘sorry’ command concept. If it’s a free move socially to choose whether or not to debate (which avoids the thing where a person mostly wants to debate only if they’re in the mood and about the thing they are interested in but don’t want to defend a position against arbitrary objections that they may have answered lots of times before etc.) and also a free move to say ‘actually, some of my beliefs in this area are cached sorries, so I reserve the right to not have perfect epistemics here already, and we also recognize that even if we refute specific parts of the argument, we might disagree on whether it is a smoking gun, so I can go away and think about it and I don’t have to publicly update on it’ then it derisks engaging in a friendly, yet still adversarial form debate.
If we believe that people doing a lot of this play fighting will on average increase the volume and quality of EA output both through direct discovery of more bugs in arguments and in providing more training opportunity, then maybe it should be a named thing like Crocker’s rules? Like people can say ‘I’m open to debating X, but I declare Kid Gloves’ or something. (What might be a good name for this?)