However, we think these issues are not inherent to the format.
I do basically think the problems are kind of inherent to the format and pretty hard to fix. Like, I don’t think it’s physically impossible to fix these issues, but I am very skeptical of any efforts that try to fix them that stay within the existing debate context.
Overall, I am not sure where the key causes of our disagreement lies. The above didn’t really feel like it addresses my core concerns with the sport, and while the list of benefits is nice, it feels like a list that I can basically construct for an arbitrary sport (like, not this specific list of debates, but something of equal benefit), and below I give some pointers why I think some of them don’t hold, or at least don’t hold with the forcefulness that one might expect based on your descriptions.
I think it is fair to say that many debates do not result in figuring the truth on the topic at hand due to the complicated nature of the policies & ideas that are discussed and the limited time per discussion.
To be clear, neither the complexity of the topics or the limited time are at all anywhere close to the central reason why I think debate isn’t very truth-seeking. I can totally have a meeting with a bunch of friends of mine about a complicated issue with only an hour of time, and we can easily make good approximations and solid progress on understanding it. I am quite confident we would not if we instead spent that time in any competitive debating context. Indeed, it seems likely to me that we would leave the competitive debating context with worse beliefs than we entered it on the relevant topic.
There are ample discussion groups for debaters that seek to deepen their knowledge, there is a lot of emphasis on inclusion, and extracurricular educational videos are a rising trend. Therefore, most debaters operate in ecosystems where exploring complexity is a virtue.
None of these (inclusion, extracurricular education or “exploring complexity is a virtue) have really much to do with my concerns for debate, so at least from my perspective, describing these as trends that are gaining momentum in the debate community does very little to make me less concerned. Some of these seem mildly bad to me.
Further, since debating improves your ability to understand how arguments relate to one another, these skills can aid in figuring which position makes more sense in complicated discussions in real life, which can be helpful in seeking the truth, or at the very least in identifying falsehoods.
I don’t really think debate is really helping you understand how arguments relate to each other, at least not in a truth-tracking way. In most debate formats, it’s usually much less about actually making good arguments, but much more about abusing the way judges are told to score various arguments, in a way that has very little to do with the cognitive patterns I would encourage someone to use if they were trying to figure out whether an argument makes sense or not.
c) Debating forces you to engage with multiple perspectives. Positions in debating, i.e. being for or against the topic, are randomly allocated. This feature compels you to think on a topic in ways you might not have otherwise, and ultimately assists in developing a more nuanced world view.
I think this is actually useful, and learning the skill of generating steelmanned-arguments for positions you don’t believe is quite useful. Though because of the problem I pointed out above with the arguments that you are generating having very little to do with actual truth-trackingness, this benefit does fall quite a bit short from the ideal you describe here.
In my experience it creates a kind of “fallacy-of-grey”-like mindset where you are avoiding having any beliefs on these issues at all, or don’t really think of it being your job to actually decide which side is right, which I think is quite bad. Ultimately the goal of understanding both sides of an argument is to still judge which side is right (or of course to do a more complicated synthesis between the two, though that’s I think pretty actively discouraged in the debating format).
d) The debating community is truly global. In competitions you can hear voices that are hard to find in other places. The ability to gain the perspectives of people from around the world on a plethora of important issues has benefits for those that hold EA values.
I don’t really believe this? The debating community is overall really insular and narrow, as far as I can tell, being really heavily selected for being full of all the standard ivy-league people that we already have a ton of. I like cognitive diversity, but I don’t really think the debating community is very exciting from that perspective. Indeed it seems to have very similar selection filters to the way the EA community is already filtered for. I might be wrong here, but I currently don’t really believe that recruiting from the debate community is going to increase our cognitive diversity on almost any important dimension.
Following up on this, as part of me trying to understand the format of BP more, I was watching this video, which is the most watched WUDC video on Youtube. And… I find it terrifying. I find it in some sense more terrifying than the video where everyone talks super fast:
I encourage other people who are trying to evaluate debate as a method for truth-seeking to watch this themselves.
There is no super-fast-talking here, but all the arguments in the opening speech are terrible rhetorical argument. The speaker leverages the laughs and engagement of the audience to dismiss the position of his opponents, and this overall really felt more terrifying to me than many of the big political speeches I’ve seen this year.
Like, I… think I am more terrified of the effect this would have on epistemics than the effect of the super-fast-talkers in policy debate? Like, at least in policy-debate it’s somewhat obvious you are playing a game. In the above, I wouldn’t be surprised if the participants actually come to believe the position they are trying to defend.
I was surprised, this video was much less goodharted than I expected (after having been primed with the super-fast talking example). I was expecting more insane things.
Though overall it had the level of much broad public debate/discourse I’ve seen. I watched the first three speakers, and didn’t learn anything. In good debates I’ve seen I’ve felt that I’ve learned something from the debaters about their fields and their unique world views, these felt like two opposing sides in a broader political debate with kind of no grounding in reality. They were optimized for short-scale (e.g. <30 seconds) applause lights for the audience, when objected they’d make it a fight saying things like “Don‘t even try to win that example”, their examples seemed false yet rewarded (primarily attributing China’s rise out of poverty in the last 50 years to ‘redistribution’ and getting applause for it, which, correct me if I’m wrong, is not at all the primary reason, they had massive growth in industry in part by copying a lot of the west). I wouldn’t expect to learn anything, it just seemed like nobody understood economics and they were indexed off what was like 0-1 inferential steps from what the audience as a whole understood. I guess that was the worst part, how can you discuss interesting ideas if they have to be obvious to an audience that big and generic within 10-20 seconds?
I appreciate the response!
I do basically think the problems are kind of inherent to the format and pretty hard to fix. Like, I don’t think it’s physically impossible to fix these issues, but I am very skeptical of any efforts that try to fix them that stay within the existing debate context.
Overall, I am not sure where the key causes of our disagreement lies. The above didn’t really feel like it addresses my core concerns with the sport, and while the list of benefits is nice, it feels like a list that I can basically construct for an arbitrary sport (like, not this specific list of debates, but something of equal benefit), and below I give some pointers why I think some of them don’t hold, or at least don’t hold with the forcefulness that one might expect based on your descriptions.
To be clear, neither the complexity of the topics or the limited time are at all anywhere close to the central reason why I think debate isn’t very truth-seeking. I can totally have a meeting with a bunch of friends of mine about a complicated issue with only an hour of time, and we can easily make good approximations and solid progress on understanding it. I am quite confident we would not if we instead spent that time in any competitive debating context. Indeed, it seems likely to me that we would leave the competitive debating context with worse beliefs than we entered it on the relevant topic.
None of these (inclusion, extracurricular education or “exploring complexity is a virtue) have really much to do with my concerns for debate, so at least from my perspective, describing these as trends that are gaining momentum in the debate community does very little to make me less concerned. Some of these seem mildly bad to me.
I don’t really think debate is really helping you understand how arguments relate to each other, at least not in a truth-tracking way. In most debate formats, it’s usually much less about actually making good arguments, but much more about abusing the way judges are told to score various arguments, in a way that has very little to do with the cognitive patterns I would encourage someone to use if they were trying to figure out whether an argument makes sense or not.
I think this is actually useful, and learning the skill of generating steelmanned-arguments for positions you don’t believe is quite useful. Though because of the problem I pointed out above with the arguments that you are generating having very little to do with actual truth-trackingness, this benefit does fall quite a bit short from the ideal you describe here.
In my experience it creates a kind of “fallacy-of-grey”-like mindset where you are avoiding having any beliefs on these issues at all, or don’t really think of it being your job to actually decide which side is right, which I think is quite bad. Ultimately the goal of understanding both sides of an argument is to still judge which side is right (or of course to do a more complicated synthesis between the two, though that’s I think pretty actively discouraged in the debating format).
I don’t really believe this? The debating community is overall really insular and narrow, as far as I can tell, being really heavily selected for being full of all the standard ivy-league people that we already have a ton of. I like cognitive diversity, but I don’t really think the debating community is very exciting from that perspective. Indeed it seems to have very similar selection filters to the way the EA community is already filtered for. I might be wrong here, but I currently don’t really believe that recruiting from the debate community is going to increase our cognitive diversity on almost any important dimension.
Following up on this, as part of me trying to understand the format of BP more, I was watching this video, which is the most watched WUDC video on Youtube. And… I find it terrifying. I find it in some sense more terrifying than the video where everyone talks super fast:
I encourage other people who are trying to evaluate debate as a method for truth-seeking to watch this themselves.
There is no super-fast-talking here, but all the arguments in the opening speech are terrible rhetorical argument. The speaker leverages the laughs and engagement of the audience to dismiss the position of his opponents, and this overall really felt more terrifying to me than many of the big political speeches I’ve seen this year.
Like, I… think I am more terrified of the effect this would have on epistemics than the effect of the super-fast-talkers in policy debate? Like, at least in policy-debate it’s somewhat obvious you are playing a game. In the above, I wouldn’t be surprised if the participants actually come to believe the position they are trying to defend.
I was surprised, this video was much less goodharted than I expected (after having been primed with the super-fast talking example). I was expecting more insane things.
Though overall it had the level of much broad public debate/discourse I’ve seen. I watched the first three speakers, and didn’t learn anything. In good debates I’ve seen I’ve felt that I’ve learned something from the debaters about their fields and their unique world views, these felt like two opposing sides in a broader political debate with kind of no grounding in reality. They were optimized for short-scale (e.g. <30 seconds) applause lights for the audience, when objected they’d make it a fight saying things like “Don‘t even try to win that example”, their examples seemed false yet rewarded (primarily attributing China’s rise out of poverty in the last 50 years to ‘redistribution’ and getting applause for it, which, correct me if I’m wrong, is not at all the primary reason, they had massive growth in industry in part by copying a lot of the west). I wouldn’t expect to learn anything, it just seemed like nobody understood economics and they were indexed off what was like 0-1 inferential steps from what the audience as a whole understood. I guess that was the worst part, how can you discuss interesting ideas if they have to be obvious to an audience that big and generic within 10-20 seconds?