You did give some responses elsewhere, so a few thoughts on your responses:
But this is really far from the only way policy debate is broken. Indeed, a large fraction of policy debates end up not debating the topic at all, but end up being full of people debating the institution of debating in various ways, and making various arguments for why they should be declared the winner for instrumental reasons. This is also pretty common in other debate formats.
Hereās why I think I know the opposite: the standard in British Parliamentary judging is to judge based on the āOrdinary Intelligent Voterā, defined as follows:
In particular, judges are asked to conceive of themselves as if they were a hypothetical āordinary intelligent voterā (sometimes also termed āaverage reasonable personā or āinformed global citizenā). This hypothetical ordinary intelligent voter doesnāt have pre-formed views on the topic of the debate and isnāt convinced by sophistry, deception or logical fallacies. They are well informed about political and social affairs but lack specialist knowledge. They are open-minded and concerned to decide how to vote ā they are thus willing to be convinced by the debaters who provide the most compelling case for or against a certain policy. They are intelligent to the point of being able to understand and assess contrasting arguments (including sophisticated arguments), that are presented to them; but they keep themselves constrained to the material presented unless it patently contradicts common knowledge or is otherwise wildly implausible.
This definition is basically designed to be hard to Goodhart. Itās still easy for judging cultures to take effect and either reward or fail to punish unhelplful behaviour, and personally I would list āspeaking too fastā under this, but nothing in that definition is likely to lead to people ādebating the institution of debatingā. So unsurprisingly, I saw vanishingly little of this. Scanning down recent WUDC finals, the only one where the speakers appear to come close to doing this is the one where the motion itself is āThis house believes that University Debating has done more harm than goodā. Correspondingly, I see no cases where they end up ānot debating the topic at allā.
The debates I participated in in high-school had nobody talking fast. But it had people doing weird meta-debate, and had people repeatedly abusing terrible studies because you can basically never challenge the validity or methodology of a study, or had people make terrible rhetorical arguments, or intentionally obfuscate their arguments until they complete it in the last minute so the opposition would have no time to respond to it.
I mean, Iām sorry you had terrible judges or a terrible format I guess? I judged more high school debates than virtually anyone during my time at university, and these are not things I would have allowed to fly, because they are not things I consider persuasive to the Ordinary Intelligent Voter; the āisnāt convinced by sophistry, deception or logical fallaciesā seems particularly relevant.
On that note, I donāt think itās a coincidence that a significant fraction of my comments on this forum are about challenging errors of math or logic. My rough impression is that other users often notice something is wrong, but struggle to identify it precisely, and so say nothing. It should be obvious why Iām keen on getting more people who are used to structuring their thoughts in such a way that they can explain the exact perceived error. Such exactness has benefits even when the perception is wrong and the original argument holds, because itās easier to refute the refutation.
I might be wrong here, but I currently donāt really believe that recruiting from the debate community is going to increase our cognitive diversity on almost any important dimension.
The Oxbridge debating community at least is pretty far to the right of the EA community, politically speaking. I consider this an important form of cognitive diversity, but YMMV.
***
Overall, Iām left with the distinct impression that youāve made up your mind on this based on a bad personal experience, and that nothing is likely to change that view. Which does happen sometimes when there isnāt much in the way of empirical data (after all, thereās sadly no easy way for me to disprove your claim that a large fraction of BP debates end up not debating the topic at all..), and isnāt a bad reasoning process per se, but confidence in such views should necessarily be limited.
To be clear, I think very little of my personal experience played a role in my position on this. Or at least very unlikely in the way you seem to suggest.
A good chunk of my thoughts on this were formed talking to Buck Shlegeris and Evan Hubinger at some point and also a number of other discussions about debating with a bunch of EAs and rationalists. I was actually pretty in favor of debate ~4-5 years ago when I remember first discussing this with people, but changed my mind after a bunch of people gave their perspectives and experiences and I thought more through the broader problem of how to fix it.
I also want to clarify the following
after all, thereās sadly no easy way for me to disprove your claim that a large fraction of BP debates end up not debating the topic at all..
I didnāt say that. I said āThis is also pretty common in other debate formatsā. I even explicitly said I am less familiar with BP as a debate format. It seems pretty plausible to me that BP has less of the problem of meta-debate. But I do think evidence of problems like meta-debate in other formats is evidence of BP also having problems, even if I am specifically less familiar with BP.
I even explicitly said I am less familiar with BP as a debate format.
The fact that you are unfamiliar with the format, and yet are making a number of claims about it, is pretty much exactly my issue. Lack of familiarity is an anti-excuse for overconfidence.
The OP is about an event conducted in BP. Any future events will presumably also be conducted in BP. Information about other formats is only relevant to the extent that they provide information about BP.
I can understand not realising how large the differences between formats are initially, and so assuming information from other formats has strong relevance at first, which is why I was sympathetic to your original comment, but a bunchofpeople have pointed this out by now.
I expect substantiated criticisms of BP as a truth-seeking device (of which there are many!) to look more like the stuff that Ben Pace is saying here, and less like the things you are writing. In brief, I think the actual biggest issues are:
15-minute prep makes for a better game but for very evidence-light arguments.
Judges are explicitly not supposed to reward applause lights, but they are human, so sometimes they do.
Itās rarely a good idea to explicitly back down, even on an issue you are clearly losing. Instead you end up making a lot of āeven ifā statements. I think Scott did a good job of explaining why thatās not ideal in collaborative discussions (search for āI donāt like the āeven ifā framing.ā).
(1) isnāt really a problem on the meta (read: relevant) level, since itās very obvious; mostly I think this ends up teaching the useful lesson āyou can prove roughly anything with ungrounded argumentsā. (2) and (3) can inculcate actual bad habits, which I would worry about more if EA wasnāt already stuffed full of those habits and if my personal experience didnāt suggest that debaters are pretty good at dropping those habits outside of the debates themselves. Still, I think they are things reasonable people can worry about.
By contrast, criticisms I think mostly donāt make sense:
Goodharting
Anything to the effect of āthe speakers might end up believing what they are sayingā, especially at top levels. Like, these people were randomly assigned positions, have probably been assigned the roughly opposite position at some point, and are not idiots.
Finally, even after a re-read and showing your comment to two other people seeking alternative interpretations, I think you did say the thing you claim not to have said. Perhaps you meant to say something else, in which case Iād suggest editing to say whatever you meant to say. I would suggest an edit myself, but in this case I donāt know what it was you meant to say.
Finally, even after a re-read and showing your comment to two other people seeking alternative interpretations, I think you did say the thing you claim not to have said. Perhaps you meant to say something else, in which case Iād suggest editing to say whatever you meant to say. I would suggest an edit myself, but in this case I donāt know what it was you meant to say.
Iāve edited the relevant section. The edit was simply āThis is also pretty common in other debate formats (though I donāt know how common in BP in particular)ā.
By contrast, criticisms I think mostly donāt make sense:
+ Goodharting + Anything to the effect of āthe speakers might end up believing what they are sayingā, especially at top levels. Like, these people were randomly assigned positions, have probably been assigned the roughly opposite position at some point, and are not idiots.
Alas, those are indeed my primary concerns. Itās of course totally OK if you are not compelled, but I have no idea how you are so confident to dismiss them. Having talked to multiple people who have participated in high-level debate in multiple formats, those are the criticisms that they level as well, including for formats very similar to BP, and for BP in-particular.
I have now watched multiple videos of BP debate, and I wish I didnāt because my guesses of what it would look like were basically right, and I feel like I wasted two hours of my time watching BP debates because you insisted that for some reason I am not allowed to make claims from very nearby points of evidence, even though as far as I can tell after spending those two hours, most of my concerns are on-point and BP looks just like most other forms of debate Iāve seen.
I knew when I wrote the above comment that BP debates look less immediately goodharted. But after engaging more deeply with it, I would be surprised if it is actually much less goodharted. Of course, 4 debates at 2x speed isnāt really enough to judge the whole category, but given that Iāve watched dozens of other debates in multiple other formats, I feel like Iāve pinpointed the type of debate that BP is pretty well in debate space.
Of course, you can insist that only people intimately familiar with the format participate in this discussion, in which case I of course cannot clear that bar, and neither can almost anyone else on the forum (and this will of course heavily select against anyone who is critical of debate).
Let me take a step back. Lookā¦ I feel super frustrated by your comment above. I am trying to contribute a number of points to this discussion that feel important, and you now twice just kind of insinuated that I am unfairly biased or being unreasonable without really backing up your points? Like, your comments have been super stressful, and the associated downvotes have felt pretty bad. I think the arguments Iāve made in my comments are pretty straightforward, I stayed civil, and I donāt think I am being particularly irrational about this topic.
Iāve thought about it for 2-3 dozen hours over the years and at multiple points in the last few years have spent full-time work weeks evaluating whether we should have a debate tradition inside of EA as well, which caused me to think through a lot of the relevant considerations and investigate a substantial number of debate formats. Iāve talked to something like 8 people with extensive debate experience in EA for at least an hour and tried to get a sense of what things worked and what didnāt.
And then you come along and just assert:
Overall, Iām left with the distinct impression that youāve made up your mind on this based on a bad personal experience, and that nothing is likely to change that view.
And thisā¦ just feels really unfair? Indeed, phenomenologically, my debate experiences were great. I didnāt have a random bad experience that somehow soured me towards this whole sport. I was positive on it, and then thought about it for at least a dozen hours in total and overall came to a complicated high-level position that overall was a lot more hesitant. I have separately also thought for at least a literal 1000 by-the-clock-hours about our talent funnels and the epistemic norms I want the community to have and how the two interact.
My position also isnāt categorically opposed to debate at all. Indeed, I am personally likely to cause EA and the Rationality community to have more of a debating institution internally, and continue to feel conflicted about this project. I think itās quite plausible itās good, but I would want the organizers to think hard about how to avoid the problems that seem pretty deeply embedded in debate, and how to avoid them damaging the social institutions of EA, or attract people that might otherwise cause harm.
I donāt know. Itās fine for you to think I am being irrational about this topic, or for some reason to categorically dismiss the kind of concern that I am having, but I donāt feel like youāve really justified either of those assertions, and I perceived them both coming with some kind of social slap-down motion that made participating in this thread much more stressful than necessary. I will disengage for now. I hope the people involved in this project make good choices.
You did give some responses elsewhere, so a few thoughts on your responses:
(Emphasis added). This seems like a classic case for āwhat do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?ā.
Hereās why I think I know the opposite: the standard in British Parliamentary judging is to judge based on the āOrdinary Intelligent Voterā, defined as follows:
This definition is basically designed to be hard to Goodhart. Itās still easy for judging cultures to take effect and either reward or fail to punish unhelplful behaviour, and personally I would list āspeaking too fastā under this, but nothing in that definition is likely to lead to people ādebating the institution of debatingā. So unsurprisingly, I saw vanishingly little of this. Scanning down recent WUDC finals, the only one where the speakers appear to come close to doing this is the one where the motion itself is āThis house believes that University Debating has done more harm than goodā. Correspondingly, I see no cases where they end up ānot debating the topic at allā.
I mean, Iām sorry you had terrible judges or a terrible format I guess? I judged more high school debates than virtually anyone during my time at university, and these are not things I would have allowed to fly, because they are not things I consider persuasive to the Ordinary Intelligent Voter; the āisnāt convinced by sophistry, deception or logical fallaciesā seems particularly relevant.
On that note, I donāt think itās a coincidence that a significant fraction of my comments on this forum are about challenging errors of math or logic. My rough impression is that other users often notice something is wrong, but struggle to identify it precisely, and so say nothing. It should be obvious why Iām keen on getting more people who are used to structuring their thoughts in such a way that they can explain the exact perceived error. Such exactness has benefits even when the perception is wrong and the original argument holds, because itās easier to refute the refutation.
The Oxbridge debating community at least is pretty far to the right of the EA community, politically speaking. I consider this an important form of cognitive diversity, but YMMV.
***
Overall, Iām left with the distinct impression that youāve made up your mind on this based on a bad personal experience, and that nothing is likely to change that view. Which does happen sometimes when there isnāt much in the way of empirical data (after all, thereās sadly no easy way for me to disprove your claim that a large fraction of BP debates end up not debating the topic at all..), and isnāt a bad reasoning process per se, but confidence in such views should necessarily be limited.
To be clear, I think very little of my personal experience played a role in my position on this. Or at least very unlikely in the way you seem to suggest.
A good chunk of my thoughts on this were formed talking to Buck Shlegeris and Evan Hubinger at some point and also a number of other discussions about debating with a bunch of EAs and rationalists. I was actually pretty in favor of debate ~4-5 years ago when I remember first discussing this with people, but changed my mind after a bunch of people gave their perspectives and experiences and I thought more through the broader problem of how to fix it.
I also want to clarify the following
I didnāt say that. I said āThis is also pretty common in other debate formatsā. I even explicitly said I am less familiar with BP as a debate format. It seems pretty plausible to me that BP has less of the problem of meta-debate. But I do think evidence of problems like meta-debate in other formats is evidence of BP also having problems, even if I am specifically less familiar with BP.
The fact that you are unfamiliar with the format, and yet are making a number of claims about it, is pretty much exactly my issue. Lack of familiarity is an anti-excuse for overconfidence.
The OP is about an event conducted in BP. Any future events will presumably also be conducted in BP. Information about other formats is only relevant to the extent that they provide information about BP.
I can understand not realising how large the differences between formats are initially, and so assuming information from other formats has strong relevance at first, which is why I was sympathetic to your original comment, but a bunch of people have pointed this out by now.
I expect substantiated criticisms of BP as a truth-seeking device (of which there are many!) to look more like the stuff that Ben Pace is saying here, and less like the things you are writing. In brief, I think the actual biggest issues are:
15-minute prep makes for a better game but for very evidence-light arguments.
Judges are explicitly not supposed to reward applause lights, but they are human, so sometimes they do.
Itās rarely a good idea to explicitly back down, even on an issue you are clearly losing. Instead you end up making a lot of āeven ifā statements. I think Scott did a good job of explaining why thatās not ideal in collaborative discussions (search for āI donāt like the āeven ifā framing.ā).
(1) isnāt really a problem on the meta (read: relevant) level, since itās very obvious; mostly I think this ends up teaching the useful lesson āyou can prove roughly anything with ungrounded argumentsā. (2) and (3) can inculcate actual bad habits, which I would worry about more if EA wasnāt already stuffed full of those habits and if my personal experience didnāt suggest that debaters are pretty good at dropping those habits outside of the debates themselves. Still, I think they are things reasonable people can worry about.
By contrast, criticisms I think mostly donāt make sense:
Goodharting
Anything to the effect of āthe speakers might end up believing what they are sayingā, especially at top levels. Like, these people were randomly assigned positions, have probably been assigned the roughly opposite position at some point, and are not idiots.
Finally, even after a re-read and showing your comment to two other people seeking alternative interpretations, I think you did say the thing you claim not to have said. Perhaps you meant to say something else, in which case Iād suggest editing to say whatever you meant to say. I would suggest an edit myself, but in this case I donāt know what it was you meant to say.
Iāve edited the relevant section. The edit was simply āThis is also pretty common in other debate formats (though I donāt know how common in BP in particular)ā.
Alas, those are indeed my primary concerns. Itās of course totally OK if you are not compelled, but I have no idea how you are so confident to dismiss them. Having talked to multiple people who have participated in high-level debate in multiple formats, those are the criticisms that they level as well, including for formats very similar to BP, and for BP in-particular.
I have now watched multiple videos of BP debate, and I wish I didnāt because my guesses of what it would look like were basically right, and I feel like I wasted two hours of my time watching BP debates because you insisted that for some reason I am not allowed to make claims from very nearby points of evidence, even though as far as I can tell after spending those two hours, most of my concerns are on-point and BP looks just like most other forms of debate Iāve seen.
I knew when I wrote the above comment that BP debates look less immediately goodharted. But after engaging more deeply with it, I would be surprised if it is actually much less goodharted. Of course, 4 debates at 2x speed isnāt really enough to judge the whole category, but given that Iāve watched dozens of other debates in multiple other formats, I feel like Iāve pinpointed the type of debate that BP is pretty well in debate space.
Of course, you can insist that only people intimately familiar with the format participate in this discussion, in which case I of course cannot clear that bar, and neither can almost anyone else on the forum (and this will of course heavily select against anyone who is critical of debate).
Let me take a step back. Lookā¦ I feel super frustrated by your comment above. I am trying to contribute a number of points to this discussion that feel important, and you now twice just kind of insinuated that I am unfairly biased or being unreasonable without really backing up your points? Like, your comments have been super stressful, and the associated downvotes have felt pretty bad. I think the arguments Iāve made in my comments are pretty straightforward, I stayed civil, and I donāt think I am being particularly irrational about this topic.
Iāve thought about it for 2-3 dozen hours over the years and at multiple points in the last few years have spent full-time work weeks evaluating whether we should have a debate tradition inside of EA as well, which caused me to think through a lot of the relevant considerations and investigate a substantial number of debate formats. Iāve talked to something like 8 people with extensive debate experience in EA for at least an hour and tried to get a sense of what things worked and what didnāt.
And then you come along and just assert:
And thisā¦ just feels really unfair? Indeed, phenomenologically, my debate experiences were great. I didnāt have a random bad experience that somehow soured me towards this whole sport. I was positive on it, and then thought about it for at least a dozen hours in total and overall came to a complicated high-level position that overall was a lot more hesitant. I have separately also thought for at least a literal 1000 by-the-clock-hours about our talent funnels and the epistemic norms I want the community to have and how the two interact.
My position also isnāt categorically opposed to debate at all. Indeed, I am personally likely to cause EA and the Rationality community to have more of a debating institution internally, and continue to feel conflicted about this project. I think itās quite plausible itās good, but I would want the organizers to think hard about how to avoid the problems that seem pretty deeply embedded in debate, and how to avoid them damaging the social institutions of EA, or attract people that might otherwise cause harm.
I donāt know. Itās fine for you to think I am being irrational about this topic, or for some reason to categorically dismiss the kind of concern that I am having, but I donāt feel like youāve really justified either of those assertions, and I perceived them both coming with some kind of social slap-down motion that made participating in this thread much more stressful than necessary. I will disengage for now. I hope the people involved in this project make good choices.