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?
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?