I think these concerns are all pretty reasonable, but also strongly discordant with my personal experience, so I figured it would help third parties if I explained the key insights/skills I think I learned or were strongly reinforced by my debating experience.
Three notable caveats on that experience:
I spent more time judging debates than I did speaking in them, which is moderately unusual. It’s plausible to me that judging was much more useful.
It was 8-12 years ago, and my independent impression is that the top levels of the sport have degenerated somewhat since (e.g. I watched world-class debaters speak and while they spoke fast, I’ve never seen anything like the link Oli posted).
I approached debating with a mindset of ‘this is an area I am naturally weak in and want to get better at’, so it was always more likely to complement my natural quantitative approach to figuring things out, rather than replacing it.
(Edit: Since some other discussions on this thread are talking about various formats, I should also add that my experience is entirely inside British Parliamentary debate.)
All in all, I think it’s very plausible Oli’s experience was closer to a typical 2021 experience than mine. But mostly I’m just not sure, for one thing I’d bet that the ‘cram as many points in as possible’ strategy is still much less prevalent at lower levels.
With that out of the way, here are things I picked up that I think are important and useful for truth-tracking, as opposed to persuasion.
Actually listening to the arguments that have been made, in a way that means I could repeat them back with at-least-comparable eloquence to the speaker. Put another way, I think debating made me much better at ideological Turing tests.
A healthy skepticism of the power of arguments and inner-sense-of-conviction as a truth-tracking device, particularly whenever you are talking to someone smarter and more charismatic than yourself, or whenever you’ve just done something like give a speech (or write a blog post/comment!) in favour of a particular conclusion, or whenever you are surrounded by a group of people who all think the same way. This is very closely related to Epistemic Learned Helplessness. It seems like Scott realised this by reading pseudohistory books, see below quote, but my parallel ‘oh shit’ moment was being thoroughly out-argued and convinced by much better debaters in favour of A, and then being equally out-argued by debaters in favour of not-A. Unlike Scott’s experience, I think those people could argue circles around me on virtually every topic. Which just makes it even more obvious you need a better approach.
Being able to generate (some) strong arguments against things I strongly believe and being able to do it independently. It’s pretty common for novice debaters who are highly committed socialists to be unable to come up with any arguments for free markets, or vice-versa. I often see similar patterns, including on that exact issue but also on many other issues, within EA groups. I think getting better at this is critical if we want to do more policy work. Closely related: Policy debates should not appear one-sided. I’m also reminded of Haidt’s work on moral foundations and how liberals tend to ignore some of the foundations.
Identifying critical disagreements, areas that if they resolved one way would likely result in a win for one side, and if they resolved the other way would win for the other side. These are very close to, though not quite the same as, CFAR’s concept of a double crux.
To state the hopefully-obvious, I doubt debating is the optimal way to learn any of this. If I was talking to an EA without debating experience who really wanted to pick up the things I picked up, I’d advise them to read and reflect on the above links, and probably a few other related links I didn’t think of, rather than getting involved in competitive debating, partly for reasons Oli gives and partly for time reasons. I did it primarily because it was fun and the fact it happened to be (imo) useful was a bonus, not unlike the reasons I played Chess or strategy games. That and the fact that half those posts didn’t even exist back in 2009.
At the same time, if I want to learn things from a conversation with someone that I disagree with, and all I know is that I have the choice between talking to someone with or without debating experience, I’m going with the first person. Past experience has taught me that the conversation is likely to be more efficient, more focused on cruxes and falsifiable beliefs, and thus less frustrating.
And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.
And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn’t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.
And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.
And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable...
I don’t have time to respond in super much depth because of a bunch of competing commitments but I want to say that all of these are good points and I appreciate you making them.
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.
Here’s why I think I know the opposite: the standard in British Parliamentary judging is to judge based on the ‘Ordinary Intelligent Voter’, defined as follows:
In particular, judges are asked to conceive of themselves as if they were a hypothetical ‘ordinary intelligent voter’ (sometimes also termed ‘average reasonable person’ or ‘informed global citizen’). This hypothetical ordinary intelligent voter doesn’t have pre-formed views on the topic of the debate and isn’t 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 – 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. It’s still easy for judging cultures to take effect and either reward or fail to punish unhelplful behaviour, and personally I would list ‘speaking too fast’ under this, but nothing in that definition is likely to lead to people ‘debating the institution of debating’. 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 “This house believes that University Debating has done more harm than good”. Correspondingly, I see no cases where they end up ‘not debating the topic at all’.
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, I’m 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 ‘isn’t convinced by sophistry, deception or logical fallacies’ seems particularly relevant.
On that note, I don’t think it’s 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 I’m 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 it’s easier to refute the refutation.
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.
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, I’m left with the distinct impression that you’ve 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 isn’t much in the way of empirical data (after all, there’s 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 isn’t 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, there’s 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 didn’t say that. I said “This is also pretty common in other debate formats”. 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.
It’s rarely a good idea to explicitly back down, even on an issue you are clearly losing. Instead you end up making a lot of ‘even if’ statements. I think Scott did a good job of explaining why that’s not ideal in collaborative discussions (search for “I don’t like the “even if” framing.”).
(1) isn’t really a problem on the meta (read: relevant) level, since it’s very obvious; mostly I think this ends up teaching the useful lesson ‘you can prove roughly anything with ungrounded arguments’. (2) and (3) can inculcate actual bad habits, which I would worry about more if EA wasn’t already stuffed full of those habits and if my personal experience didn’t 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 don’t make sense:
Goodharting
Anything to the effect of ‘the speakers might end up believing what they are saying’, 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 I’d suggest editing to say whatever you meant to say. I would suggest an edit myself, but in this case I don’t 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 I’d suggest editing to say whatever you meant to say. I would suggest an edit myself, but in this case I don’t know what it was you meant to say.
I’ve edited the relevant section. The edit was simply “This is also pretty common in other debate formats (though I don’t know how common in BP in particular)”.
By contrast, criticisms I think mostly don’t make sense:
+ Goodharting + Anything to the effect of ‘the speakers might end up believing what they are saying’, 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. It’s 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 didn’t 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 I’ve 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 isn’t really enough to judge the whole category, but given that I’ve watched dozens of other debates in multiple other formats, I feel like I’ve 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. Look… 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 I’ve made in my comments are pretty straightforward, I stayed civil, and I don’t think I am being particularly irrational about this topic.
I’ve 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. I’ve 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 didn’t.
And then you come along and just assert:
Overall, I’m left with the distinct impression that you’ve made up your mind on this based on a bad personal experience, and that nothing is likely to change that view.
And this… just feels really unfair? Indeed, phenomenologically, my debate experiences were great. I didn’t 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 isn’t 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 it’s quite plausible it’s 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 don’t know. It’s 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 don’t feel like you’ve 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.
I think these concerns are all pretty reasonable, but also strongly discordant with my personal experience, so I figured it would help third parties if I explained the key insights/skills I think I learned or were strongly reinforced by my debating experience.
Three notable caveats on that experience:
I spent more time judging debates than I did speaking in them, which is moderately unusual. It’s plausible to me that judging was much more useful.
It was 8-12 years ago, and my independent impression is that the top levels of the sport have degenerated somewhat since (e.g. I watched world-class debaters speak and while they spoke fast, I’ve never seen anything like the link Oli posted).
I approached debating with a mindset of ‘this is an area I am naturally weak in and want to get better at’, so it was always more likely to complement my natural quantitative approach to figuring things out, rather than replacing it.
(Edit: Since some other discussions on this thread are talking about various formats, I should also add that my experience is entirely inside British Parliamentary debate.)
All in all, I think it’s very plausible Oli’s experience was closer to a typical 2021 experience than mine. But mostly I’m just not sure, for one thing I’d bet that the ‘cram as many points in as possible’ strategy is still much less prevalent at lower levels.
With that out of the way, here are things I picked up that I think are important and useful for truth-tracking, as opposed to persuasion.
Actually listening to the arguments that have been made, in a way that means I could repeat them back with at-least-comparable eloquence to the speaker. Put another way, I think debating made me much better at ideological Turing tests.
A healthy skepticism of the power of arguments and inner-sense-of-conviction as a truth-tracking device, particularly whenever you are talking to someone smarter and more charismatic than yourself, or whenever you’ve just done something like give a speech (or write a blog post/comment!) in favour of a particular conclusion, or whenever you are surrounded by a group of people who all think the same way. This is very closely related to Epistemic Learned Helplessness. It seems like Scott realised this by reading pseudohistory books, see below quote, but my parallel ‘oh shit’ moment was being thoroughly out-argued and convinced by much better debaters in favour of A, and then being equally out-argued by debaters in favour of not-A. Unlike Scott’s experience, I think those people could argue circles around me on virtually every topic. Which just makes it even more obvious you need a better approach.
Being able to generate (some) strong arguments against things I strongly believe and being able to do it independently. It’s pretty common for novice debaters who are highly committed socialists to be unable to come up with any arguments for free markets, or vice-versa. I often see similar patterns, including on that exact issue but also on many other issues, within EA groups. I think getting better at this is critical if we want to do more policy work. Closely related: Policy debates should not appear one-sided. I’m also reminded of Haidt’s work on moral foundations and how liberals tend to ignore some of the foundations.
Identifying critical disagreements, areas that if they resolved one way would likely result in a win for one side, and if they resolved the other way would win for the other side. These are very close to, though not quite the same as, CFAR’s concept of a double crux.
To state the hopefully-obvious, I doubt debating is the optimal way to learn any of this. If I was talking to an EA without debating experience who really wanted to pick up the things I picked up, I’d advise them to read and reflect on the above links, and probably a few other related links I didn’t think of, rather than getting involved in competitive debating, partly for reasons Oli gives and partly for time reasons. I did it primarily because it was fun and the fact it happened to be (imo) useful was a bonus, not unlike the reasons I played Chess or strategy games. That and the fact that half those posts didn’t even exist back in 2009.
At the same time, if I want to learn things from a conversation with someone that I disagree with, and all I know is that I have the choice between talking to someone with or without debating experience, I’m going with the first person. Past experience has taught me that the conversation is likely to be more efficient, more focused on cruxes and falsifiable beliefs, and thus less frustrating.
I don’t have time to respond in super much depth because of a bunch of competing commitments but I want to say that all of these are good points and I appreciate you making them.
You did give some responses elsewhere, so a few thoughts on your responses:
(Emphasis added). This seems like a classic case for ‘what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?’.
Here’s why I think I know the opposite: the standard in British Parliamentary judging is to judge based on the ‘Ordinary Intelligent Voter’, defined as follows:
This definition is basically designed to be hard to Goodhart. It’s still easy for judging cultures to take effect and either reward or fail to punish unhelplful behaviour, and personally I would list ‘speaking too fast’ under this, but nothing in that definition is likely to lead to people ‘debating the institution of debating’. 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 “This house believes that University Debating has done more harm than good”. Correspondingly, I see no cases where they end up ‘not debating the topic at all’.
I mean, I’m 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 ‘isn’t convinced by sophistry, deception or logical fallacies’ seems particularly relevant.
On that note, I don’t think it’s 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 I’m 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 it’s 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, I’m left with the distinct impression that you’ve 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 isn’t much in the way of empirical data (after all, there’s 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 isn’t 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 didn’t say that. I said “This is also pretty common in other debate formats”. 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.
It’s rarely a good idea to explicitly back down, even on an issue you are clearly losing. Instead you end up making a lot of ‘even if’ statements. I think Scott did a good job of explaining why that’s not ideal in collaborative discussions (search for “I don’t like the “even if” framing.”).
(1) isn’t really a problem on the meta (read: relevant) level, since it’s very obvious; mostly I think this ends up teaching the useful lesson ‘you can prove roughly anything with ungrounded arguments’. (2) and (3) can inculcate actual bad habits, which I would worry about more if EA wasn’t already stuffed full of those habits and if my personal experience didn’t 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 don’t make sense:
Goodharting
Anything to the effect of ‘the speakers might end up believing what they are saying’, 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 I’d suggest editing to say whatever you meant to say. I would suggest an edit myself, but in this case I don’t know what it was you meant to say.
I’ve edited the relevant section. The edit was simply “This is also pretty common in other debate formats (though I don’t know how common in BP in particular)”.
Alas, those are indeed my primary concerns. It’s 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 didn’t 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 I’ve 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 isn’t really enough to judge the whole category, but given that I’ve watched dozens of other debates in multiple other formats, I feel like I’ve 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. Look… 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 I’ve made in my comments are pretty straightforward, I stayed civil, and I don’t think I am being particularly irrational about this topic.
I’ve 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. I’ve 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 didn’t.
And then you come along and just assert:
And this… just feels really unfair? Indeed, phenomenologically, my debate experiences were great. I didn’t 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 isn’t 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 it’s quite plausible it’s 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 don’t know. It’s 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 don’t feel like you’ve 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.