Thanks for thinking about this Jason! Lots of good ideas here.
FWIW financial allocation was an attempt to get a more precise debate after several users reported the “more of a priority” framing of the AI Welfare debate as being a bit confusing.
I think it’s generally nice to be tracking something relatively unified along the X axis, but that could just be strength of agreement, as long as users agree on the meaning of the debate statement.
The season idea is cool, though I’d probably prefer to do a more spaced out season, with the debates at very least a few weeks apart. Some authors might want to contribute to multiple debates, and writing a post a week is a bit of a large ask. It’d be great to have the topics published in advance though, so that people can start thinking earlier.
Yeah, I definitely see the appeal to financial-allocation framings. I think some of my reaction is that I read the AI Welfare question as substantially about financial allocation as well. So I am more about moving away from a perceived trendline rather than objecting to financial allocation as part of a mix of topic types.
I also agree with a spaced-out season; week after week of Debates in a row would be exhausting! The season concept is more a recognition that—like matchup pairs in a sports league—individual Debate Weeks are very hard to balance. Zooming out to the season level helps with that—the NFL can balance out (to some extent) who gets the good matchups, the primetime TV slots, the more competent referees,[1] etc. It can also try to balance the demands on each team—for instance, if it schedules a team to play in London, it usually balances that by giving them the next week off. So picking the right order could minimize the odds that a particular person would want to write major posts for successive Weeks.
If we are committed to desktop-only voting anyway, I wonder if a 2-D response grid system (as opposed to points on a line) would allow tracking responses on two dimensions and thus a bit more complexity in posed questions. I initially conceived question 1 as ~ “more people should do EtG” and it could move back toward those roots if needed. Relatedly, I am undecided on how tightly I think the poll question has to cover the scope of the Debate Week vs. focusing on a portion of the Debate Week topic for operationalization purposes.
Thanks for thinking about this Jason! Lots of good ideas here.
FWIW financial allocation was an attempt to get a more precise debate after several users reported the “more of a priority” framing of the AI Welfare debate as being a bit confusing.
I think it’s generally nice to be tracking something relatively unified along the X axis, but that could just be strength of agreement, as long as users agree on the meaning of the debate statement.
The season idea is cool, though I’d probably prefer to do a more spaced out season, with the debates at very least a few weeks apart. Some authors might want to contribute to multiple debates, and writing a post a week is a bit of a large ask. It’d be great to have the topics published in advance though, so that people can start thinking earlier.
Yeah, I definitely see the appeal to financial-allocation framings. I think some of my reaction is that I read the AI Welfare question as substantially about financial allocation as well. So I am more about moving away from a perceived trendline rather than objecting to financial allocation as part of a mix of topic types.
I also agree with a spaced-out season; week after week of Debates in a row would be exhausting! The season concept is more a recognition that—like matchup pairs in a sports league—individual Debate Weeks are very hard to balance. Zooming out to the season level helps with that—the NFL can balance out (to some extent) who gets the good matchups, the primetime TV slots, the more competent referees,[1] etc. It can also try to balance the demands on each team—for instance, if it schedules a team to play in London, it usually balances that by giving them the next week off. So picking the right order could minimize the odds that a particular person would want to write major posts for successive Weeks.
If we are committed to desktop-only voting anyway, I wonder if a 2-D response grid system (as opposed to points on a line) would allow tracking responses on two dimensions and thus a bit more complexity in posed questions. I initially conceived question 1 as ~ “more people should do EtG” and it could move back toward those roots if needed. Relatedly, I am undecided on how tightly I think the poll question has to cover the scope of the Debate Week vs. focusing on a portion of the Debate Week topic for operationalization purposes.
This item is not meant to be taken seriously.