I wonder about the risks of optimising for persuasive arguments over accurate arguments. I feel like it’s a negative-sum game, and will result in everyone (most people) having a worse model of the world, and that we should have a strong norm against that. Some people have done this for arguments for donating, so maybe you want to update a bit against donating to balance this out: https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/06/contest-winner-philosophical-argument.html
I wonder about the risks of optimising for persuasive arguments over accurate arguments. I feel like it’s a negative-sum game, and will result in everyone (most people) having a worse model of the world, and that we should have a strong norm against that. Some people have done this for arguments for donating, so maybe you want to update a bit against donating to balance this out: https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/06/contest-winner-philosophical-argument.html
On the other hand, I sometimes want to pay people to change my mind to incentivize finding evidence. A good example is paying for arguments that lead someone to revoke their cryonics memberships, hence making them save money: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HxGRCquTQPSJE2k9g/i-will-pay-usd500-to-anyone-who-can-convince-me-to-cancel-my Although if I did that, I would likely also have a bounty for arguments to spend resources for life extension interventions.
So maybe 2 crucial differences are:
a) whether the recipient of the argument is also the one paying for it or otherwise consenting / aware of what’s going on
b) there’s a bounty on the 2 sides