Nice to hear from you Keiran. That idea is interesting. For me the “figure out what the truth is” aspect is the most important thing. I don’t necessarily think there has to be a “winner” of the debate, I just want two experts to be able to hash out their differences and hopefully in doing so get closer to the truth. Maybe the anti-debate format is conducive to that.
In terms of a wishlist of topics see below for some ideas. This thread has a lot of good ideas. I’m not massively concerned about who is involved as long as they are experts or well-versed in what they’re talking about.
Stuart Russell “vs” someone on whether AI is a significant x-risk that we should focus on or not
Will MacAskill “vs” Toby Ord on ‘hinginess’ of the present/probability of x-risk this century/broad or targeted approaches to long-termism
Someone (maybe Toby Ord) “vs” someone (maybe Simon Knutsson) on whether we should focus on suffering more than on happiness, or should be treating these the same
Hauke Hillebrandt “vs” someone on economic growth vs randomista development
Maybe a debate on population ethics (e.g. total view vs not total view)
Maybe a debate on the validity of long-termism. I’m not actually sure who a prominent critic of long-termism is but such a debate would be very interesting
In short, any debate that is ongoing in EA circles, that has credible voices on either side and that has important implications for what we should do.
By the way I enjoy listening to the Unbelievable? podcast in which the host Justin Brierley often hosts debates between atheists and christians. He moderates pretty well, even though he is a christian it is not clear at all from his moderating which side he is on! You may (or may not) find it useful to check out a debate from that podcast. In normal times they actually get the guests in the same room and video the debate so it’s available as both an audio and visual podcast.
Nice to hear from you Keiran. That idea is interesting. For me the “figure out what the truth is” aspect is the most important thing. I don’t necessarily think there has to be a “winner” of the debate, I just want two experts to be able to hash out their differences and hopefully in doing so get closer to the truth. Maybe the anti-debate format is conducive to that.
In terms of a wishlist of topics see below for some ideas. This thread has a lot of good ideas. I’m not massively concerned about who is involved as long as they are experts or well-versed in what they’re talking about.
Stuart Russell “vs” someone on whether AI is a significant x-risk that we should focus on or not
Will MacAskill “vs” Toby Ord on ‘hinginess’ of the present/probability of x-risk this century/broad or targeted approaches to long-termism
Someone (maybe Toby Ord) “vs” someone (maybe Simon Knutsson) on whether we should focus on suffering more than on happiness, or should be treating these the same
Hauke Hillebrandt “vs” someone on economic growth vs randomista development
Maybe a debate on population ethics (e.g. total view vs not total view)
Maybe a debate on the validity of long-termism. I’m not actually sure who a prominent critic of long-termism is but such a debate would be very interesting
In short, any debate that is ongoing in EA circles, that has credible voices on either side and that has important implications for what we should do.
By the way I enjoy listening to the Unbelievable? podcast in which the host Justin Brierley often hosts debates between atheists and christians. He moderates pretty well, even though he is a christian it is not clear at all from his moderating which side he is on! You may (or may not) find it useful to check out a debate from that podcast. In normal times they actually get the guests in the same room and video the debate so it’s available as both an audio and visual podcast.
That almost perfectly matches my own wish list!
Thanks for the ideas Jack, really appreciate it.
Glad to hear it!