A Plan to Improve the World: 20 Rational Debate Advocates

Unbounded
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I came up with a new plan for changing the world. I’m seeking initial feedback and discussion. This is a brief summary which assumes familiarity with some of my relevant articles (particularly about topics like debate methodology and paths forward).

Plan: 20 advocates spread rational debate method ideas on the web and social media for a year. (Averaging over 3 posts per day means over 20,000 total posts.) Elliot writes relevant essays, gives some guidance, and is available for debates.

Key question: What results could we expect assuming there were 20 advocates who all did their job well? I think it’d have a significant effect on the world. Basically, not everyone would ignore these ideas, and they’re very powerful so they’d spread once some influential people or groups took interest and started doing them. Once people were having more rational discussions and debates, it would advantage good ideas (conclusions would be better on average) and people would learn more, and it’d become easier to differentiate rational thought leaders from people no one should listen to.

What ideas should be spread? In short, that intellectuals (including amateurs who want to do better) should be open to debate but currently aren’t. They should have written debate policies and methodology, transparency, anti-bias policies, and ways to be corrected on errors that other people know about. They should write some information down, and be held accountable for it, which gives critics predictability about what will get them attention and responses. They should make more organized, documented, transparent efforts not to allocate attention by social status. They should participate in organized debates, reasonably often, using either CF’s methodology with debate trees or else some alternative that is written down which they believe is better. (If someone says they’re available to debate, but no one wants an organized (methodology-following) debate with them, that’s fine too. Anyone popular would easily get some debates, but anyone who isn’t popular might not.)

Biggest advantage of this plan: Advocates don’t need to be great philosophers. They don’t need to catch up to my skill and knowledge. (This is much easier and more concrete than my old plan, which was basically that people learn to be great philosophers and then we figure out a plan after that. I thought fewer than 10 great philosophers would be enough to first make a bunch of progress, then do something that utilizes that progress. I still believe that, but this new plan is more accessible.)

What is required of advocates? Learning the CF ideas related to debate.(Besides current articles, I’d create some training materials for this and for how to do advocacy.) Being competent, smart and reasonable. Not posting anything tilted. Staying on message. Not fighting with people. Learning some basic media training skills. Being open to debate some. (Losing debates is OK but you have to do a good job, explicitly follow rational methods, and come off as reasonable.) A year commitment and being consistent not flakey. (People are welcome to be involved without any commitment or consistency. They just don’t count towards the goal of having 20 advocates.)

This plan requires low resources for a plan to make the world better. It’s efficient. Besides me, it just takes 20 volunteers spending under 10 hours per week (they can have a full time job too) for a year. Many think tanks, non-profits, hobby projects or small businesses have over 20 people, last for many years, and accomplish much less than this plan would.

I do not plan to recruit other than writing on my own websites as usual. I’ll post a CF article explaining this plan in the future. If you like the plan, you can prepare to be an advocate and/or recruit people. You can also criticize and debate the plan. If people don’t refute the plan or even claim it’s wrong, but don’t care enough enough to become advocates and recruit enough other advocates, then it won’t happen, and I will not blame myself. In that scenario, I will think that I did more than enough. I don’t expect this plan to happen soon (there are currently fewer than 20 active CF forum posters) but I wanted to give people the option; people may find it inspiring to have an easier way to do something important that requires less philosophy learning first. I know some people really care about changing the world. (I’m open to changing the world but if others don’t choose to help then I can also be content with the more indirect plan of researching and writing.) This plan offers a focus point other than just learning philosophy and could clarify the CF advocacy situation. It’s a goal that people can work towards or express disinterest in, which can be clarifying. I think the existence of the plan can make the CF community better, for many years, even if it doesn’t start. Whether it’s implemented or not, it’s good to have a plan and to have an understanding of what changing the world would involve.

There are other details but this should give people the general idea of the plan. I found it difficult to write a finalized document for the CF site and realized I should get some feedback first which will help guide me on e.g. what issues to emphasize and what objections or misunderstandings people have.

What do you like about this plan? Does it make any sense to you? What doubts or objections do you have? What questions do you have? Please discuss.

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Learning to be an advocate of rational debate policy would be a goal I would enjoy working towards.

One potential issue that I’m thinking of is that many people don’t value rationality or truth-seeking. Having a rational debate policy is a solution to a problem. But if people don’t recognize themselves as having a problem in the first place, it’s going to be hard to convince them to adopt a new solution.

I think that convincing people they have a problem will be harder than convincing them that a rational debate policy is a good solution. Admitting they have a problem would involve acknowledging the way they do things is (at least partly) irrational. And people usually don’t like thinking about their own irrationality. Does that make sense?

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I think one issue could be to keep the motivation and drive for a full year of 20 people.

I think that rationally spreading these kinds of ideas is hard. ET has already been spreading many of these ideas by trying to engage with people on e.g. LW, EA etc. (IIRC) with limited interest shown from other people. Rational debate advocates would have it even harder to rationally spread these ideas than ET has had, is my guess.
If this is the case, I think it might be hard for many of the rational debate advocates to stay fully motivated and driven, which I think is needed for doing a good job, (or some to even stay at it at all) for an entire year.

So addressing the risk of potential diminishing motivation and drive might be something wort thinking about and figuring out solutions for.

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I think that people would be more likely to stay motivated if they felt they were making progress. Like if the number of volunteers slowly increased from 20 to 50 to 100. Or if famous intellectuals started publicly endorsing Elliot’s ideas.

There does seem to be a lot of motivated activists who care about spending time on causes. I think people will want to help us if they think we have a good plan for making a positive change in the world.

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The target audience would be people who already claim to value rationality or who would easily be interested. There are plenty of people like that. Here’s an example that would be appropriate to respond to:

https://twitter.com/liron/status/1679890530485014529

This thread is actually pretty good (my impression without reading the material he’s attacking to double check that he didn’t misrepresent it). It makes some reasonable points. It also explicitly discusses meta issues about debate and rationality, which isn’t needed but makes it easier to bring those topics up. Although it’s pretty good, it also had a notable error. Errors can sometimes be useful to point out (reliably finding the error is not necessary to be an advocate, but an advocate should probably be able to catch over 5% of errors like this).

Reading the thread, you can see the author already has some interest in debating and also in making debate better. But he doesn’t actually provide any clear way to point out his errors. You can reply in a tweet and probably be ignored, but he isn’t e.g. offering to debate anyone, under any conditions, on a forum about his claims. So there’s an opportunity to bring up some CF ideas that could help him do better or to challenge him to debate. There’s also an opportunity to talk about organizing debate and making a tree diagram of the AI safety debate that interests him – e.g. one could offer to collaborate on a tree with him or even (harder and not necessary) make an initial tree and show him. He also might be interested in using CF debate ideas to challenge and call out some of his current enemies – they can be a powerful tool for any side that cares to use them (with the risk that people might actually accept a debate and do better than you). Note: In general, you have to pick only one opportunity to use and focus on that. Don’t respond to the same thread with two different criticisms or suggestions.

People who claim interest in rationality are often partially faking or lying (it’s a way to brag, look smart, look rational, etc.), but I estimate over 10% of them will express some kind of further interest or take some additional steps if you get their attention, rather than having zero followup. And that’s still a lot of people.

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Advocates don’t need to – and actually shouldn’t – do a lot of things I’ve done (I had different goals). Don’t write essays. Don’t be pushy. Stay on message (don’t e.g. discuss misquoting or deadnaming). Don’t be too intense – one post a week at EA for months would be more effective than saying a lot in a short time period. It can also help a ton to establish rapport with some people there instead of being seen and treated as a total outsider.

In general, one or two people are easy to ignore, and are ignored. Advocates, rather than doing anything better than me, just need to exist in larger numbers and be consistent over time and avoid fighting with people. People will listen way more if they see ideas in multiple places from multiple different people. They often need to see something, think it maybe sounds nice, then get reminded of it several times in the next few months, before they’ll start paying attention.

Instead of investing energy in explaining a lot to anyone in particular, the advocates will write situation-appropriate, customized versions of standard talking points, and will get more involved when there’s a good opportunity that isn’t really hard to use (e.g. if someone responds positively and asks a reasonable question). It’s very hard to push any particular person to be more rational. It’s much easier to play a numbers game – do a lot of inoffensive, near-zero-downside, cheap, easy posts and most of the time nothing visible will happen and that’s OK. If there’s a visible, positive response 5% of the time, that’s plenty. And for every response, dozens or sometimes even thousands of people see a message and some of them become more likely to respond (or take another step forward such as reading an article) next time.

Writing initial messages should be easy – you just bring up one standard point that you’ve written about repeatedly before and you connect it to and customize it for the thing you’re responding to. Following up should be easy because it’s normally only done when there’s a good opportunity. Hard or low probability opportunities can generally just be ignored. And finding opportunities requires regularly reading/watching stuff online which a lot of CF fans already do a ton of anyway.

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One of the reasons it’s hard for me to share ideas is the gap in perspective and skill is too big. E.g. I see too many of people’s errors. It’s easier to connect with them if you can honestly have a higher opinion of them, or agree with them more, than I do.

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Ok. Yeah, that makes sense to me and sounds like it might drastically improve the likelihood of success in spreading the ideas.

Edit: Finished the sentence and removed a quote. I accidentally posted before finishing the post.

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I can see how that helps avoid the problem of trying to convince an irrational person to use a rational debate policy.

Would you mind sharing the error?

This would have been my guess:

But what if we don’t pre-assume that the Orthogonality Thesis is false?

It wouldn’t be a confident guess though.

That seems very low to me. I would be worried that I didn’t really understand a topic if I could only catch 10% - 20% of the errors in a discussion. I don’t think I would feel comfortable advocating for a topic until I could point out around 90% of errors with a less than 20% false positive rate.

I think that’s a good strategy. (it’s from your reply to deroj, not me)

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I have, and I definitely want to participate.

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I’d like to contribute to this. I’d love for radical life extension to be achieved in my lifetime (I’m currently in my 20s) and I feel like this could be the best way to contribute to accelerating the advent of radical life extension. (If Paths Forward becomes widespread enough and enough of a Western cultural norm/practice to influence everything from how investors and philanthropists allocate their billions of dollars to how scientists decide what approaches to pursue, etc., etc.).

I tried brainstorming a few ideas for how to recruit people for this 20 Advocates plan. It was harder than I thought and I don’t think my ideas are very good tbh.

  • Promote ET content to adjacent online communities

    • Post on EA forum promoting Paths Forward (and perhaps specifically this 20 Advocates plan) as one of the most effective ways to improve the world (better than donating a kidney or mosquito nets or OxFam, etc.) because it helps address the most fundamental problem in the world: bad thinking.
      • Also post on other related forums/communities like LW or become a reply guy to those sorts of ppl on Twitter/X.
    • Promote ET to Oists. E.g., perhaps posting his David Deutsch Smears Ayn Rand article (which is how I originally discovered ET) and his AS chapter analyses etc. in Rand/Objectivst subreddits or to Rand fans on Twitter/X or stuff like that & hope that some people are impressed and read more ET content and eventually join the CF community and eventually become one of the 20 advocates.
    • Pitch popular newsletters. I wonder if ET could have some of his content published as a guest post on a popular Substack or something like that, for example? (While retaining his copyright.) And then hope that wins him some fans who eventually become advocates.

  • Get rich and hire advocates (like a think tank)

    • Or seek donors? Even just persuading one single super rich person

  • IRL recruiting

    • Recruit IRL friends & family. Personally the ppl I know IRL are not into philosophy/intellectual stuff. Also I’m not remotely eloquent or persuasive or charismatic, so I’d be an extremely weak advocate. I imagine it’s easier to find people who are already interested in a philosophy like Oism or CR or EA online like I mentioned in the first bullet point (tho I haven’t actually tried doing that yet so maybe I’m wrong & it’s also actually super hard).
    • Maybe look on Meetup or something to see if there are any philosophy clubs or relevant clubs nearby

  • Make do with fewer initial advocate recruiters

    • ET wrote:

      So maybe a couple grinders doing 100 hour weeks and 30 posts per day each (or even 5 advocates doing 40 hours a week and 12 posts per day each) won’t work due to the social proof element. But maybe such a strategy could still work for recruiting other people to become ET fans who might then later become advocates.

But tbh I struggle to imagine any of these being particularly effective. Maybe I should get better at thinking and project management etc. and power up before trying to contribute to something big like this. Then maybe I can be in a better position to create & promote content promoting CF & Paths Forward & the 20 Advocates plan.

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I’d like to debate anyone who would have a long and organized enough debate that it’s suitable to make trees and videos. Or if they have a large audience that’s fine too. There has to be some sort of value for me, like serious engagement or publicity. Someone with no fans who quits without explanation after 1-3 messages is easily available in Reddit comment sections but generally doesn’t offer value to me.

Preferred topics include decisive vs. indecisive arguments, Popper, Goldratt, debate methodology and Paths Forward, but a ton of topics are fine (not MAGA, but underlying issues like political philosophy, economics or feminism are fine).

I also feel like maybe Paths Forward could gain traction if it got some publicity but I’m not sure. In my experience, intellectuals with fans don’t want it, e.g. David Deutsch, Robin Hanson, Aubrey de Gray, Alex Epstein.

People without fans sometimes like it because it sounds rational or because they imagine it being used on their enemies, or they imagine using it to get debates they want. But if I then try to use it on them, I’ve found they don’t want to do it.

People without fans also commonly object saying it’d take too long. They often don’t seem to understand it in detail and it’s hard to get enough attention to address their concerns. I think a common cause of this is they are imagining it being used against someone they are a fan of.

My latest approach to talking about this is saying that public intellectuals should have written debate policies. It’s harder to object to this on the basis that it’d take too long because they can put whatever they want in the debate policy and limit how long it takes to follow. Plus their debate policy itself doesn’t need to be original – if a million people had debate policies, over 90% of them would just endorse a generic pre-written policy or combine generic pre-written passages together to make their own semi-customized policy. They wouldn’t even have to write a whole debate policy themselves. But even writing your own policy from scratch is just one essay – a low burden.

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There are some Popper-and-Deutsch interested rich men like Patrick Collison and Naval Ravikant. Those two people have already funded people who don’t like me though. I don’t know if anything negative about me has been said to them already or they have no idea who I am. As far as I know, none of my fans have ever tried to contact them to promote me. doubtingthomas once suggested that Ravikant should be contacted, but he wanted me to do it, I told him to do it himself, and I believe he did not.

Self-promotion has a lot of problems/downsides (I don’t think it inherently should, but it does in our society).

Less Wrong has funding but they don’t like me and Yudkowsky is irrational. Maybe they would like me if someone other than me approached them in the right way. Also I don’t know to what extent Lulie Tanett or others have already trash talked me to Less Wrong leadership.

The Ayn Rand Institute has funding but I don’t think that’s a promising lead for me.

I think some Goldratt people have money but I haven’t found discussion forums and I’ve done little to contact individuals.

In general, I believe rich men are usually suck ups who associate with and help other suck ups. Also, like all people with any amount of wealth, they usually aren’t super rational or super smart. So I may not be very compatible with them. This is not a comment on anyone in particular including the two rich people I named above, who I know little about.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’ve written that can alienate funders and their social networks:

Tabarrok co-blogs with Tyler Cowen (who I emailed this to, btw, but he didn’t reply) at Marginal Revolution, which I understand is really popular. They associate with Less Wrong and Roots of Progress among others.

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I’d also like to get some views for debates. Even if you manage to impress someone you’re talking with, they may quit talking to you anyway for no apparent reason, so if basically no one else saw it, it’s hard to get anywhere.

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People are welcome to start promoting CF epistemology or Paths Forward at any time. I wish people would do that more. There’s no need to get critical mass first. People getting started now is the best way to reach 20 advocates. Waiting until I attract 20 advocates without anyone else doing promotion may be very slow.

I don’t want to and should not micromanage advocacy or ghost write for it. That would essentially turn it into self-promotion by sock puppets or plagiarists. If I want to self-promote I can just do it myself which is better than using middle men for self-promotion. People need to act independently on their own initiative.

I can give some examples and general guidance and advice.

For example I recently wrote Curiosity – Fundamental Philosophical Errors in Taking Children Seriously and a new TCS book was recently published so there’s a potential opportunity for debate there. As far as I know they don’t have any active forums where you could point this out, but some relevant people have Twitter accounts, or are on Facebook groups, or have a Substack with open comments.

Approaching Deutsch fans has both large upsides (some similar interests and background knowledge to me, and may care that I’ve spent so many hours talking with Deutsch) and downsides (a lot of them dislike me, but they tend not to want to explain why in public, so the ones who dislike me might just say nothing, or might flame me without any evidence, or might just be passive-aggressive and try to keep plausible deniability, or might change their mind, idk).

I have written plenty of other things that contradict people and I could easily write more of that. There’s no shortage of people who I have disagreements with to go challenge to debate. There are shortages of explicitly rationality-oriented communities, but I believe there’s a large non-Deutsch Critical Rationalism Facebook group and there are platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Facebook/Instagram/Reels/Threads for general audiences.

As far as general advice, don’t be mean to people and don’t brigade. It’s probably counter-productive if 5 of you go to the same place at the same time, post a lot for a week, then leave. Try to be kind, helpful, informative, etc. Be patient and generous with explaining stuff; don’t be annoyed that people don’t already know stuff or aren’t doing rationality right. Don’t be pushy or get your expectations up with individuals. Don’t bicker with people or get drawn into unproductive, messy arguments. If you feel frustrated with people, take a longer break than you think you need.

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I don’t know. Not being me is, in some ways, a huge advantage for promoting CF. But if you don’t already have any prestige or fans, then a single person is generally easy to ignore. But you also have to be really careful about several low-status people brigading – people hate that and won’t listen.

Also, if stuff gets out of your depth, you can suggest people discuss or debate with me. You don’t have to address everything yourself.

I think one of the difficulties is it’s hard to get any attention at a lot of venues. You can post stuff and just get no engagement. You may have to build up a reputation gradually in the same way as building a fan base in general or as participating in the community as an actual member over time, not just show up and drop a few links or debate challenges.

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Note that Harry Binswanger already dislikes me. Curiosity – Harry Binswanger Refuses To Think

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EA mostly ignored me when I posted there, but sure, this is a reasonable plan to try.

Yeah sure. Popular YouTubers or other platforms too. I don’t know what causes people like that to agree.

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In general terms, the difficulty with Paths Forward and debate policies stuff is that fundamentally it’s a challenge to the social status hierarchy. Almost everyone, even low status people, are very invested in that hierarchy. It’s extremely entrenched. It’s kind of like how most women are involved in patriarchy.

For many intellectuals, what may be on offer if they debate me and their fans watch the debate is that maybe they will look foolish and lose a lot of fans to me.

You might think that doesn’t matter: their fans think they’re truth seekers not social climbers, so their fans will like Paths Forward and debate policies and push them to act like the rational thinkers they claim to be. That makes some sense. But most women (and low status men) aren’t feminists.

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In the past I’ve been banned from groups partly for being too rude (David Deutsch was a bad influence but I was too argumentative before I met him) but partly just for disagreeing.

Being less rude in more recent years hasn’t been particularly effective. E.g. on the large CR Facebook group, I tried to not be rude but some of the moderators were being rude to me, so I blocked them and focused on productive discussions. Then the owner banned me for not getting along with some of his buddies, and I guess also banned links to any of my writing (I don’t remember but my blog post says that. I have no idea if that still applies today).

One of the reasons they were rude to me is they know I like Ayn Rand. Mentioning her at all was one of the things that had gotten me in trouble there previously. I wasn’t mentioning her at the time but they were still mistreating me. I’ve shared enough opinions publicly, and have diverse enough opinions, that basically anyone can easily find one they strongly dislike.

In general all groups want you to fit in and get along with people. They aren’t serious about debate. You can look for exceptions like some places are very explicitly designed around debate (which is different than e.g. Less Wrong or Effective Altruism which talk a lot about rationality but are not set up as debate venues). So e.g. there’s a vegan debate YouTuber with a Discord. I was able to go there and debate briefly but he banned me for refusing to give a direct answer to a question he was asking where all direct answers were wrong because it had a flawed premise or something. I forget the details but imagine something kinda like the “When did you stop beating your wife?” trick. He wants people who he can bully with “logic” and debate experience. I was calmer and more confident and reasonable than him; he was kind of yelly; so he just kicked me out. Most “debaters” have audiences where they can just kick people out when they’re losing and their audience doesn’t turn on them.