A Plan to Improve the World: 20 Rational Debate Advocates

LessWrong, but based on Elliot’s experience they don’t seem very interested in debate.

Maybe it could ruin the reputation of PF. I’m not sure.

I have a feeling they could be even more dogmatic than usual. (Not talking about the specific people you linked, or anyone else specifically.)

I guess we can prioritize people we think are actually correct and would win in debates. But it’s entirely possible to promote PF to many sides in debate since they all ought to believe they would win.

Whether groups are interested in debate often depends on what you want to debate. Less Wrong does have a lot of argumentative members. Some individuals will even argue about Popper.

If you go to an argumentative vegan community and argue in favor of eating meat, you can get debates. If you go to the same community and ask them to lay out their reasoning in an organized way with citations and then you want to analyze it using logic, Popper and fact/cite checking, maybe no one will want to do that. Sometimes people seem to like to talk most when their existing talking points (e.g. reasons that factory farms are bad) are relevant.

If you go to an AnCap group and argue for socialism or minarchy, you’ll have a much better chance to get debate than if you argue that they need to make an idea tree, or something else to rationally organize their claims, and then follow that up by debating critics (including those who question premises like saying that solipsism is true and therefore political philosophy is irrelevant) before they can rationally conclude that AnCap is correct.

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People are going to do PF wrong. They will be unreasonable in debates. They will bully people during debates. They will misquote. They will put up debate policies then refuse to follow them as written. They will censor comments on their forums pointing out that they aren’t following their debate policy, while leaving the policy they aren’t following unchanged. They will find that they don’t like something their policy says to do then change the policy and switch to the new policy immediately, not just for future issues (and the new policy might be no policy: they might just delete it). They will write policies where they will be deeply disappointed if their critics don’t follow all the policy rules (e.g. not doing everything they agreed to in a debate) – basically taking too much risk and investing energy in strangers (it’s important to design policies to limit the harm when people break their word).

This is largely going to be outside of our control.

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Anti-CR too, among others.