Critical Fallibilism Real World Examples

[Elliot]

I found an intellectual with a published debate policy: Alex Epstein. Although I’ve worked with him in the past, I don’t know if the creation of this debate policy had any connection with my ideas or not. (It’s possible he doesn’t know either even if there is a connection. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone read some of my stuff and then said something to him related to debate policies without naming me. A lot of my readers are fans of Epstein.)

Although I don’t love this debate policy (I think it’s very restrictive and is inadequate for Paths Forward), I acknowledge it has major advantages over what most intellectuals offer (no written policies, no clarity).

One concern I have is about transparency: I don’t know if he keeps his word or not. Supposing he didn’t, how/where would I find out? As far as I know, he doesn’t have any sort of open forum where people could complain that they met the criteria but he still wouldn’t debate them. Nor does he have anywhere he publishes all the debate requests he receives and his judgment of whether they meet the criteria or not.

His criteria also contain some ambiguity. 250,000 views over what time period? Also views aren’t guaranteed, so how reliable does success at those viewer numbers have to be, and what would be good enough to convince him?

I’d like to debate Epstein about whether Silent Spring is a good book, among other things, but I don’t meet the criteria. He was also unwilling to debate me when I was doing free work for him (and had a lot less disagreement with him, but still some), which I think is unreasonable and is one of the main reasons I stopped working with him. If you think someone is really smart, tell them so, meet them in person to chat, use their research in your books and debates and publish some of their writing, then you don’t need to avoid debating them because of “protecting me from having my time wasted by the endless number of unknown people who demand multi-hour debates with me”. I wasn’t then, and still today am not, unknown to Epstein, so the reasoning he gives for his policy doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t debate me and may be misleading (which brings us back to the transparency concern above). I believe a better debate policy would allow more ways of proving your worth than just paying a lot of money or having a huge audience. One important issue is whether a policy enables upwards mobility of merit or not (this policy doesn’t because it basically excludes everyone with merit who hasn’t already had major success).

[Elliot]

Here are some more issues with Alex Epstein’s debate police:

It doesn’t say what topics he’ll debate. Would he debate Objectivism? Critical Rationalism? Silent Spring? I don’t know if he’s mentioned Silent Spring in the last 5 years. (He attacked it on Twitter long ago and he published an article on his website, written by an associate, attacking DDT including Silent Spring. The article doesn’t provide a publication date but I think it’s over 10 years old.)

Is Silent Spring too indirectly related to energy and outside of his expertise for a debate? What about the issue of whether fossil fuel companies are incompatible with the capitalist rule of law due to committing fraud? Would he debate that? Does he think he has expertise about that? If not, would he debate the issue of whether he ought to have expertise about that, and be prepared to debate it, given his career choices and reputation?

Pre-debate questions can be quite important but the policy doesn’t enable them and I’m not aware of any forum where people can ask. I asked Epstein if he’s read Silent Spring but he didn’t answer. It’d be quite a different debate if

1. He read Silent Spring, disliked it, and formed his own opinions about it.

or

2. Some secondary sources told him Silent Spring is bad but he doesn’t actually know what the book says.

The fraud issue would also require pre-debate questions to work well because Epstein has published little or nothing about it, so there’s no good way to prepare debate arguments in advance (since you don’t know what claims he’ll make).

Another issue is debate formats. Would he debate on a text-based internet forum, like this one, or would he just refuse and insist on real-time formats only? Is he only willing to do the standard debate-to-time-limit and not any other ending criteria for debates, and consequently only willing to do real-time debates? One of the downsides of real-time debates is they’re broadly unsuitable for fact checking citations (which often requires checking many sources to find where a claim originally comes from). In my experience, Epstein thinks giving a citation to a secondary source is adequate if he thinks they’re trustworthy, and he doesn’t see the need to figure out where the secondary source got the information and figure out if it’s actually true.

[Elliot]

Epstein has 15,000 YouTube subscribers and gets under 1,000 views per video. He wouldn’t debate himself. He set the 250,000 views debate criterion way above what he could provide to someone he requested a debate with.

If everyone only wanted to debate people with significantly larger audiences than they have, then no debates would ever happen. Logically, for any pair of people, they can’t both have a significantly larger audience to offer the other person.

A more reasonable approach would be to debate people with over 50% of your own audience size.

Epstein spends time on venues with much smaller audiences than 250,000:

These images are probably biased towards higher view counts since they’re high results in my YouTube search (I searched “alex epstein” without quotes).

If you’ll talk with lots of people with audiences under 10,000, but set a requirement of 250,000 for a debate, then it’s in some sense a fake, inflated rule that’s meant to exclude almost everyone so you can then selectively choose who to engage with (or not) according to unstated policies. The public debate policy is obscuring what the real policies are rather than being a good indicator of who he would debate.

I know that giving a talk or interview and a debate are somewhat different, but I think they’re reasonably similar and that he ought to debate more. He says he wants to protect his time because too many people lacking large followings want long debates with him, but did he ever accept and win even one of those debates with someone with a small following? I managed to find only a single multi-hour (>= 2h) debate he’s ever had (I searched “alex epstein debate” without quotes).

For >= 1h, I found:

That’s it. I found only 3 videos of Epstein actually debating someone at length. None of them have 250,000 views.

For short debates, there’s not much either, but I found:

So he’s occasionally debated unknown people in person for around 10 minutes or less, and most of it isn’t posted online.

If you have under 10 hours of total video of your debates online, maybe you shouldn’t be declining to debate anyone unless they pay you a bunch of money or have a much larger platform than you do. (Or in the alternative, don’t posture as a debater.) Based on YouTube search results, it looks like Epstein has only reached an audience of 250,000 people twice in his life (never for a debate):

If you barely ever debate anyone, it’s misleading to write:

Unfortunately, very few prominent people are willing to debate me in a major forum.

And it’s misleading to define “major forum” as meaning only one of the largest forums he’s ever participated at in his life. He’s excluding people like himself as not even close to famous enough to debate him. His debate policy gives the impression he doesn’t want to waste his time on forums that are too small for him, but that isn’t what’s really going on; he’s excluding debate at most forums that, numerically, aren’t too small for him.

[Elliot]

Alex Epstein’s FAQ is introduced like this:

Frequently Asked Questions, including many hostile questions I often get. Here’s the unvarnished truth, with references.

But it doesn’t have “many” questions. It has six, which is short for an FAQ. None are clearly hostile questions.

And none of the answers have references. Five out of six don’t really need references but then don’t write “with references”. One ought to have references (“How is your work on energy funded?”) but doesn’t.