It's hard to get high quality debate. I don't think this is a personal problem about me. I don't think I'm being gatekept for not having a PhD. People can be dismissive over missing credentials, but that's a sign they aren't rational and wouldn't be good debate opponents. I don't think having the credentials would actually get me good debates. I don't see many intellectuals having great debates with each other but excluding me. A lot of debates I see on social media are about politics not philosophy, and they're low quality and stop early. Academic journals aren't set up for much back and forth debate. Debates that take place on stages are generally too short and aren't followed up on enough, and often focus more on speaking to the audience than trying to engage with the other side.
There are often career incentives and social dynamics making all of this much worse. The world has a lot of problematic power structures.
It’s a a bit of a chicken and egg situation with Paths Forward. The world has to be rational to some significant degree to want PF, but how do you make the world way more rational without PF? Well, PF isn’t the only way to make the world more rational since the world has made progress in rationality multiple times (but also it has also regressed other times). You can make the world more rational through art and media, parenting, science, etc. Also the world isn’t entirely hostile to PF. Some people and sub-cultures would be more open to it than others. So there are ways to make progress, but I think the beginning is especially hard and maybe it could start snowballing after some critical point where a big enough and high enough quality group uses PF to quickly improve.
A fair amount of people will either say PF sounds good or PF sounds good except for concerns about the time it takes up. My PF writing already covers mechanisms for protecting your time. PF says some ways to limit time use are rational and others are irrational and has suggestions. I think the standard view is also that some are rational and others irrational. I haven’t gotten anyone to critique why the specific methods I suggest are inadequate or suggest better ones or argue that the problem is insoluble (or already solved and the status quo is fine). I’ve found the disinterest in discussing it strange.
When people say they like PF, I think they tend to imagine they and their allies using it on others, not being on the receiving end. I think it’s uncommon that people want to be on the receiving end of it. Whereas I would like my debate policy to be used more and to receive more criticisms and challenges.
I forget if the debate was good or not (probably can’t really tell anyway) but I remember Alex Epstein being able to get a debate with some environmentalists while having a lack of credentials so there’s that.
IIRC Epstein paid McKibben $10,000 for that debate, which was a publicity stunt not an attempt at truth-seeking. I looked at Epstein’s YouTube history a while back and was surprised at how few debates there actually were.