Someone recently told me “Hey, you seem good at debate.” Which made me think “Yeah, the world needs more debate. Let’s design a better online debate forum.” Here’s an initial concept sketch. Audience
I like FI better, in order to get criteria for the audience to rate posts & casts, with the hope of getting more reasonable discussion. We need a process of raising the status of pundits who raise "good points", more than merely good at debate persuasion.
It's good to have gamification, but the scoring is a big issue.Twitter, FB, YouTube, reddit has likes, retweets, some dislikes for popularity scoring - not good.Super easy likes is not selective enough.Having a Team owner/promoter, with a personal referee for each submission for points is far too "judgement intense".
(* I chose you on my FI Team in April, somebody else got you in May. )
Measurement is much easier than setting this up, so I'd want to have competing measurements in a beta phase. Definitely points per consensus element in the synthesis, and per side agreeing this rest is better than what they came on with. I guess I'd want to give points for subclaims marked as directly opposed, so participants don't talk past each other or are secretly in cahoots against third party views.
I agree with that, too. Someone, say, running for office has a vested interest in telling people what he really believes and in trying to convince them.
But I think it would be nice to have the kind I described for say, learning how to debate.
It is a different skill I think to be able to persuade people of any view given, vs only being able to persuade people of views you believe. For many purposes, we might prefer the 2nd kind of skill.
I've always wanted to see a debate format where both sides prepare ahead of time, but then, just before debate, a coin is flipped to determine which position each side takes. I always liked this idea, because each side has to be prepared to defend both positions. This should separate out "being good at debating" and passionately presenting one's views.
I think this would also help keep everyone honest, because you don't understand a position until you have to defend it.
Then again, I'm the kind of guy who, when I am talking to an Israeli, takes the Palestinian side and, when talking to a Palestinian, takes the Israeli side.
This would be much more interesting if the points of contention were not single claims, but networks of claims. Each side builds an outline of an argument where like five to twenty claims build on each other. I'm picturing this as mindmaps, but it could be done in several ways, although this probably difficult in a purely audio format.
Then the debaters can go through these two outlines together, see which subclaims are uncontested, where they're opposed and ideally where the crux is.
Then the debate would be more of an adversarial collaboration where the debaters attempt to make a synthesis, an outline of where exactly the disagreement is, which would imply ways to resolve it, or to "ground" the disagreement in more fundamental disagreements, such as between consequentialism and deontology.
I'm happy to grant "close in spirit" for a broad enough sense of "close", but I really do want to publicly rate individuals, so pseudonymity is indeed an obstacle in Reddit.
Agree that /r/changemyview is similar, but Reddit is too loud and noisy for me. Also less compelling, in my opinion, than seeing a debate between two prominent public intellectuals.
Let's see how it stacks up to your proposed feature set:1. Audience: There are over 1.3 million users subscribed to the subreddit, and the most popular posts from the last year all have thousands of comments. 2. Claim: Users of the subreddit independently upvote/downvote posts as a way of distributed consensus on claims worthy of debate.3. Debaters: There is pseudonymity to the debaters, which renders most of the ideas here unenforceable.4. Debates: Debates go live on a continuous instead of discrete basis. 5. Civility: Subreddit rules and the downvote mechanism effectively enforce civility. 6. Opinions: Debate presenters are expected to award "deltas" when their opinion is changed.7. Matching: Again, pseudonymity makes this somewhat untenable.8: Ranking: Aggregate upvotes could be an effective proxy for rank. A leaderboard system seems like it'd be simple to implement.
Overall, I think the subreddit comes close to the spirit of what you're suggesting. If you could convince mainstream public intellectuals to sponsor AMA-style scheduled debates on it, I bet that'd get you 90% of the way to the goal with extremely little up-front investment.
I've always disliked polling the audience for an opinion on the topic, before and after the debate, and using that to declare a winner. I think audience members often self-deceive before the debate, claiming not to have an opinion (when they really do), and then more honestly answering after the debate (regardless if the debate actually changed their mind).
This causes an unseen bias toward the expected beliefs of the audience, and the debate doesn't accurately reflect how well the debater convinced the audience, nor how effectively/logically they argued.
The simple solution is to just prevent people from claiming "no opinion" on the poll. Force them to take a side. Though if you allow for degrees of opinion, I do think you'll still see people self-deceiving about how strong their opinions are, and the post-debate poll will likely see a shift towards stronger opinions, not because the debater was good, but because that's what people actually believed to begin with.
I think a more complicated solution would be to randomly pick a judge, and then poll people on how they think they judge will change his/her mind. This wouldn't reflect how many people changed their minds (but let's be honest, how often does that happen anyway), but it would reflect how well people thought the debater argued their points. Even if the judge doesn't change his/her mind, if most people thought that the judge would change (assuming they have 0 knowledge about the judge), then that's an indication that the debater did fairly well.
Good idea - similar goal to Arnold Kling's "Fantasy Intellectual Teams*". http://www.arnoldkling.com/...
Big gains for such a forum.
I like FI better, in order to get criteria for the audience to rate posts & casts, with the hope of getting more reasonable discussion. We need a process of raising the status of pundits who raise "good points", more than merely good at debate persuasion.
It's good to have gamification, but the scoring is a big issue.Twitter, FB, YouTube, reddit has likes, retweets, some dislikes for popularity scoring - not good.Super easy likes is not selective enough.Having a Team owner/promoter, with a personal referee for each submission for points is far too "judgement intense".
(* I chose you on my FI Team in April, somebody else got you in May. )
Measurement is much easier than setting this up, so I'd want to have competing measurements in a beta phase. Definitely points per consensus element in the synthesis, and per side agreeing this rest is better than what they came on with. I guess I'd want to give points for subclaims marked as directly opposed, so participants don't talk past each other or are secretly in cahoots against third party views.
I agree with that, too. Someone, say, running for office has a vested interest in telling people what he really believes and in trying to convince them.
But I think it would be nice to have the kind I described for say, learning how to debate.
That's not an open forum into which anyone can enter to prove themselves.
It is a different skill I think to be able to persuade people of any view given, vs only being able to persuade people of views you believe. For many purposes, we might prefer the 2nd kind of skill.
How would you measure such contributions?
The Munk Debates do some of this.
https://munkdebates.com/deb...
I've always wanted to see a debate format where both sides prepare ahead of time, but then, just before debate, a coin is flipped to determine which position each side takes. I always liked this idea, because each side has to be prepared to defend both positions. This should separate out "being good at debating" and passionately presenting one's views.
I think this would also help keep everyone honest, because you don't understand a position until you have to defend it.
Then again, I'm the kind of guy who, when I am talking to an Israeli, takes the Palestinian side and, when talking to a Palestinian, takes the Israeli side.
Yeah I think the audience would be the biggest problem. But your proposal sounds like a plausible solution.
This would be much more interesting if the points of contention were not single claims, but networks of claims. Each side builds an outline of an argument where like five to twenty claims build on each other. I'm picturing this as mindmaps, but it could be done in several ways, although this probably difficult in a purely audio format.
Then the debaters can go through these two outlines together, see which subclaims are uncontested, where they're opposed and ideally where the crux is.
Then the debate would be more of an adversarial collaboration where the debaters attempt to make a synthesis, an outline of where exactly the disagreement is, which would imply ways to resolve it, or to "ground" the disagreement in more fundamental disagreements, such as between consequentialism and deontology.
I edited the post to allow different kinds of formats. Yes, my proposal could more naturally include debates between prominent people.
I'm happy to grant "close in spirit" for a broad enough sense of "close", but I really do want to publicly rate individuals, so pseudonymity is indeed an obstacle in Reddit.
An interesting suggestion.
Any reason the debates can't be asynchronous and written?
pairagraph.com (I'm the founder) and letter.wiki are both doing this.
Agree that /r/changemyview is similar, but Reddit is too loud and noisy for me. Also less compelling, in my opinion, than seeing a debate between two prominent public intellectuals.
For your consideration: Reddit's /r/changemyview
Let's see how it stacks up to your proposed feature set:1. Audience: There are over 1.3 million users subscribed to the subreddit, and the most popular posts from the last year all have thousands of comments. 2. Claim: Users of the subreddit independently upvote/downvote posts as a way of distributed consensus on claims worthy of debate.3. Debaters: There is pseudonymity to the debaters, which renders most of the ideas here unenforceable.4. Debates: Debates go live on a continuous instead of discrete basis. 5. Civility: Subreddit rules and the downvote mechanism effectively enforce civility. 6. Opinions: Debate presenters are expected to award "deltas" when their opinion is changed.7. Matching: Again, pseudonymity makes this somewhat untenable.8: Ranking: Aggregate upvotes could be an effective proxy for rank. A leaderboard system seems like it'd be simple to implement.
Overall, I think the subreddit comes close to the spirit of what you're suggesting. If you could convince mainstream public intellectuals to sponsor AMA-style scheduled debates on it, I bet that'd get you 90% of the way to the goal with extremely little up-front investment.
I've always disliked polling the audience for an opinion on the topic, before and after the debate, and using that to declare a winner. I think audience members often self-deceive before the debate, claiming not to have an opinion (when they really do), and then more honestly answering after the debate (regardless if the debate actually changed their mind).
This causes an unseen bias toward the expected beliefs of the audience, and the debate doesn't accurately reflect how well the debater convinced the audience, nor how effectively/logically they argued.
The simple solution is to just prevent people from claiming "no opinion" on the poll. Force them to take a side. Though if you allow for degrees of opinion, I do think you'll still see people self-deceiving about how strong their opinions are, and the post-debate poll will likely see a shift towards stronger opinions, not because the debater was good, but because that's what people actually believed to begin with.
I think a more complicated solution would be to randomly pick a judge, and then poll people on how they think they judge will change his/her mind. This wouldn't reflect how many people changed their minds (but let's be honest, how often does that happen anyway), but it would reflect how well people thought the debater argued their points. Even if the judge doesn't change his/her mind, if most people thought that the judge would change (assuming they have 0 knowledge about the judge), then that's an indication that the debater did fairly well.