I want to get more experience with adversarial truth-seeking processes, and maybe build more features for them on LessWrong. To get started, I'd like to have a little debate-club-style debate, where we pick a question and each take opposing sides to present evidence and arguments for. Is anyone up for having such a debate with me in a LW dialogue for a few hours? (No particular intention to publish it.)

I have a suggested debate topic in mind, but I'm open to debating any well-operationalized claim (e.g. the sort of thing you could have a Manifold market on). The point isn't that we're experts in it, the point is to test our skills for finding relevant evidence and arguments on our feet (along with internet access). We flip a coin to decide which of us searches for evidence and arguments for each position.

If you may be up for doing this with me sometime in the next few days, let me know with comment / private message / thumbs-up react :-)

Darn it, I misread the UI. When I hover over the react, it only shows me the bold section of the following quote as being reacted-to:

I would phrase what you are looking for as a world where society has nothing to offer people that is nice enough they are willing to work an unpleasant job to produce it.  

It turns out that's actually the text referred to by the other react (the "misunderstands position" react, which makes sense in context). I don't know why the relevant section ("I think there has also been a trend...") isn't highlighted when I hover over your react.

Anyway, I retract the above, my apologies for the mistake!

[Edit: Oops, I misread the UI. I retract this comment!]

@sunwillrise I hope you'll forgive me singling you out, you're certainly not the only person to make what seems to me to be the same mistake, but it seems to me that your use of the "I checked, it's true" react is a misfire here. I think the react makes sense for factual claims that are well-operationalized and where some independent fact-checking occurred. The text you highlighted with that react is an attempted reframe of someone else's position — a reframe is not a claim about the part of the world that the original person is talking about, it's a claim about someone's position. I think the appropriate react to communicate your epistemic state is to "agree" react to the statement starting from "I would phrase", indicating that you concur that this is an accurate restatement.

(I think the meaning of the "I checked, it's true" react in this context would be "I checked with the person who this is a paraphrase of, and they concurred that this was an accurate reframe of their position".)

Oh so that’s why they say “Do you believe in God?”

Rather than “Do you believe that God exists?”.

Something like "I respect this comment"?

(Pretty close to upvote IMO, though it would be deanonymized)

I would broadly support a norm of ‘double quotation marks means you’re quoting someone and single quotes means you are not’.

The sole reason I don’t do this already is because often I have an abbreviated word, like I did with ‘you’re’ above, and I feel like it’s visually confusing to have an apostrophe inside of the pair of single quotes.

Maybe it’s worth just working with it anyway? Or perhaps people have a solution I haven’t thought of? Or perhaps I should start using backticks?

I think this is a reasonable question to ask. I will note that in this case, if your guess is right about what happened, the breaking of the agreement is something that it turned out the counterparty endorsed, or at least, after the counterparty became aware of the agreement, they immediately lifted it.

I still think there's something to maintaining all agreements regardless of context, but I do genuinely think it matters here if you (accurately) expect the entity you've made the secret agreement with would likely retract it if they found out about it.

(Disclaimer that I have no private info about this specific situation.)

"You're trying to become de-confused? I want to catch up to you, because I'm pre-confused!"

I think this is personally right for me. I do not twit, and I have fully blocked the platform for (I think) more than half of the last two years. 

I sometimes go there and seek out the thoughts of people I respect. When I do, I commonly find them arguing against positions they're uninterested in and with people who seem to pick their positions for political reasons (rather than their assessment of what's true), and who bring low-quality arguments and discussion norms. It's not where I want to spend my time thinking.

I think some people go there to just have fun and make friends, which is quite a different thing.

I think it makes sense to state the more direct threat-model of literal extinction; though I am also a little confused by the citing of weirdness points… I would’ve said that it makes the whole conversation more complex in a way that (I believe) everyone would reliably end up thinking was not a productive use of time.

(Expanding on this a little: I think that literal extinction is a likely default outcome, and most people who are newly coming to this topic would want to know that this is even in the hypothesis-space and find that to be key information. I think if I said “also maybe they later simulate us in weird configurations like pets for a day every billion years while experiencing insane things” they would not respond “ah, never mind then, this subject is no longer a very big issue”, they would be more like “I would’ve preferred that you had factored this element out of our discussion so far, we spent a lot of time on it yet it still seems to me like the extinction event being on the table is the primary thing that I want to debate”.)