All of cartografie's Comments + Replies

1. You query whether Debate favours short arguments over long arguments because "the weakest part of an argument is a min function of the number of argument steps."
   
   This is a feature, not a bug.
   
   It's true that long arguments are more debatable than short arguments because they contain more inferential steps and each step is debatable.
   
   But additionally, long arguments are less likely to be sound than short arguments because they contain more inferential steps and each step is 100% certain.
   
   So "debate" still tracks "unlikely".
    
2. "An efficient Debate argument is

yes, thanks v much. edited.

The precision-recall tradeoff definitely varies from one task to another. I split tasks into "precision-maxxing" (where false-positives are costlier than false-negatives) and "recall-maxxing" (where false-negatives are costlier than false-positives).

I disagree with your estimate of the relative costs in history and in medical research. The truth is that academia does surprisingly well at filtering out the good from the bad.

Suppose I select two medical papers at random — one from the set of good medical papers, and one from the set of crap medical papers. I... (read more)

Moreover, even if the post shouldn't have been published with hindsight, that does not entail the post shouldn't have been published without hindsight.

You are correct that precision is (in general) higher than the threshold. So if Alice publishes anything with at least 10% likelihood of being good, then more than 10% of her poems will be good. Whereas, if Alice aims for a precision of 10% then her promising threshold will be less than 10%.

Unless I've made a typo somewhere (and please let me know if I have), I don't claim the optimal promising threshold ${\tau }^{\star }$ = 10%.  You can see in Graph 5 that I propose a promising threshold of 3.5%, which gives a precision of 10%.

I'll edit the article to dis... (read more)