The snippet was posted a month ago and the voting has stabilized as a net positive. I was kind of expecting this one to end up in the deep red and its interesting that it didn't!

Something that is interesting me to me is that this thing that ended up at +15 (as of this comment) abut also this post is, for me, in equilibrium with attempts to create relatively fun and relatively safe and relatively sophisticated meta-Egregores that are about Egreoges. One such entity is "Ingroup".

Indeed "Ingroup" (or at least the OG Ingroup members) were mostly post-ratioanalists trying to experimentally create ways way creating open ended, funny, ironic, hopefully-net-healthy ways to embrace a group identity that anyone could embrace, and anyone would likely be helped by embracing. And yet the Ingroup post is currently sitting at -6 with three comments that take the predictable negative reaction of LW-circa-June-2025 for granted.

Updating, I am! (Though mostly to reject narrow hypotheses about the state of the LW allele meme frequencies, and be open to learning that it has changed in ways I don't understand yet.)

The last four paragraphs lack a period.

no i won’t get tested for toxoplasmosis why would you

Making a joke like this is exactly what someone with toxoplasmosis would do to deflect scrutiny away from their blatant pro-cat propaganda with humor and this should not be allowed! You MUST be tested now

The way I read it:

"✅" is "this is a viewpoint character because they are interesting and their mental state is consistent with the Authors intended sequence of Reader revelations".

"(✅)" is "this person isn't interesting enough, in their mental states, choices, or whatever, for the juice to be worth the squeeze of describing their minds in detail over time".

"((✅))" is "this person's mental state contains spoilers, that, if leaked to the Reader, would ruin the Author's plan for what is supposed to be a mystery, and hard to understand, vs not (probably because some more interesting viewpoint character's lack knowledge of the mental state of the villain or whoever is actually plot critical such that the plot would just be totally over if a viewpoint character was telepathic)".

I think your comment fixed the chart, and now it shows ((Dumbledore)) and ((Quirrel)) and I feel like this is better than before :-)

Also, I think it is kinda interesting to try to map this framework farther out, to Mysteries, or to the Romance genre (especially love triangles?) because it probably needs more levels than these three (or maybe three levels, but make it a vector of them, that do "this, but in different dimensions of knowledge the viewpoint character can, themselves, understand"?) in a super critical way?

Like something about "each character's own interiority and self understanding" can't be breached (differently for each character?) in some genres because in many a Romance too much (mutual?) clarity about how and why each person would react to different possible world's they might be in, or might actualize with their choices... would mess up the Story. (This is also a sort of useful frame for Planecrash, which is a Romance of a sort.)

You could still have interesting art... if you mess up the Story too much with super high levels of insight, but then the Story won't be inside genre conventions that tend to ensure the reader gets the payoff they expected to get, from reading something implying that it is in a certain genre. (Playing with this too much gets into accusations of unethical marketing.)

At the character level, in some sense, every personality disorder is a way of being avowedly oblivious to something important about the normal human experience, and each such obliviousness would make it harder for a character with that personality disorder to really deserve a "✅" with no parentheses at all... except you totally can do that!

Like in Herbert's Dune, a way to describe part of how weird it is might be that sociopathy is normal to the Author's "omniscient" viewpoint, and so sociopaths who wouldn't normally be more than a two bit villain or side character in a character story get viewpoint attention?? And the Author doesn't comment on it or lampshade it or anything. And in Bushnell's Trading Up, I think Bushnell was quite purposeful in making narcissism normal to the Author's "omniscient" viewpoint, and there's supposed to be no viewpoint in that story to deeply admire, and its a sort of "tragedy about trashy fun" on many levels. If you empathize too much it is a deep tragedy, but if you don't, you can "hate read it". Or whatever.

You might call books where the viewpoint characters are almost intolerably oblivious to themselves "cringe literature" similar to "cringe comedy" like the first season (but not the third and later seasons) of Parks & Recs?

In lots of Romance (or Romance adjacent) stuff I just don't vibe with it because it is too cringe-to-me... either the writer is really The Author and its embarrassing to see into the writer like that, or else the writer is pandering to their Reader or... anyway... its not "on purpose (in a way I like)".

But, by contrast, I thought Bushnell was probably doing something weird on purpose, that was sort of pandering to some readers, but also saying something to some of those readers that they might not even notice that they could usefully learn, and I got artistic payoffs from reading something so spiritually alien, and yet so grounded in almost-plausibly-real ways for some women in NYC to be, and also so detailed.

Anyway.  I guess I'm trying to say that I think inventing ontologies for "how much insight is communicated about someone's viewpoint" is interesting.

And such ontologies can also slightly be applied to the Narrator, and the Expected Reader, and the Author (if different from the Narrator), and a possibly distinct writer sitting in their office, with bills to pay, and limited spoons, and aspirations to be seen by many as an Author whose Art echos in artistic history in ways they would like, and so on.

Like with HP:MoR, a lot of plot lines could be ruled out by thinking "if X happened it would be a story about Y, and a story about Y would have result Z on the Singularitarian/Rationality movement, and Eliezer doesn't want a future like Z, so X won't happen".

I don't know of any fiction by anyone except Eliezer where precisely this filter will predict a lot about what happens in the story... but also... that's a large part of why I read it <3

Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue?  I still have to finish that one too!

What I'm looking forward to there is the Light Novel or Manga version, with tightened pacing and so on, that is setting up an Anime that will get dubs/subs in Japanese and Chinese and Korean and so on. (Or something similarly insanely full of chutzpah that could also actually work.)

Also, a re-formatting and re-editing would let me actually recommend it to other people, which I can't do now because they bounce off of the glowfic formatting.

But then also... that story is about "corrigibility"... which is a research field that makes me un-utterably sad.

I would prefer the editing to just offer a full on "weird kind of sequel" that is ANOTHER MUCH LATER PLAY THROUGH by the player of the game, where the player of the game has learned a lot about "corrigibility" from seeing past versions of the game, and can score a lot more points against the mere god-character of a concept as half-assed as "corrigibility" ;-)

Stuff like this (aiming for TV on purpose, fixing some of the alignment-theoretic understructure, improving the marketability) could actually resonate in History in a way that moves the needle on the Singularity... which is the standard I usually hold Eliezer's writing to because I think he, himself, tries to hold himself to that standard ;-)

An Epilogue #3 that came out in a way, and with the right timing, to build interest in such a Sequel would be great. Then again, maybe actual real world international politics is more pressing, because of p-doom and timelines and an imminent WW3 and so on?

Neat! This part of it helped me get a better model of Eliezer's model of the lowest levels of subjectively accessible and controllable thinking!

There's that stuff in the middle of the 30ms to 300,000ms zone where a thought that takes 4 seconds to happen (and which necessarily must have some underlying neurological basis) can sometimes need 4 minutes to explain to a third party... or can't be transmitted that fast. Or can be explained but not turned into something they could repeat in 4 seconds on their own... or whatever.

Harry’s dark side, as I model it, is not actually supernatural. It is a bunch of stuff that got written into his brain and then erased by childhood amnesia. So he’s got a bunch of habits that chain into each other.

(I parenthetically mention that one of my deflationary hypotheses for why people say they get new thoughts when they’re on drugs, is just that some drugs, like psychedelics, disrupt patterned chains of thought. Normally whenever we think thought X, we then go on to think thoughts Y and Z in a familiar pattern. But taking psychedelics is one way to disrupt those patterns and think new thoughts instead. The deflationary hypothesis is that any kind of mental disruption would do it, that the results are not specific to the drug; you'd need to demonstrate some tighter correlation to get past the deflationary hypothesis for that drug.)

I don't have a really strong mechanistic idea about habits, but I try to use the word "habit" in a way that is consistent with what I think I know about the basal ganglia... which controls gross motor stuff, emotion, and cognition, and is sufficient to let a de-corticated rabbit stay alive and sort of eat food (but is probably not sufficient to keep a de-corticated human alive, because (insofar as ethical experiments have been possible) it is probably the case that we and chimps and some other higher mammals are way way more "essentially corticated" than the little simple ones).

I had never previously focused on these ideas (habits vs 5-second-level) at the same time, but... it does seem like "sub five second" stuff probably sometimes involves intuitive deployment of valid reasoning leaps (like from mathematics) and this MIGHT actually be simply "based in habit"!?

In "Distinct Contributions of the Cerebellum and Basal Ganglia to Arithmetic Procedures" it looks like maybe reliable iteration (ie "counting") leans harder on the cerebellum (as if counting was a fine motor skill) and "operational chaining" (like maybe a goto statement in a slightly conscious but still quite low level mental algorithm) leans harder on the basal ganglia, as if long division was the application of a looping habit?

So. Yeah. Maybe "sub five second stuff" just literally IS the application of acquired mental habits that are useful!?

At least this round of falsification pursuit didn't rule out the hypothesis.

What I was expecting, naively, right after reading Eliezer's theory, is that sub five second stuff is more "Hebbian, and neurological, in general" than "habitual (and based on the basal ganglia) as such"... which still might be true, but I'm less confident now.

Maybe 3 second rationality skills ARE just "all in fine motor skills and habits, possible directed inwardly, like in kinesthetic imagination"???

Regarding the larger set of data Eliezer talked about, from having tried a hallucinogen once (to gather subjective metaphysical data to see if "reality was really reality" when I was young and foolish)... it very much did NOT seem like the effects were localized to the basal ganglia or the cerebellum.

There was a lot of super low level visual cortex involvement, with things down in the Brodmann Areas 18 and maybe 17 and 19 (and maybe everywhere in the entire cortex?) involved as if "opponent process" processes for things like "motion vs not-motion", and so on, were falling in and out of calibration.

As subjective data about subjectivity itself (like for trying to figure trying to figure out if Solipsism is true, or whether maybe there is only me plus some Cartesian Demon that is fucking with a hypothetical disembodied mind that is me, with all of external reality as an illusion), hallucinogens did just totally destroy the simple naive hypothesis that "cogito-ergo-sum-style subjective awareness" is independent (not caused by?) what happens in the brain's firings...

..."the brain" just obviously does cause "the subjective mind", it turns out...

...unless the Demon's powers extend to inventing a complex theory of neurology, and taking into account what hallucinogens would hypothetically do to a hypothetically incarnated mind, and then the Demon fed plausible lies along these lines into some hypothetically "metaphysically disembodied awareness" that was me... lol!

((You can' always generate "an even more paranoid hypothesis"... its just that such hypotheses almost always become negligible under pragmatic anti-paranoid normalization <3))

Anyway. I'm not sure how the idea that "3 second level stuff maybe only happens in the cerebellum and basal ganglia" could be behaviorally applied, to get profits in some way, such as to know the VoI on ruling hypotheses of that class in or out...

But that was a cool part of the interview. Thank you! <3

Huh. I feel like this could be a whole subreddit or wiki on its own? So open ended! Its not like there's a uniquely correct response to it.

For myself, lately, the thing I've gotten the most mileage out of is "p-beauty contest played by, 2, 3, 4, or maybe 5 players".

In a two player game, you simply bid zero if you can do math and want to win.

That's all there is to it.

But it turns out a lot of kinda smart people need that math lesson!

Once you have three players who have all had that math lesson... then it gets interesting because it turns out a LOT of people hate the idea of generating a real "common knowledge certificate of mutual awareness of mathematical rationality recognizing mutual awareness of mathematical rationality"... or something?

So people will throw games! Or wax philosophical about their objections for 30 minutes before playing... or all kinds of stuff.

In my entire life, I have only seen "four humans all bid zero in the very first round" once.

"Com judges" might not exist any more (or might be called something different)?

I think the current meta focuses on "K" vs "not-K"? (Roughly, the "K" people only want to debate philosophy, and they sort of abuse the Policy Debate platform (using the logic of policy debate) to try to undermine doing policy debate within a Policy Debate tournament because maybe "better policy outcomes" would happen "in real life" if people stopped having policy debates and debated philosophy instead.)

Coms judges probably do exist, but maybe not "by that name" anymore because they are somewhat timeless? They come in two archetypal flavors:

(1) the default you'd expect of a private school PMC (Professional / Managerial Class) parents who volunteer to judge when their kid's coach asks for parent volunteers to enable the coach to run a tournament, where those parents will act and judge like normies, and will predictably reward "the appearance of articulate prestige" in terms of PMC cultural standards and...

(2) church lady debate coaches who think the naive reactions of those PMC parents are essentially correct and timeless and wants to consciously "teach to that test", and who also personally "judge to the theory that teaches to that test" when they are judging... in a high church way that connects back to latin phrases like "post hoc ergo prompter hoc" and "status quo" and and "ad hominum" and certain ways of organizing policy proposals based on "prima facie stock issues" of some kind (the lynchpin of all of them being the stock issue of "Solvency" where the plan had better at least pretend to be positively likely to positively work to fix some problem, and the AFF has to prove this or else they are a bad AFF). Some of them get very defensive, and sort of refuse to flow, and will pantomime "ripping up the ballot" if a debater starts to talk really fast.

Sankar's comment is indicative of the lay public's attitude, that church lady com judges respect. 

If you watch some modern competive debate, you might have a better understanding of why it's disliked. The Cross Examination Debate Association's National Championship is the most prestigious of the US college debate tournaments, and the 2014 finals was widely circulated as an illustrative example of the current style.

((

Arguably, however, the NDT year end tournament of the merged CEDA/NDT circuit system is more prestigious that the CEDA year end tournament? And former NDT regional circuits tend to be in the South, and are more rhetorically traditional, and less "post-modern" (which some peopledislike for separate reasons). The distinction here isn't about flow vs not-flow, or stock-issues vs not-stock-issues, but rather K (post modern? philosophic? anarchist? woke?) vs not-K (modernist? policy-centric? archist? conservative?).

))

Flow Judges... flow! 

And rely on it heavily to decide their ballot. (There are subtypes. I will not enumerate them <3)

Here is an example image (sauce here) of a flow for ONE (or two???) position(s) (maybe an entire case?!), that was discussed substantively by skillfully-intellectually-organized speakers all of whom remembered and addressed each other's previous points coherently in a skillful way, to make flowing easy (often maybe using verbally numbered arguments based on everyone taking similar notes in similar ways), in seven sequential speeches (which we know, because there are seven columns):

We have sub-issues going horizontally across the page.

Interpreting this a bit... "H" with a circle at the top left in black ink probably stands for "Harms", which often shows up in the first affirmative constructive (1AC) proving the stock issue of "Harms". Something has to be wrong with the status quo. If the status quo ain't broke, it shouldn't be fixed. The AFF has to make people want change before they propose change. All of this is latent in "H" in a circle... and it has something to do with something being "untraceable". Everyone heard this in the round of course. That's why they can get away with so much shorthand. They might have a whole logic loop in working or audio memory and be able to know what is being talked about if someone says "on the traceability argument in Harms, our response to their response saying <blah blah> is... NEW X".

Whatever the arguments are, it involved a cited substantive claim, published in 2010, by "Bachi" (whoever that is).

((Google scholar offers no insight when I search for something, fwiw. This is bad. A KEY FUNCTION of these notes should be to enable people to do opposition research on key ideas "out in the literature" and get a better picture of reality thereby, and win debates about reality thereby. You want to be able to aumantically hear an argument, and come back later at a new tournament magically knowing the backstory of what was claimed as a posterior, and via scholarship, this can happen! The citation and keywords, for later research, are like the NUMBER ONE THING at least one of the two people on your two person team should be capturing.)

Back in the image, where is says "Brower '08" that means someone with the last name of Brower was quoted ver batim based on something published in 2008. The substance of what was said is going to be in everyone's working memory, but the gist of it is "The economy going down somehow causes something to do with satellites" which we get from "econ  V  ->  satellite".

The red ink is almost certainly the negative rebuttals, which attacked various subarguments line by line with the first such speech not "reasoning" that much, but mostly just reading four pieces of (probably case specific) counter-evidence. (When that happens to you, as the AFF, your stomach often sinks, because you might drop an AFF round, even though you picked the ground upon which to fight, which is a huge advantage.)

The blue and black ink are probably all affirmative speeches. The blue was likely written very fast, in the middle of the round, while speeches were happening.

The black ink was probably "pre-flowed" and written in advance of the round by the affirmative team, to save time, so as not to waste seconds during the round by taking notes on a set speech they already optimized the shit out of (and might know by heart).

This might be a sloppy/weird flow? It has the flavor of something fake.

Normally you'd put each issue on its own piece of paper or file, or tab in your spreadsheet on a laptop, because you don't know how much it might explode. This is "less real".  Good for pedagogy maybe?

See the "2 Blackouts '10" in black ink near the bottom?

To the right of that is an "S" with a circle in red ink, which usually means "Solvency" which is a common stock issue that is different from "Harms" (and should be on different paper??). Also, on the far left in the same row there's red ink that simply says "no solvency" which suggests that the entire horizontal sequence of debate is "about Solvency"... and if this is true then it suggests that the negative had the last word on the subject (and the affirmative might have dropped it)!

If the affirmative really did drop Solvency, then they basically lost the debate. 

Therefore a flow judge would probably give the ballot to the negative (unless some other piece of paper also exists, about what standards to use for a ballet, and somehow that debate resolved in "Solvency doesn't matter anymore for <reasons>"). A Flow Judge would give NEG the ballot even if the flow judge was a flat earther who doesn't believe in satellites but does believe aliens will rapture us all before anything being talked about in the round actually ever happened... you can be a Flow Judge AND be crazy... but being a flow judge immunizes you some from having wrong beliefs so long as you track syntax and are in a half-honest environment ;-)

So we see here, from the example flow: NEG probably won in some "objective" sense.

And a flow judge would notice and give NEG the ballot?

And this is why debaters often prefer to be judged by flow judges... it puts the speakers legibly and clearly in control of their own destiny within a round, tightening the OODA loop and the lessons it can teach :-)

Yeah, so there are quite a few different formats (I won't even mention all of them below) and they can evolve, and they work somewhat differently here, and "being honest in your advocacy" comes up in the debates themselves quite often (but the other side is, sort of necessarily, also argued whenever the debate "goes meta about debate itself" like that).

I. "SPAR"

In High School (when I was competing in individuals events for the team I eventually returned to and coached) there was one tournament every year that had a "SPontaneous ARgument" competition.

That tournament was the best, and lots of us loved to SPAR, and that was just like the thing you're imagining.

You don't even know what the question will be. Its usually something trivial like "Peanut better is objectively better than jelly" but it could be "Invading Iraq was a mistake" or whatever.

If both people agree on who wants to be pro/con they can, otherwise its a coin flip.

Amateur parent volunteer judges with no rhetorical training then judge on... random criteria?

It is, to serious undergraduate NDT tournament at a national Finals, what your first day at an improv class is to starring in Hamlet.

II. RESOLUTIONS SELECTED BY A NATIONAL COMMITTEE

In serious policy debate the community picks a RESOLUTION and then at a tournament you take the affirmative three times, and the negative three times. When you are affirmative, you pick ANY CASE YOU WANT that is an instance of a detailed policy consistent with the RESOLUTION to advocate.

At least that's how it works nowadays. Sometimes in the past there was poor resolution selection such that every round for the entire year was the same argument and it was terrible. The trick to a good one is to hit the zeitgeist a bit, but also to leave wiggle room for crazy cases.

1928 Resolved: That a federal department of education should be created with a secretary in the president's cabinet.

1943 Resolved: That a federal world government should be established.

1966 Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a program of compulsory arbitration in labor-management disputes in basic industries.

1985 Resolved: That the federal government should provide employment for all employable United States citizens living in poverty.

1999 Resolved: That the United States should substantially change its foreign policy toward Russia.

2007 Resolved: The United States federal government should establish a policy substantially increasing the number of persons serving in one or more of the following national service programs: AmeriCorps, Citizen Corps, Senior Corps, Peace Corps, Learn and Serve America, Armed Forces.

2016 Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.

In general, teams can run cases they truly believe in, or they can run "trick cases", or they can run centrally topical cases. These are more like dimensions? In modern times there's a whole other thing called "kritiks" which I'll touch on very lightly later. Affirmative cases can often be positioned in these three or four dimensions, but often push very hard into one specific dimension.

III. Example Trick Case: Bomb Russian Booze

I remember a trick case with Russia, where the affirmative plan was to send Navy Seals into Russia, and secretly bomb literally every large alcohol distillery (also all the warehouses with stores of vodka), and get away with it (no one would know who the bombers were), and so (the claim went) nothing would change except a massive increase in the price of hard alcohol in Russia, based on massive decrease in the supply, and thus a massive lowering of their rates of alcoholism, for a massive net benefit to Russian domestic wellbeing.

And this was, obviously, INSANE. But it kept winning! :-D

They had all this published recruiting material, that young men are often exposed to by ROTC recruiters, saying that the Navy Seals were essentially made of magic and could do anything and never be caught.

And they submitted it as strong direct written evidence of the ease with which the plan could be carried off, and bloviated about how "the American government would never lie to its precious young men in its recruiting material so either this is true or else the USG is evil... is that what you're really saying when you accuse our recent and clearly cited evidence of being overstated?? do you you lack patriotism?!?"

It was hilarious. People almost always laughed the first time they heard it. And (rare) Flow Judges and (common) Coms Judges could both appreciate the "technically clean logic" and (often) the fun/patriotic/cynical showboating.

IV. Other Example Cases: Drug Legalization & Dioxins

So, basically, if you wanted to spend your optimization pressure to pick an AFF case you really really believed in (like as a political posture?) even if it had shit evidence, and only one crackpot in one insane progressive magazine with a readership of 1000 was advocating it directly (and you weren't even doing what the crackpot suggested because that was a bad plan, but you were modifying it creatively yourself)... I mean... you could do that, but it would be tougher and maybe less funny?

And funniness, in my book, counts for a lot.

((I kinda "went authentic" my second year of actually debating, trying to pass off radical domestic drug reform in the US as a "demand side" attempt at a "foreign policy" adjustment towards a country with large "illegal" opium farms and cartels and stuff. It was something someone in their early 20s might foolishly think was wise? Arguably we were Brucing a bit in choosing to run it... we sometimes actually lost on AFF, which is not great. 

In my first year we just went straight up the middle with a dioxin emission fix based on mandated medical waste incinerator smokestack filters paid for by government subsidies, and enforced by fines for refusing to accept the retrofit. Dioxins are basically not emitted in the US anymore, but back then they were. We won a lot. And it wasn't even a trick case! But people didn't laugh... just nod along and agree that this boring thing was boringly correct and the negative arguments were grasping at straws. The coach made sure we didn't change since we were beginners and etc etc.))

Often, teams would pick a case, and change it a little bit between every tournament and bring polished proposals and skilled defense to tournaments at the end of the year.

The hard and creative (and more morally ambiguous) part was Negative.

V. The Desperate (Deeply Theoretical?) Bullshit Negatives Need To Ever Win

Over and over and over (usually three times every tournament) you hear this AMAZING First Affirmative Constructive (1AC) and with shining rhetoric, a clean story, tidy evidence, and true confidence in the voice of the person speaking it, and... 

...you want to stand up and applaud and say "this is a great proposal that America should do"...

...but instead you have to pull shit out of your ass somehow to say NO to it...

...like maybe: "NO! uh... because... technically it is a prima facie burden of the affirmative team to propose a plan with no vagueness, and here is a formal expert in rhetoric to back us up on this claim about how debate has to technically work if it is to be properly educational, and this plan is vague because... uh... [checks list of 20 ways a plan can be vague that was given to them by the advanced team that usually gets to at least the quarter finals in tournaments] it lacks a clear funding mechanism... and you, dear wonderful Judge who is very wise and full of common sense, you wouldn't sign a blank check, would you? wouldn't that be crazy? this is a prima facie burden! and it can't be fixed in the second speech! if they didn't have it in the first speech you know they're just making shit up and you can't trust them, and therefore they should lose and there's no two ways about it, and here are five independent reasons that the basic idea, if true, constitutes valid reason to give the ballot to us, all based on just the truth that their plan was vague <and so on>".

You actually give it A LOT more structure thatn that. Break "Vagueness" into an A, B, C, D set of claims, where the four lettered claims abstractly explain why NEG has to win. Give each letter several numbered justifications... Also, you make four other half-crazy arguments, each of which attacks the AFF case from orthogonal directions from "Vagueness".

Then (on the Vagueness position) the AFF later says:

(1) you made an ad hominum in your accusation, about them not being trustworthy

(2) and yes do too they have a price number, and they just baldly assert <a made up price> with no evidence at all, and 

(3 & 4 & 5) they make some other rebuttals, but they don't don't refute EVERY independent line of argument through your entire plan vagueness scaffold.

So in your counter you magnanimously grant almost everything they said, except for the totally made up price which is obviously made up. Which you reiterate is too late so shouldn't count for educational reasons, and also NEW 1 its a fake number with no evidence, and also... <three more new numbered arguments>.

And you point out that you made more and stronger arguments that they ignored, and reiterate the A B C and D of the Vagueness argument...

...using only A2, A4, B1, B5, C2, C3, and D3, D4, and D5 as voters.

You point out that you now have 2x2x2x3==24 different paths to retain the overall Vagueness Position in a form that could destroy AFF! <3

(These 24 paths to victory are a shorter and smaller version of what you originally said! You said more before... via speed reading a generic Vagueness Template that you've practiced speed reading the pro forma parts of.)

And then you remind the judge that the next time the AFF talks it won't be a constructive, and they would have made their strongest arguments, and if they make new arguments it wouldn't be fair, because you probably could have made strong creative counter-arguments to those new arguments, but you won't have the time or legal allowance for that (which might be why they would have stuck arguments in that were weak in the long run but strong initially)...

...and so anything else they make up later would violate the "educational spirit" of "the noble practice of policy debate", and so, sadly, despite the case possibly being great in real life (unless either of the two other independent anti-affirmative voting arguments goes through) the judge will have to Vote On Vagueness And Vote Negative.

And then you watch the judge's facial expressions carefully during this as they look down at their notes and write what you say... or whatever the judge does. Its the judge. The judge is god for the round. You want the ballot, right? The judge controls the ballot.

VI. Subservience To The Judge Is Good Strategy

Depending on the judge(s)'s nods or frowns, maybe in an even later (even shorter) speech, you might concede or silently drop or spend only 20 seconds half-assing the Vagueness position at the very very end?

Or you might hammer it super hard in an eloquent minute long rant explaining why this is ONE OF TWO very very strong and very very independent reasons to Vote Negative.

And you spell out a potted but plausible history of the debate so far (that everyone has notes on and it just happened but it was fast and you're trying to crystalized it in people's minds) summarizing all the rhetorical flubs of the AFF team who had a BURDEN OF PROOF! And not-at-all-fakely emoting about how the AFF burden of proof is so important... right now... (until you're on AFF in the next round, insisting that stock issues are fake bullshit in general, and Vagueness isn't even one that people normally cared about)...

In finals, there are three judges!

Based on facial expressions these three "gods" might buy different things, so there are entire lectures you'll get from the coach in the five hour van ride to yet another college for yet another tournament, on how to pick what to drop and what to emphasize so that you can try to get at least two of the three judges in the final to vote for you, even if they vote on different issues.)

And then sometimes all the prep work and all the fallbacks, and all the combinatorial optimization gives you a weaselly win as a negative?

And you win against a naively "real world very strong case" where the Affirmative just were kinda lazy about researching the cost of their plan enough? Or not?

It depends.

VII. The Bullshit, Emphasized Above As Silly, Is Actually Often Educational

However also... it overall... these practice really are, often, "educational in general"! <3

The vagueness bullshit might work in the second tournament of the season, but in the fourth tournament of the season, with the AFF running a newer and sexier version of their case, and they will have changed the wording slightly (at no time cost) to mention a price in their Official Plan!

And it will be backed by evidence they didn't mention, but now have in their laptops or box of papers, that they can quote (but only if you're fool enough to not notice the slightly different words and try vagueness on reflex, rather than from actually listening and deciding what Negative attacks to try, on the fly, in the round) and the evidence will be based on an expert they found in some library article, after haunting the library for a day.

Negative teams rarely win the same way twice against the same Affirmative team, and by the end of the year the same teams will often have been in the finals against each other two or three times, arguing the same AFF case as always (but now very strong) and "yet another crazy way to attack it" (like a kritik maybe?).

But anyway.

If you go with a stock issues frame, and try Vagueness, on NEG, that first time... (early in a season, with a strong generic theoretical counter-argument to a half-assed AFF case) you might win, especially in High School...

...in college anarchoprogleft types might try to accuse you of being logocentrically racist if you naively try to use stock issues, and anarchoprogleft college judges might agree with that? College rounds can be insane or not, in hundreds of different ways ;-)

I lost to "Kant"... twice. Never got a 3rd rematch.

I lost to "deep eco feminism"... twice and then beat it the third time and had "Cara" (who was in her late 20s, and finally getting a degree to make something of her life, and was intimidatingly confident, and made finals in like half the tournaments I saw) ask for a copy of my citations and evidence at the end, which made me felt super proud. Then she stopped running "deep eco feminism"! Which I thought was high integrity of her!

Anyway. If things are working well overall, Winning As Negative gets harder and harder and harder over the course of the season.

Because there is feedback!

Because it is at least half real, and every 90 minute debate at a tournament gives the AFF yet another real life, adrenaline filled, actual redteamed, OODA loop's worth of information on how to make their advocacy, that they get to choose and refine (within the arguably vague bounds of the annual resolution that is stable all year) stronger against arbitrary attacks :-)

VIII. Thoughts On The Flexibility Of The Ontology Of Traditional Debate Norms

Mostly here I'm talking about specifically undergrad level "CEDA/NDT debate" and its echo at the High School level which is called "Policy Debate".

Anyone can make up anything they want, in terms of a group of people who meet to argue and vote and award prizes and whatever.

"Debate" in a fully general form, is nearly infinitely open and flexible. It doesn't have to be two people vs two people. It doesn't have to have a yearly resolution (in High School sometimes they change it halfway through the year).

It doesn't have to have five minute constructive speeches with two minutes of cross-examination at the beginning. It doesn't have to have ballots that say either AFF or NEG. It doesn't have to have "speaker points" over and above that to help break ties in how the seeding process for finals should work.

Debates have been happening for millennia and you can do them however it seems correct to you to do them. They are deeply "existential" rather than "essential" when the judges can write anything they want on a ballot, and your job is to get people to grant you ethos, and feel "<YourName> wins" is true of what just happened, and express it somehow. If people are truly good, it can work. If people are bad, then... maybe the methods can save it? Maybe?

The debates exist... that existence includes a competitively collaborative search for the meaning of the competitive practice, with winners and losers, internal to the practice...

The form that exists now agrees, mostly, that it should be able to regenerate itself from inside its own logic, but the forms we have are deeply deeply tested and not everyone will understand all of why things happen and particular way. And these forms are part of continuous traditions going back to the 1920s that are still culturally resonating, which I think is kinda cool <3

Consider: just simple basic traditional DEBATE... in its modern form!

Before overcomingbias or lesswrong existed, and before I became friends with anyone who would (eventually) end up being In The Rationality Community... I did inter-collegiate policy debate (CEDA/NDT) debate for two years in a community college.

I don't know anything similar that gives the same fusion of "adrenaline and logic" with super fast and super precise feedback and clear skill progression.

It was because of policy debate that I haunted libraries for many hours every week, doing opposition research on winning affirmative cases and putting together my own affirmative case (leveling up library science skills), and it was because of that practice that I found and read Goedel Escher Bach. Its good stuff that causes good stuff!

I loved it so much that for two more years I coached my old public High School's debate team for policy debate (they already had a very strong individual and dramatic program, like for reading poems or reproducing famous old speeches or giving one-shot informative topical speeches to persuade, but the Program Director wasn't comfy with debate debate).

My two teams of two kids (four total students) did great (both teams were in the Finals both years), and we won "Best Small School" two years straight, and then I transferred to a UC and had to stop coaching, but the rumors I heard through the grape fine is that our tiny little public high school had acquired a reputation and lots of the big schools private high schools were starting to team up to do "cooperative ops research" against us! Yay! I wish I could have coached a third year to see how that would have gone.

I like to imagine that at least some of our supernormal outcome was my coaching, but to be fair I I think my kids were like "literally geniuses"? (Like, the smartest of them maxed the SATs and later earned a PhD in Applied Math.)

So you have to subtract that out of my credit somehow if you're trying to do proper credit assignment. I don't think a single one of my four kids had an iq less than 125.

My debate experiences are one of the things I would have pointed to early in life if I was following some of the logic in Mandatory Secret Identities (MSI), which has a lot of fun and interesting ideas around status allocation in dojos (assuming debate teams don't count as rationality dojos in themselves) but that whole dojo design vibe is full of weird stuff...

Like from the name of the essay (rather than the detailed contents) it is easy to mis-use the title and imagine gwern is doing "Mandatory Secret Identities" the best of anyone by only teaching through a pseudonym?

But that's the opposite of MSI's actual internal contents! 

According to the MSI essay's detailed claims, the rationality teacher's "real life" is supposed to be taken into account somehow and so gwern should have zero status or something?

But then... think gwern is awesome and any sane and good status allocation mechanism should be in favor of websites like this existing and their authors getting respect.

Its complicated! ;-)

Anyway.

I think that forensics/debate/rhetoric have a bad reputation about LW that is not justified by carefully tracing out real pedagogical outcomes.

I think they teach a lot of skills that include researching in libraries, adaptively optimizing your speech production to the true incentives and the real audience, having fun, laughing, building an identity and some pride around your ability to know things and explain things and not be tricked, and also they grow your ability to judge a debate well.

Like, in policy debate, if you get a "Flow Judge" (whose stated judging philosophy is that they take notes like the conversation was a math equation, and then whatever the bottom line is from the math equation is how they will vote, regardless of personal feelings, common sense, or who was more personable) you're happy because the round will be insanely fun and anything could happen.

And if you get a "Communication Judge" (whose stated judging philosophy is that they will take barely any notes, and will simply apply common sense and vote for whoever they think seemed more prestigious and correct and better spoken at the end) you're sad because the round will be boring and who wins will be semi-random.

And then, a little later, when you get to be the a judge yourself, you know which kind of judge you want to be (one of the cool ones who can take really really high quality substantive notes even when the speaker sounds like this).

((That video has this hilarious moment where the kid is like "I don't know why we practice talking fast while we have a pen in our mouth" and you can SEE his "I notice I am confused" reaction happen in his eyes! <3 :-D

For reference, this is a training tradition in the field of rhetoric that goes way way way back. Its a not a great sign for the epistemics of the coach, but maybe its just fun (or a puzzle bomb in the curriculum)? This kind of training for that is better supported by evidence and mechanistic priors on like... muscles in the mouth and tongue n'stuff.))

I'm going to assume I've sold you on "academic debate is worth looking into" and pivot to applications now!

If you're in High School and thinking about colleges, I think it is likely to be a net positive in your life if you explore adding Policy Debate as second or third "major" (likely un-official) on top of EE or Physics or Math or something (or possibly in parallel with Philosophy). 

Part of why I re-arranged my majors so much and eventually picked up a Philosophy bachelors (there were other reasons for allocating time that way... I'm not insane) is that Philosophy majors clearly punched harder in debate.

They could speak fewer words, more slowly, and still win a round with a Flow Judge!

They could cleanly identify categories of thought and dispense with 10 arguments of 4 sentences each that shared reliance on a broken mental category (that had been named in the First Negative Constructive (1NC) because they knew it would eventually be useful!) in like three sentences in their Second Negative Rebuttal (2NR). Destroying 40 sentences of gibber-jabber in the mid game, with 10 sentences placed in the opening game, plus another 3 sentences at the end when time is precious, is a powerup!

In terms of applying this in real life, with life planning decisions...

I don't think people "pick a High School" super carefully usually? But maybe there are parents reading this who want to buy a home near a school that will help their teenage kids? In that case, this ranking of High School policy teams has numerous teams from the same school, and those schools probably have solid policy debate programs ;-)

If you're in High School and thinking about college I think it is worth an hour or five to research the Policy Debate options carefully, before you visit any schools prior to applying to them.

For example, Bakersfield College (in central southern California) and Chico State (in norther central California) both had great programs 25 years ago (despite having no amazingly great reputation overall, as schools, and being easy to get into, and cheap), and they they are still on the list of community colleges with Policy programs) so they might still be amazing and worth a look? Depending on whether their coaches solved Succession Planning, anyway?

I can't easily google to get a good ranked list of undergrad institutions, for CEDA/NDT, but this list of all the different regional circuits in the US could help. The more tournaments a school hosts, the more likely it is to have a strong program with energetic coaches.

You'll probably pick a college based on lots of other factors, but if you at least look up which ones have CEDA/NDT stuff, then, when you visit, before applying, you could probably try to visit the debate program and talk to people there to catch a vibe and make an assessment? <3

Minor counter-point here...

Let's talk about the controlled setting of a dojo for a moment, because I think that’s actually a very important qualifier.

If I punch you in the nose while you’re standing at the bus stop or while you’re walking through the halls of your high school, I’m a jerk and this is not how martial arts dojos work. It is true that the bus stop or your high school are the places you will want the self defence skills!

I had a co-worker who was in a kinda half-made-up-seeming dojo for "ninjitsu", and in one of his belt tests the test was whether or not the teacher could "touch his back with a symbolic dagger" (it was a long time ago and my memory is fuzzy, but I think maybe symbolic poisoning of food or drink was also valid?) at any time, waking or sleeping, in any place, public or private, for an entire multi-day window. (He failed the first test, and was hypothetically interested in trying a second time when he and the sensei both had the time for it.)

There were rules to keep it from hurting any third parties or looking too weird, but it sounded (1) super fun and (2) very expensive in terms of the time cost for the person being tested and the person testing (if they actually make multiple attempts or multiple attempts per day).

I have no idea how to adapt this to real life exactly, but it was so exceptional and fun-sounding that it seems worth a mention here ;-)

A possible answer to this question is: sort of YES! (But the practice is I know about from experience... does not involve a pair of people, where the liar is known, and the thing they're lying about is clear. It is a group practice with some fraction of liars.)

Has any rationalist practice ever involved pairing up to practice being lied to and responding to lies?

There's a wiki entry on Paranoid Debating which might have been mentioned for the first time ever in Eliezer's 2009 "Selecting Rationalist Groups" as part of the Sequences, and the highest relevant substantive post is a writeup about it where a group in London playing the game ~11 years ago.

Its not perfect. Its kind of like playing Avalon Mafia mixed with a game about Fermi estimates. Knowing what I now know (like, for example, having played Avalon) I think I could design a similar game that was more fun and more focused on giving faster feedback on specific subskills.