Debate Policies Introduction

Elliot Temple -

A debate policy is a public document, written and posted in advance, which provides information about what issues you will debate, with who, using what debate methods.

It's like a law. Laws are written down in advance to specify how things will be handled in the future. Laws help limit the power of kings, judges and other authorities. Laws help prevent people from making arbitrary or biased decisions or showing favoritism.

With laws, authorities give up some control. Sometimes the law determines the outcome contrary to their personal preference, taste or judgment. Sometimes the law overrules them and they follow the law instead of doing whatever they want.

With debate policies, intellectuals give up some control. To be effective, a debate policy should sometimes overrule an intellectual's decisions. It should change some behavior and result in some different outcomes.

Why are debate policies good? Basically the same reasons laws are good. They help with fairness. They combat bias. They provide better predictability, transparency and accountability. They help us live up to our ideals.

Our laws aren't perfect but they help make society better. Debate policies don't have to be perfect to be helpful. Laws aren't always enforced correctly, and debate policies won't be followed every time, but if they're used a fair amount they can make a big difference, as laws do.

Debate is important because it enables errors to be corrected. If an intellectual is wrong, and a critic has an important correction, then refusing to debate is one of the common ways the intellectual can stay wrong.

Debate Policy Design

What should be in a debate policy? There are three key areas to address: the start, middle and end of debates.

The start of a debate deals with what topics will you debate, who will you debate, what debates will you accept or reject. People should be able to predict in advance that certain debate requests will meet your standards and be accepted.

The middle deals with what happens during a debate, e.g. not using insults, having a moderator or not, using text or voice, having a real time or asynchronous debate, using organizational tools like tree diagrams, how much back-and-forth engagement there is, and how the conversation flow is controlled. How should people behave during debates? What should they do and not do? How will citations, literature and fact checking be handled? Reading and fact checking people's cites can take a long time, but disallowing cites has downsides too, and allowing cites but not giving people time to check them also has downsides.

The end deals with how a debate concludes. Under what circumstances can people quit a debate and do they have to do anything like write a closing statement or answer some final questions? In general, debates can end by mutual consent. But when one person wants to keep debating and one person doesn't, what do you do? A bad answer is "you can quit arbitrarily at any time no matter what objections the other person has". Something more restrictive than that is important. We don't want people to quit, with no explanation about why they're quitting, when they start losing or find debate difficult. But we also don't want people to be stuck in unproductive debates for a long time.

Debate policies don't need to be original or innovative. I hope one day there will be lots of good examples and people will be able to create their own policy just by selecting from various standard terms.

Judging Debate Policies

Not all debate policies are created equal. Debate policies can be stricter (requires you to debate a lot) or milder (places minimal debating requirements on you). Debate policies can be reasonable or unreasonable.

A strict policy for starting debates is: "I will debate anyone who writes a critique of my work that is at least 500 words long." A mild policy is: "I will debate anyone who pays me a billion dollars."

A strict policy for ending debates is "We must agree on a conclusion or try for at least 1,000 hours." A mild policy is "The debate will end as soon as anyone feels bored or annoyed."

A strict policy for the middle of a debate is "Answer all questions your opponent asks." A mild policy is "Give one statement about why you think you're right. Saying anything else in the debate is optional."

Debates can have different goals like trying to reach a conclusion or just saying your arguments and trying to be persuasive but not feeling the need to resolve disagreements.

Strict policies aren't necessarily better. Policies should be strict enough to matter while also respecting the time and energy of the person creating the policy.

Written debate policies allow judgment from audiences. People can see which intellectuals are more open to debate than others and which have reasonable or unreasonable policies. Debate policies themselves can be critiqued and debated.

People can also judge whether debate policies make sense, are written coherently, or contain the core elements of a debate policy (covering the start, middle and end of debates). Policies should give information about what debates will be accepted, what will happen in the debates, and how they will and won't end.

Critical Discussion

Debate doesn't have to mean standing on a stage with an opponent and bickering. Any time people exchange arguments, that's debate. People can debate by writing books or academic papers back and forth, but that's very slow. Essays, blog posts and video responses can be faster. Forum posts, social media posts and emails are even faster. Talking to each other out loud in real time is even faster. Many formats are valid.

My overall favorite is debating in text using forum posts or essays and spreading the debate out over a few days or weeks. That gives people enough time to read cited sources, use exact quotations, and do fact checking. But there are benefits for other types and speeds of debate.

A debate policy could also be called an error correction policy or a rationality policy. The important thing is addressing criticism instead of leaving it unanswered, ignored or dismissed.

Questions and Answers

What if idiots request debates and waste my time? Write your debate policy to exclude that and protect your time.

But if I say I won't debate idiots, that will be vague and allow for arbitrary, biased judgment, so my fans won't like it? Yeah, so come up with something more objective.

But I can't figure out anything more objective? You could say you'll only debate people who have written at least 50,000 words relevant to the debate topic. If you get too many debates, raise the number. If you get too few, lower the number. This will filter out most idiots using an objective rule that your fans could see as reasonable as long as you debate often enough.

That won't filter out low status people though? Yeah, that's part of the point. The socials status hierarchy is bad, biased and non-objective. Use other filters that try to focus on merit instead, or which anyone who puts in effort can meet. Or if you can figure out how to objectively measure some elements of social status, and you think it's rational to limit debates that way, go ahead.

What if people write 50,000 words using ChatGPT? What if they have ChatGPT write all their arguments in the debate, too? Put a no AI rule in your policy.

What if they trick me and I can't tell it's AI? Yeah, there's a real societal problem here but the source of the problem isn't debate policies. This affects people who don't have debate policies too. If people can fool you with AI, having no debate policy won't fix that.

What if my debates are inconclusive and unproductive? Get better at debate. And, specifically, look into Critical Fallibilism and it's decisive arguments. You may also need to focus on the big picture more instead of getting lost in details.

Can I be a productive public intellectual who isn't very good at debate? Isn't debate a separate skill from e.g. medical research? Some people in your field should be good at debate so criticisms can be discussed and errors can be corrected. If other people are doing a good job debating, which satisfies you, then your debate policy could be to refer debate requests to them.

What if people want to debate using arguments which have already been refuted? Cite the refutation. In general, arguments can be reused and you don't have to personally deal with stuff if it's already been dealt with to your satisfaction.

What if I give them a link but they say I missed the point and actually they're saying something different and the link doesn't answer all their concerns, criticisms and questions? If they give specifics, then it sounds like someone should provide other cites or say something new.

What if they want to debate the premises of my field but I don't know enough about them to debate? You're trusting other people who worked on those other issues. Your work builds on theirs. Will some of them debate this critic? If so, there's no need for you to do it personally; just monitor that the premises you're using are surviving those debates. If others won't debate, you shouldn't trust them and should look into the premises of your work yourself.

What if no one else will debate in my place and there is no adequate literature to cite to address their points but I still don't want to debate? Then you shouldn't be confident that you're right.

What if we debate for a while and still disagree? If you can't resolve a debate decisively in your favor, you shouldn't be confident that you're right. If you and your debate opponent both are unable to clearly determine which idea is correct and which is an error and why, then you should both accept that you don't know the answer and that either idea could be right (or maybe both of your ideas are wrong).

What if the reason we can't agree is because he's being stubborn even though my arguments are convincing? Show it in a clear way so that a large majority of reasonable people would agree with you. Lay out specifically what the impasse is and how you're evaluating it. E.g. if your opponent makes an arithmetic error, and you point it out, and he still won't back down, you can present that so most people will see your point. Math is pretty objective and uncontroversial. If the issue is more muddy than that, so you can't get 90+% agreement from observers, then maybe you should seek more clarity and try to connect it logically to some especially objective issues more like math. Don't jump to conclusions early and be overconfident about controversial topics where precision and objectivity are difficult.

What if we're debating controversial, hard topics where precision and objectivity are difficult? Then acknowledge that your position is your opinion, not something you objectively know is correct. He can do the same. And you can both agree that it's a hard field with scope for reasonable people to have different opinions. If you don't make overly bold claims, then your claims won't actually contradict each other and debate won't be necessary. If you refuse to be appropriately modest and limit your claims to the extent of your knowledge, and you get into a more difficult debate than you know how to rationally resolve, that's your error.

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