Intellectuals Don't Debate Much

How many think tanks or prestigious authors have a discussion forum? How many have an online community set up where people can request debates about their claims and debates actually happen on a regular basis? How many communities had (or wanted) ten debates in the last year?

The world as a whole has some debate. You can find some college students who will debate you for a little while. You can be a Twitch streamer and debate viewers. There are Discord servers where you can argue with people. It's easiest to get debate about politics but other issues are possible too.

Public intellectuals could debate more if they wanted to. Scientists could debate a few critics every time they publish a new idea. Philosophers could organize their ideas and their literature citations, then debate when someone has a new type of criticism that doesn't fit into the same patterns that have already been addressed by their ideas and citations. Podcasters could have online forums where people in their community debate, and then they could debate people who win debates against their fans.

David Deutsch fans say they value "traditions of criticism" and "rationality" so highly. They say that blocking error correction is the most immoral thing. They say that "criticism is a gift". But they don't have a discussion forum and they don't debate. They don't live by the ideals they advocate. The ones on social media commonly block, ignore or insult people who disagree with them. They aren't doing their best to have the highest quality debates they can find. They don't highlight records of their past debates as part of their claims to rationality.

Less Wrong says they strive to be wrong to a lesser degree about less things. They value error correction and rationality. They actually do have a discussion forum but their moderators have a history of taking action (mirror) against critics, dissenters and people who receive downvotes. They don't have any way to get a debate. You can go there and try to argue with people, but they usually stop responding to you after 0-3 messages. If you want to have a longer debate with a specific person and try to reach a conclusion, they aren't set up for that. In general, no individual feels like it's their responsibility to debate challengers, and the overall result is that often no one does. They don't have leadership that tries to make sure each criticism gets an answer or that people seeking debate aren't fully ignored. Effective Altruism is similar to Less Wrong: they say they love rationality and criticism, they have a forum, but they have no standard policy of having debates on their forum. Critics can easily be individually ignored by each person there and leadership won't see that as a problem. They have a large community full of people who each think debating critics isn't their personal problem, resulting in not much debate happening.

Where else should one look for debate? At the main Karl Popper facebook group, I was unwelcome because I like Ayn Rand. At multiple Ayn Rand groups, I was unwelcome because I like Karl Popper. People did not want to debate a fan of their enemy, even if that person is also a fan of their favorite thinker. I haven't found something better from mainstream philosophy groups (fans of Kant, Plato, academia, etc.). Those groups are often unwelcoming if you like Popper or Rand rather than being open to debate about any of those ideas.

I don't think the main issue is that I'm presenting myself the wrong way, e.g. not being friendly enough. I've observed what happens with other people and I don't see organized, lengthy, productive debates happening without me. Similarly, I don't think lack of prestige or credentials is the issue; I don't see many good debates taking place between prestigious people.

I have, many times, gotten or observed a bit of debate with some individual on the internet, but it usually runs into some kind of limit and isn't very organized or repeatable. A bit here and there from some individuals doesn't solve the systemic problem.

The systemic problem includes a lack of ways to work your way up. Debate ought to work more like an imaginary boxing league (that resembles reality somewhat): It's reasonably easy to challenge people who aren't very successful. If you win, you can challenge people a bit higher up in the hierarchy. If you keep winning, you can work your way up to the top. With debate, even if you get someone to debate you, and you win, it mostly won't matter; there's no organization keeping track of people's debate records in an effective way where the winners can earn recognition and attention.

There exist debating societies but that's different than using debate as part of real truth-seeking in fields like physics or philosophy. Debate clubs tend to focus on things like impressing audiences within time limits, not trying to reach an objective conclusion.

And I like debating people who have made some significant claims about what they think is true and important which they would then be willing to defend. Or people can agree with someone else who has done that, e.g. you can be a Richard Dawkins fan who wants to defend his take on evolution. If someone hasn't written or endorsed essays or books, then they aren't putting forward claims that could be debated. It's mainly people who actually have claims who should debate and are most interesting to debate. At debate clubs, people often debate a specific narrow issue out of context of other ideas, and they don't want to connect things to philosophical and scientific premises, and they may say contradictory things in different debates. I prefer to debate with people who advocate a particular worldview or school of thought on a consistent basis across all topics instead of using ideas/premises for one debate then dropping them and switching ideas/premises for the next debate. I see the main purpose of debate as trying to figure out which ideas are true and find and correct errors in the worldviews being proposed, so I prefer talking to people who genuinely believe and care about what they're saying.

Some topics are popular. Millions of people might be willing to debate defending evolution. No critic has time to deal with every one of them. There are various potential solutions. If you win a lot of debates, you should attract some fans who can debate on your side, so you don't have to do everything yourself. Also, it doesn't really matter how many debate opponents you face if there are good mechanisms set up to avoid repetition. If you answer a point, you shouldn't have to debate other people making the same point (or variations on the same theme) so that what they're saying is already refuted by what you already wrote in the past. You should basically only have to debate more when people say things that require new arguments to address. There can be disagreements about what already addresses what, so handling repetition issues well isn't easy. Setting up good systems for dealing with repetition should be a major goal of people who value debate; instead of giving up on debate because this is hard to deal with, they should put effort into making it work as best they can. When people rush to give up, instead of doing their best to try to solve the problem, I suspect they don't actually value debate and are happy to have an excuse not to debate.

In my experience, I see a lot of people repeating standard points, and rewriting them in an inferior form to what's already published, instead of using citations. I've encountered people who didn't like it when I wanted to share my past writing instead of writing it out again fresh for them (even though the pre-existing writing had more time and effort put into it; they demand lower effort, lower quality new writing). I've encountered people who didn't like it when I asked if they thought their side had already written down winning arguments before our debate started, and if so would they please refer me to those instead of writing their own unpolished, lower effort, lower quality version now? And if their side did not already have winning arguments written down anywhere, are they basically alone advocating something no one else believes, or do they think they're the one smart thought leader on their side who can write good arguments but who didn't do it until after our debate started for some reason, or what?

If you want to debate as a form of practice, study or education, then it makes sense to write arguments yourself and not rely too much on citations. You're trying to learn the ideas and catch up to existing arguments. But if you're trying to move human knowledge forward and make significant progress, then all existing literature should be taken into account, and people should mostly be talking about literature instead of making their own arguments. Even if they have important original ideas, generally they should write those down in advance, at least as a blog post, before trying to debate them. If you have original ideas, you'll generally have to say more in debate and rely less on literature because there isn't a whole field where many people already wrote things down thoroughly, but you should write something down before debating. Also, in my experience, a lot of fields actually have a lot of missing literature where things aren't written down as thoroughly as people might assume. Finding fields with big gaps in the arguments in their literature is important to organizing human knowledge, truth seeking, and debating which schools of thought are actually right.

A common reason people won't debate is they don't know enough about the topic or about the position you want to bring up to challenge them. If an inductivist has never heard of Karl Popper, then he's not in a good position to debate induction effectively. This is one of the reasons that public intellectuals or schools of thought should have their own debate forum (or be active at some open debate forum and say they're doing that and refer people there). If you go to a general purpose debate forum, it'll usually be hard to find anyone with the right expertise for a lot of potential debates, e.g. about Popper, and probably no one there will feel any kind of responsibility to organize the world's knowledge or address all points of view that disagree with theirs. Schools of thought (rather than individuals who aren't making big claims, who are just personally interested in ideas) ought to have people actually learn about and address rival schools of thought (either with new arguments and/or by researching existing arguments and gathering some citations to existing arguments). Schools of thought that just ignore other schools of thought that contradict them are irrational. Truth-seeking schools of thought should preemptively investigate and consider some alternative ideas and should be open to debate with some other ideas even if that requires doing some reading and research. (I think waiting to be challenged to debate makes sense sometimes. Being challenged means someone is available to respond to questions and criticisms. I wouldn't advise reviewing every obscure idea that has no representatives willing to discuss it. I think it makes sense to look at ideas that look interesting or important to you or which are popular or prestigious, and then also to be open to debate with other ideas if there is a living advocate of those ideas who is willing to discuss, especially if the advocate studied your ideas.)

My proposal is that rational intellectuals should create and follow written debate policies. This would get them to debate more and help with bias. See my Debate Policies Introduction.