TLDR: *You can't solve this "a priori", you need an evolvable debate format and do lots of experiments.*
**Why this doesn't work**
Your suggestions are very specific, which makes no sense when you're (in my view) attempting to solve what is an extremely general problem (partly because it overlaps with even more general problems like "how to think", "how to arrive at truth", "how to know who is right", "how to know even what exactly the topic is that we are discussing")
(Also, things like "encourage cordiality" and "Speaking first shouldn’t win the debate" are naive imo because they ignore the incentives that do exist in a debate, and basically says "i wish both debaters and viewers felt differently about debates and had different incentives")
**How I think this should be solved**
A system for "updating hyperparameters" of the debate format over time, instead of trying to figure it out beforehand.
How to update is tricky (maybe the hardest part?), but some ideas:
- let audience vote on things
- just feel things out, read comments, ask debaters, etc
- explain your process to the audience, like, "a lot of people liked X, we think X is because of <a, b and c>, so we'll do more of that", read comments to *that*.
- (and generally, if you have a place like reddit, where comments are sorted by votes, you naturally get a kind of feedback loop or evolution happening of thoughts and ideas surrounding the debate format)
**This may not work because**
It just takes a lot of time and effort to do this, and people may not care about this evolving debate format idea, and maybe the hardest part of even getting 2 experts debating and having people watch it, is to have a pre-exisitng platform, so it's not even worth trying to figure this out.
**Company?**
Maybe turning this into a company is an idea, so you can
1) actually make it sustainable for whoever is running it
2) money could add a whole new dimension to the debates, like, 2a) prize money for winners (or sub-topic winners), 2b) offer prizes for things other than "winning the argument", like, whoever makes the most progress in defining concepts and creating "landmarks" in the discussion, 2b+) also audience participation and updating of these prizes basically creates additional feedback loops and evolution mechanisms, since, whatever people want to watch and will use their (subscriber-money-earned-) voting power to encourage, are probably actually useful things for the debate format.
And 3) it gives a neat constraint for how to grow and evolve this thing, otherwise there's maybe way too many things to think about and try, which might drive you mad.
(sorry that the "turn it into a company" is kind of lame philosophically, but, i started writing and thinking about this, and that was just what it lead to)
TLDR: *You can't solve this "a priori", you need an evolvable debate format and do lots of experiments.*
**Why this doesn't work**
Your suggestions are very specific, which makes no sense when you're (in my view) attempting to solve what is an extremely general problem (partly because it overlaps with even more general problems like "how to think", "how to arrive at truth", "how to know who is right", "how to know even what exactly the topic is that we are discussing")
(Also, things like "encourage cordiality" and "Speaking first shouldn’t win the debate" are naive imo because they ignore the incentives that do exist in a debate, and basically says "i wish both debaters and viewers felt differently about debates and had different incentives")
**How I think this should be solved**
A system for "updating hyperparameters" of the debate format over time, instead of trying to figure it out beforehand.
How to update is tricky (maybe the hardest part?), but some ideas:
- let audience vote on things
- just feel things out, read comments, ask debaters, etc
- explain your process to the audience, like, "a lot of people liked X, we think X is because of <a, b and c>, so we'll do more of that", read comments to *that*.
- (and generally, if you have a place like reddit, where comments are sorted by votes, you naturally get a kind of feedback loop or evolution happening of thoughts and ideas surrounding the debate format)
**This may not work because**
It just takes a lot of time and effort to do this, and people may not care about this evolving debate format idea, and maybe the hardest part of even getting 2 experts debating and having people watch it, is to have a pre-exisitng platform, so it's not even worth trying to figure this out.
**Company?**
Maybe turning this into a company is an idea, so you can
1) actually make it sustainable for whoever is running it
2) money could add a whole new dimension to the debates, like, 2a) prize money for winners (or sub-topic winners), 2b) offer prizes for things other than "winning the argument", like, whoever makes the most progress in defining concepts and creating "landmarks" in the discussion, 2b+) also audience participation and updating of these prizes basically creates additional feedback loops and evolution mechanisms, since, whatever people want to watch and will use their (subscriber-money-earned-) voting power to encourage, are probably actually useful things for the debate format.
And 3) it gives a neat constraint for how to grow and evolve this thing, otherwise there's maybe way too many things to think about and try, which might drive you mad.
(sorry that the "turn it into a company" is kind of lame philosophically, but, i started writing and thinking about this, and that was just what it lead to)