Effective Altruism and Debate Methodology | Call with Emrik
6I discussed how and why to debate more, and how to organize debates more rationally, with Emrik from Effective Altruism.
During the call, I got distracted and never said a key point. debate is for 1) reforming EA itself (i said that) and 2) setting a good example so that other groups will listen to reason (we didn't talk about this)
spreading good debate norms to other groups would let any good arguments, including EA's, have much more impact. imagine if 10% of all charities were open to debate and would change to more cost-effective approaches due to rational arguments. imagine if companies and politicians were open to debate.
EA currently has HUGE problems with most of it's best ideas being ignored – without counter-arguments – by almost everybody. this is so normalized that i think EAs don't notice and just take it for granted as how the world is.
i think this problem is fixable. if one decently sized group like EA was willing to become open to debate, i think that could show people the way and spread to other groups.
Put another way, i think getting EA to do rational debate is a harder problem than getting other groups to start doing it after EA. I don't think people should be put off because it seems hard to get *other people/groups* to be rational; if they'd actually go first, and get it right themselves, i think that's the key issue. in other words, scaling rational debate from 1 person to 10,000 is hard. scaling from 10,000 to millions is easier. you don't need to worry so much about the mass adoption problem. it's the early adoption problem that's more important. getting to 10k might not even be hard if it got to 100 so there were many positive examples (productive debates) and it was hard to just ignore without engaging.
BTW does anyone want to debate with me?
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Emrik's user profile on EA:
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Elliot Temple is a philosopher who developed Critical Fallibilism, a rational epistemology that builds on Critical Rationalism, Objectivism and Theory of Constraints.
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