Yes sides are assigned randomly.
Yes sides are assigned randomly.
Yes that's fine.
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Okay, maybe we are saying the same thing then. My point is just that to some extent, freedom of speech is freedom from certain consequences pertaining to the law (i.e. you have the freedom to say unpopular things without being punched in the face, enforced by the government arresting the puncher for assault). When fauxlaw said we don't have the right to censor people, I thought he might be referring to using force to silence someone in a public space, not simply refusing to allow them on a private platform. Cause Remy's initial post was about violence.
The logic might be that God can defend himself but other humans can't defend themselves as easily. So if someone says something that could lead to violence toward another human, it can be taken more seriously than someone disrespecting an immoral being. Same reason that someone threatening to punch a baby would be taken more seriously than someone threatening to knock out a heavyweight boxer twice their size.
What consequences could be legitimately deemed a first amendment violation not imposed by the government?
If someone uses violence against you, that would be a consequence not imposed by the govt. The violence itself isn't a 1st amendment violation to my knowledge, but if the govt failed to prosecute them specifically because of your speech, then that would be viewpoint discrimination, which is unconstitutional.
The 1A protects people government censorship, not from the consequences of their speech.
Well it depends what the consequences are. Even in North Korea it could be said that they have free speech, just not freedom from consequences.
I don't see how objective truth is reliably produced by someone's feelings.
As far as I know, when feelings start, that's usually where thinking ceases.
How do you justify "when feelings start, that's usually where thinking ceases"? You can use some logic to get there, but you'll need starting premises, and you have to use a priori beliefs to get those.
Also if the feelings are just bias, they will be baked into the "before" belief...the whole point is to see how their belief shifts to before vs. after reading the argument.
For people who don't know logical laws, judging arguments is impossible and is entirely feelings based.
They're not judging the arguments, simply giving their beliefs before and after. Intuition and feelings are kind of the point anyway, it's the only thing the arguments themselves don't cover and you have to start from some amount of intuitions to use as premises, otherwise the arguments are meaningless.
They simply can't reach objective truth if they are not even using logical tools to reach it.
That's the point of the argument map...to give them the logical tools.
Well, the process of finding objective truth involves getting closer to the truth. In this case, if we presume that 100 different people are getting closer to the truth, then we can become a lot more accurate than all of them by determining what value they are converging toward. If everyone's estimated probability of a proposition being true is getting closer to 70%, then 70% is our best estimate.
It's not going to guide them to any objective all-truth.
It doesn't have to, the method just assumes it gets them closer to the truth. And determines what value everyone is getting closer to.
So they will learn facts relevant to the specific issue being debated. Still good enough.
the masses dont really learn
Really? Never? So people don't speak any languages, or build things? Or do anything they didn't already know how to do as a two year old?
Also, here you are starting from the premise that people actually care about whole truth. Now that premise is difficult to prove.
People are more likely to shift toward the truth than away from it in the presence of new information. Otherwise how do you ever learn anything? You'd simply have to assume that any time you learned something, it's just as likely you became more incorrect as that you became more correct and thus you have zero information.
If propositions merely move all over the place, it wouldnt so much be reaching towards truth, so much as merely observing and recording beliefs as they evolve
I'm not sure it would fluctuate. So long as the strongest arguments don't change, the initial beliefs of the population being measured don't matter.
It's not majority rule, it's evaluating which position people move towards when presented with the strongest arguments for each side. The system doesn't promise to be correct but only efficient; that is, it exhausts all available information. Much like the price of a stock reflects all available information even though it changes over time.
Let's say we want to find an objectively true answer to a question, or at the very least, find a probability distribution for what the likely answer is. There are a few methods we could use to go about achieving this.
1) Intuition
Basically system 1 thinking, which works for a lot of things but isn't always reliable. Probably the most time efficient of all of these methods, but it's also the laziest. Also the most easily distorted by cognitive biases.
2) Opinion Poll
We could take an opinion poll of a lot of people, which has the benefit of a larger sample size but again is often prone to error. For example, if a topic is complex and most people are uninformed, this might just be measuring biases.
3) Poll of Experts
Probably a better approach if we can reliably identify who the experts are, but we could also be measuring selection bias insofar as some people might be more likely to become experts, and then hold opinions they already held. And it's often as difficult to agree on who the experts are and how broad their expertise is as it is to agree on the topic itself.
4) Research
We could research and then use or intuitions based on the new information. But this is the most time-intensive method, and there's the issue of filtering through bad arguments for each side.
5) Debate
We could debate the topic. But this can be pretty time consuming and also depends on each debater being a good representative of the strongest arguments for their viewpoint.
6) Social Platforms
Ideally, this allows for a bunch of people all researching and debating the topic and then figuring out where the majority of people stand. But propaganda, bots, and bias make it far from ideal. As well as most arguments being a few sentences long at most and largely the same ones repeated over and over, which seems inefficient.
So, how can we take the best of these approaches while optimizing them for efficiency?
Phase 1: Argument Mapping
One way to save time might be storing all the arguments in one place so that people don't have to start the argument over from first principles each time. If the chain of argument goes something like point -> counterpoint -> counterpoint, people could be allowed to add arguments at any point along the chain. This could get very big very fast, but if we ask people to rank arguments for the same side against each other, then bias is largely eliminated, since when we ask someone "what is the best counterargument against argument X?" their answer won't really be influenced by whether or not they agree with argument X. So if I want to know the strongest arguments for and against a position, I can just read the strongest argument for, then the strongest counter, then the strongest counter to that, etc.
This system is intentionally adversarial, in that each side is trying to beat the other, yet this does not actually harm the efficacy of the system. If we want to form the strongest argument -> counter chain possible, then it doesn't matter if the CIA is making arguments in favor of Israel and the IRGC is making arguments in favor of Palestine. Insofar as they want to support their chosen side, they will be making the strongest arguments possible for their position, and that's what we want—the strongest arguments for each side. Making bad arguments for the other side would be pointless, since the system is designed such that we read the best arguments, not the bad ones. The only way I could see gaming the system working would be rating bad arguments for the other side high to bury their good arguments, but praising a bad argument for a position you disagree with seems so contrary to human nature that I don't see it being a huge problem.
Phase 2: Acquiring Knowledge from Arguments
So once we have a database of the strongest arguments for each side, what is the best way to derive knowledge from it? Maybe we could have some group read the argument chain and then take an opinion poll, but there's still the question of selection bias. And even if we polled everyone on Earth, is that the optimal sample? If one ideology has more kids than another, might that unfairly skew the poll results?
But there's a better way in my opinion. We sample a bunch of people with preexisting views for either side, ignoring how many of each we get. Then we measure what percent of each group flips their view. Let's say, for example, 2% of people who initially favor the resolution change their mind after reading the arguments, and 1% of people who initially oppose it change their mind.
We then determine what view distribution would be most efficient in terms of information theory—that is, what would the view distribution of the population need to be such that nothing new can be learned from the arguments? In this case, if two thirds of the population opposes the resolution and one third supports it, then the overall poll results won't change after they are exposed to the argument chain—two percent of the smaller group and one percent of the larger group changing their minds will cancel each other out.
To think of this another way, suppose that some small percent of the uninformed population bases their opinion solely on the new information provided by the strongest arguments, and the rest of the uninformed population just keeps the view they had before. Regardless of what that percentage is, presuming it is equivalent regardless of the starting view, we can mathematically estimate the optimal view distribution by sampling each viewpoint group before and after.
Another method might be having people give their percentage certainty in the resolution being true both before and after, then see if they directionally converge toward a specific value. For example, graph people's final certainty vs initial certainty in the resolution being true, and find a line of best fit, then find where the line of best fit intersects y=x. (So for instance, the line of best fit might estimate that if someone is 50% sure the resolution is true beforehand, they are 60% sure afterward. But if they were 80% sure beforehand, then they were 70% sure afterward. But at one point, in this case 65%, we would predict that the certainty remains the same before and after. So we assume an estimate of 65% certainty in the resolution being true is informationally efficient, since on average someone who made that estimate wouldn't change their mind after reading the strongest arguments for each side.)
This phase cannot be adversarial, because it would be easy to skew in favor of one side, but filling out surveys takes less effort and people than making a bunch of arguments, so we could get a sample group of 100 people or so with each viewpoint and verify that they are real people. I think it goes against human nature to voice support for a view one disagrees with, so I think most people will be honest.
Basis for Efficiency
The theory behind this system isn't that it always arrives at an objectively true answer, but that it arrives as close to the objectively correct answer as the population possibly can—that is, there are no additional sources of evidence, arguments, or intuitions that can be exhausted once this system has been used that would aid in reaching on objectively true answer. In practice, people won't submit every possible argument and response, but they might get close enough to be effectively efficient.
First ask every government agency except maybe social security to find ten percent of its spending that can be cut.
"How to cut spending"
"Ask government agencies to cut spending."
But acceptance of that doesnt diminish her point that billionaires do this through society's and other peoples help, and when looking at social justice, that all is still significant
Well, all earning requires society's help. Maybe that is your point, of course, and if so I agree. I think the bigger defense of wealth through business is the right to contract, which I think is a bit too quickly thrown aside in these discussions. Like, once you agree to work for x dollars an hour, you can't demand anything beyond that. There are ways in which contracts can be abused or nonconsensual and ways in which rich people often act immorally, but I think those are often overgeneralized to say employment is always theft, when I think by default it's not.
Obviously, paid Google advertising works.
I mean it hasn't though, people were coming because they were on DART and saw the announcement promoting DebateCraft. Don't think YouTube has brought anyone either.
I'm not sure that people are showing up and being turned off by the lax moderation...it's more like people aren't coming to the site in the first place.
It's not a sustainable method for building a website because it doesn't attract long term people
Is there a method that attracts long term people?
The wealthy evade taxes by keeping their income very low and keeping money and source of revenue in wealth that isnt taxed.
Well, some of that is intentional to incentivize investment, for example. If the government tries to incentivize/subsidize something, then rich people will take advantage of it, but people responding to incentives is kind of the whole point of them, right? It doesn't seem too different from the government hiring people to do things, or banks offering interest to people.
Other issue is that you'd be forcing stock sales to pay the tax, which could have some pretty detrimental effects on the market.
I think the better solution is figure out if there are tax loopholes that shouldn't be there, and then remove those specific loopholes while keeping the right incentives. Disincentivizing investment comes with a whole lot of baggage I'd want to avoid.
I've been messaging the people you brought in to get them to the site. Even got one to join the UltraRated tournament.
what went wrong with debateart where we all had to migrate to a THIRD website
Domain was set to expire, and the owner was non responsive. DART went down for a bit, then came back up but by then we thought it best to stick to a site we had more control over. DebateCraft is being actively updated and mods all have access to the codebase.
the first chapter will go up tomorrow
Any update on this?
where there is more gun control, there is less murder. this is the scientific consensus, as shown with the literature review
I wish you'd been more specific here. There are different policies that all fall under "gun control," and they don't all have similar effectiveness. For example, background checks have more evidence supporting them than assault weapon bans. I know you kind of address this later, but you only do so in regard to mass shootings, which are a small percentage of all gun deaths. They're also rare events statistically, which makes them harder to study.
President Trump is now the most frequently targeted president in the history of the United States.
Might be that assassination attempts are getting more widely documented, or that security is doing more poorly than usual and letting more attempts get further. Ford survived two assassination attempts, and news media didn't get ahold of information as quickly in the past, so there may have been more attempts on past presidents we didn't hear about.
Most of these problems seem like they're based on how the information is delivered. I think religious beliefs, like a lot of ideas, can be presented in a way that's harmful and a way that's not. I mean, obviously whether the belief is true or false probably takes precedence, but we're not gonna get agreement on that any time soon.