The problem with this decomposition of motives and behaviors is that “truth” is actually elusive, and often poorly-defined in most real debates. In the case of propositional, testable predictions, prediction markets are awesome because they ALIGN “win” motive with “truth-publication” motive. But just having multiple participants perform the calculations or share their evidence probably works too. It’s pretty easy to recognize if someone is handwaving or not actually trying to improve their prediction, so walking away is feasible as well.
For discussions of generality or framing or modeling of a situation, that’s a whole lot harder. Even policy or action debates often turn on which generalized principle(s) are most salient, for which “truth” doesn’t actually apply. For these, the best debates seek cruxes, not necessarily convergence. The disagreement CAN be legitimate from different priors, or different weighting of interpretations of observations, not from incorrect epistemology.
The problem with this decomposition of motives and behaviors is that “truth” is actually elusive, and often poorly-defined in most real debates. In the case of propositional, testable predictions, prediction markets are awesome because they ALIGN “win” motive with “truth-publication” motive. But just having multiple participants perform the calculations or share their evidence probably works too. It’s pretty easy to recognize if someone is handwaving or not actually trying to improve their prediction, so walking away is feasible as well.
For discussions of generality or framing or modeling of a situation, that’s a whole lot harder. Even policy or action debates often turn on which generalized principle(s) are most salient, for which “truth” doesn’t actually apply. For these, the best debates seek cruxes, not necessarily convergence. The disagreement CAN be legitimate from different priors, or different weighting of interpretations of observations, not from incorrect epistemology.