As I understand the way that simultaneity is handled here, debaters A and B are assigned to positions X and ¬X and then argue simultaneously for their positions. Thus, A and B start by each arguing for their positions without seeing each others’ arguments, then each refute each others’ arguments without seeing each others’ refutations, and so on.
I was talking about this procedure with Scott Garrabrant and he came up with an interesting insight: why not generalize this procedure beyond just debates between X and ¬X? Why not use this procedure to conduct arbitrary debates between X and Y? That would let you get general pairwise comparisons for the likelihood of arbitrary propositions, rather than just answering individual questions. Seems like a pretty straightforward generalization that might be useful in some contexts.
Also, another insight from Scott—simultaneous debate over yes-or-no questions can actually answer arbitrary questions if you just ask a question like:
Should I eat for dinner tonight whatever it is that you think I should eat for dinner tonight?
Yeah, the questions and answers can be arbitrary, doesn’t have to be X and ¬X.
I’m not completely sure whether Scott’s method would work given how we’re defining the meaning of questions, especially in the middle of the debate. The idea is to define the question by how a snapshot of the questioner taken when they wrote the question would answer questions about what they meant. So in this case, if you asked the questioner ‘is your question equivalent to ‘should I eat potatoes tonight?″, they wouldn’t know. On the other hand, you could ask them ’ if I think you should eat potatoes tonight, is your question equivalent to ’should I eat potatoes tonight?″. This would work as long as you were referring only to what one debater believed you should eat tonight, I think.
I feel fairly ok about this as a way to define the meaning of questions written by debaters within the debate. I’m less sure about how to define the top-level question. It seems like there’s only really one question, which is ‘what should I do?’, and it’s going to have to be defined by how the human asker clarifies their meaning. I’m not sure whether the meaning of the question should be allowed to include things the questioner doesn’t know at the time of asking.
As I understand the way that simultaneity is handled here, debaters A and B are assigned to positions X and ¬X and then argue simultaneously for their positions. Thus, A and B start by each arguing for their positions without seeing each others’ arguments, then each refute each others’ arguments without seeing each others’ refutations, and so on.
I was talking about this procedure with Scott Garrabrant and he came up with an interesting insight: why not generalize this procedure beyond just debates between X and ¬X? Why not use this procedure to conduct arbitrary debates between X and Y? That would let you get general pairwise comparisons for the likelihood of arbitrary propositions, rather than just answering individual questions. Seems like a pretty straightforward generalization that might be useful in some contexts.
Also, another insight from Scott—simultaneous debate over yes-or-no questions can actually answer arbitrary questions if you just ask a question like:
That’s correct about simultaneity.
Yeah, the questions and answers can be arbitrary, doesn’t have to be X and ¬X.
I’m not completely sure whether Scott’s method would work given how we’re defining the meaning of questions, especially in the middle of the debate. The idea is to define the question by how a snapshot of the questioner taken when they wrote the question would answer questions about what they meant. So in this case, if you asked the questioner ‘is your question equivalent to ‘should I eat potatoes tonight?″, they wouldn’t know. On the other hand, you could ask them ’ if I think you should eat potatoes tonight, is your question equivalent to ’should I eat potatoes tonight?″. This would work as long as you were referring only to what one debater believed you should eat tonight, I think.
I feel fairly ok about this as a way to define the meaning of questions written by debaters within the debate. I’m less sure about how to define the top-level question. It seems like there’s only really one question, which is ‘what should I do?’, and it’s going to have to be defined by how the human asker clarifies their meaning. I’m not sure whether the meaning of the question should be allowed to include things the questioner doesn’t know at the time of asking.