<@Debate@>(@Writeup: Progress on AI Safety via Debate@) requires us to provide a structure for a debate as well as rules for how the human judge should decide who wins. This post points out that we have an existing system that has been heavily optimized for this already: evidence law, which governs how court cases are run. A court case is high-stakes and involves two sides presenting opposing opinions; evidence law tells us how to structure these arguments and how to limit the kinds of arguments debaters can use. Evidence is generally admissible by default, but there are many exceptions, often based on the fallibility of fact-finders.
As a result, it may be fruitful to look to evidence law for how we might structure debates, and to see what types of arguments we should be looking for.
Planned opinion:
This seems eminently sensible to me. Of course, evidence law is going to be specialized to arguments about innocence or guilt of a crime, and may not generalize to what we would like to do with debate, but it still seems like we should be able to learn some generalizable lessons.
Planned summary for the Alignment Newsletter:
Planned opinion: