I think the consideration “you can point out sufficiently short circular arguments” should at least make you feel better about debate than iterated amplification or market making—it’s one additional way in which you can avoid circular arguments, and afaict there isn’t a positive consideration for iterated amplification / market making that doesn’t also apply to debate.
My interpretation of the situation is this breaks the link between factored cognition and debate. One way to try to judge debate as an amplification proposal would have been to establish a link to HCH, by establishing that if there’s an HCH tree computing some answer, then debate can use the tree as an argument tree, with the reasons for any given claim being the children in the HCH tree. Such a link would transfer any trust we have in HCH to trust in debate. The use of non-DAG arguments by clever debaters would seem to break this link.
OTOH, IDA may still have a strong story connecting it to HCH. Again, if we trusted HCH, we would then transfer that trust to IDA.
Are you saying that we can break the link between IDA and HCH in a very similar way, but which is worse due having no means to reject very brief circular arguments?
I think the issue is that vanilla HCH itself is susceptible to brief circular arguments, if humans lower down in the tree don’t get access to the context from humans higher up in the tree. E.g. assume a chain of humans for now:
H1 gets the question “what is 100 + 100?” with budget 3
H1 asks H2 “what is 2 * 100?” with budget 2
H2 asks H3 “what is 100 + 100?” with budget 1
H3 says “150”
(Note the final answer stays the same as budget → infinity, as long as H continues “decomposing” the question the same way.)
If HCH can always decompose questions into “smaller” parts (the DAG assumption) then this sort of pathological behavior doesn’t happen.
My interpretation of the situation is this breaks the link between factored cognition and debate. One way to try to judge debate as an amplification proposal would have been to establish a link to HCH, by establishing that if there’s an HCH tree computing some answer, then debate can use the tree as an argument tree, with the reasons for any given claim being the children in the HCH tree. Such a link would transfer any trust we have in HCH to trust in debate. The use of non-DAG arguments by clever debaters would seem to break this link.
OTOH, IDA may still have a strong story connecting it to HCH. Again, if we trusted HCH, we would then transfer that trust to IDA.
Are you saying that we can break the link between IDA and HCH in a very similar way, but which is worse due having no means to reject very brief circular arguments?
I think the issue is that vanilla HCH itself is susceptible to brief circular arguments, if humans lower down in the tree don’t get access to the context from humans higher up in the tree. E.g. assume a chain of humans for now:
H1 gets the question “what is 100 + 100?” with budget 3
H1 asks H2 “what is 2 * 100?” with budget 2
H2 asks H3 “what is 100 + 100?” with budget 1
H3 says “150”
(Note the final answer stays the same as budget → infinity, as long as H continues “decomposing” the question the same way.)
If HCH can always decompose questions into “smaller” parts (the DAG assumption) then this sort of pathological behavior doesn’t happen.