You query whether Debate favours short arguments over long arguments because “the weakest part of an argument is a min function of the number of argument steps.”
This is a feature, not a bug.
It’s true that long arguments are more debatable than short arguments because they contain more inferential steps and each step is debatable.
But additionally, long arguments are less likely to be sound than short arguments because they contain more inferential steps and each step is 100% certain.
So “debate” still tracks “unlikely”.
“An efficient Debate argument is not a guarantee of truth-tracking, if the judge is biased.”
Correct. The efficient market hypothesis for Debate basically corresponds to coherent probability assignments. Cf. the Garrabrant Inductor. I feel like you’re asking a solution to the No Free Lunch Theorem here. At some point we have to pray that the prior assumptions of the Debaters assigns high likelihood to the actual world. But that’s true of any method of generating beliefs, even idealised bayesianism.
You query whether Debate favours short arguments over long arguments because “the weakest part of an argument is a min function of the number of argument steps.”
This is a feature, not a bug.
It’s true that long arguments are more debatable than short arguments because they contain more inferential steps and each step is debatable.
But additionally, long arguments are less likely to be sound than short arguments because they contain more inferential steps and each step is 100% certain.
So “debate” still tracks “unlikely”.
“An efficient Debate argument is not a guarantee of truth-tracking, if the judge is biased.”
Correct. The efficient market hypothesis for Debate basically corresponds to coherent probability assignments. Cf. the Garrabrant Inductor. I feel like you’re asking a solution to the No Free Lunch Theorem here. At some point we have to pray that the prior assumptions of the Debaters assigns high likelihood to the actual world. But that’s true of any method of generating beliefs, even idealised bayesianism.