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ciphergoth comments on The Sin of Underconfidence - Less Wrong
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Unfair debate proposal
You want a debate in which the tables are tilted against you? I see a way to do that which doesn't carry the risks of your current proposal.
A bunch of us get together on an IRC channel and agree to debate you. We thrash out our initial serve; we then spring the topic and our initial serve on you. You must counter immediately, with no time to prepare. We then go away and mull over your counter, and agree a response, which you must again immediately respond to.
We can give ourselves more speaking time than you in each exchange, too, if you want to tilt the tables further (I'm imagining the actual serves and responses being delivered as video).
Since Eliezer hasn't prepared by watching earlier debates then one solution could be to just use arguments from the theist's past debates in a simulated debate. As Eliezer prefers, he wouldn't prepare and would have to answer questions immediately.
There are two drawbacks: first it would just be "us" evaluating whether Eliezer performed well (but then, debate performance is always somewhat subjective) and we would lose the interaction of question, response and follow-up question.
Nevertheless, Eliezer's off-the-cuff responses to the theist's past questions could be informative.
You're not theists; a handicap is more appropriate if we're going to be debating theology and you taking the positive... but this does sound interesting, so long as we can find a debate position that I agree with but that others are willing to take the negative of.
I'm pretty sure it's not required that one agree with a position to debate in its favor.
In fact, I have a post kicking around on the subject that it's easier in a debate to defend the side you don't agree with. But perhaps Eliezer also believes this and is looking to further handicap himself :)
This triggered an idea about paranoid debating: require players to submit a preliminary answer in the first few seconds of being presented with the question, then debate.