Phil Tetlock is there. Would love to see him and NN Taleb jointly publish on expertise!

That's not happening, Taleb hates him.

Isn't that the point?

Sort of. If the collaborators hate each other it goes beyond what the article is talking about and I doubt any fruitful collaboration can happen in such an environment. The article is more about having people from opposing ideologies.

Love this idea. I've always thought it'd be interesting to try to rank contrary replies to threads based on how much the opposing view ranked the reply. It'd certainly be more productive than just going around dunking on each other as is now normal, e.g. on Twitter. Of course dealing with the fact that people are smart and will game such a system is a hard problem.

I'm curious as to what you mean by rank. Is this a instead of a simple up/down signal you get something like a +10/-10 scale to rate how much you (dis)agree with a particular comment/link and then looking at the distribution of scores? Or maybe something like a rank vote of all comments at a particular tier?

Some of the most interesting recent academic work has come out of adversarial collaborations, e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/152910062311631...

The list of research projects on this website looks fascinating. Hope that these kinds of projects continue to get funded.

Scott Alexander was inspired to run a contest for adversarial collaborations on his blog, which were really cool. I actually participated in one (roughly about the evidentiary value of spiritual experiences), which I enjoyed a ton; I feel like I learned a lot and made a new friend (my collaboration partner).

I did notice that my research question was kind of ill-defined. The "classic" adversarial collaboration topic is something like the effectiveness of a medical intervention, or the effectiveness of a policy intervention. The format probably works best for that because there is some somewhat clearer notion about what it would mean for each position to be correct!

Link to 2019 series for anyone interested. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/09/2019-adversarial-colla...

This is a million times better than some attempt to talk over the top of the other person an a Joe Rogan podcast and pretending that something even vaguely resembling science or a debate has occurred.

And Rogan's style is better than not permitting dissenting opinions at all.

Except when he unquestioningly platforms conspiracy theorists, quacks, climate change deniers, transphobes, and eugenicists.

Questioningly. He asks his interviewees questions; they respond; as a result, we get a better opportunity to learn what and how they think.

I’m skeptical that this is currently possible for the topic du jour (vaccines and pharmaceuticals) simply because the vast majority of funding is from private companies with no incentive to find problems with their products and with the ability to financially punish those who look for problems.

If adversarial studies occurred it would make those debates a lot more valuable, since the discussion could be based on comparisons of the adversarial research rather than the current ‘pharma bad’ or ‘skeptics bad’ framing.

> some attempt to talk over the top of the other person an a Joe Rogan podcast

Do you have a particular example in mind when that happened? I am trying to remember any live debate on Rogan, and could only come up Tim Pool vs Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde; but I do not remember them talking over each other.

To me this is a rough implementation of Lakatos’ Research Programmes solution to the demarcation problem.

The next step is to track each adversaries progress over time and determine which group’s theories predict outcomes vs adding new auxiliary hypothesis to explain discrepancies.

This could help improve problems with pseudoscience and skepticism of scientific institutes: let all quacks collaborate by adding their programme to be comparison. Their lack of progress should then be simple enough for laymen to follow, and make it obvious that their theories have no predictive power.

Same goes with fraud: you are less likely to fabricate data if it is being publically compared to numerous other teams that have different biases.

There's a whole cavalcade of retrospectively obvious ideas, and this fits rather snugly - it had never occurred to me to use bidirectional improvements via disagreement as a deliberate rather than accidental process.

It forces both sides to argue in good faith, it forces clarity, and even in circumstances where no possible agreement can be reached, it pushes arguments on either side toward their strongest and most reasonable forms.

Of course, it does require that people on either side of a given argument need to be willing to engage and to do so in good faith.

(Captain Hindsight out.)

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." - Sun Tzu

Possibly off-topic, but this is the best way to describe running a good Dungeons & Dragons game I've heard in a while.