Honestly, I think the idea pretty much explains itself lol.
Also, I don’t have time today for an in depth back and forth as I usually would. I threw a little bomb in there about the Ohio shooting if anyone wants to get it going but I may not be able to be too much of a part of it.
Also: If you didn’t hate this idea already and want to tell me I’m a pain in the ass, check this out: The whole reason behind this community is that I made a little LLM tool that can take a look at a discussion and call out bad faith in the argumentation. I’m actually pleased with how it is working in testing. But… it’s weird to have it inject itself into disagreements without both participants wanting that to happen. It’s like calling up your mom to tell someone you’re arguing with that you are right and they need to agree with you. So, to put it into action I would like at some point to enable it in some way within this specific debate community. But I’m really not sure what that even should look like. I think probably the way to go about it is to have the community and the human participation come first, and then only after that, consult with the people there about progressing it to some kind of input from it, or moderation that is more “argue in good faith pls” and less “don’t use any racism otherwise any horrendous distortion of reality is fine” as in most communities.
Edit: Someone raised I think a pretty valid point about it being offensive to have people’s comments fed into an AI thing. I think consider the AI bot on hold until I can address those concerns.
Anyway, feel free to subscribe, go nuts, feel free to tell me why I am literally a sealion. Peace.
Hm.
Here are my thoughts:
I don’t really care about picking the better debater. That actually seems kind of antithetical: In a perfect world, the truth should win, and it doesn’t really matter if someone’s more “skillful” or forceful or just willing to type and berate more. Actually one of the things that bothers me about the propaganda on Lemmy is that it is often (not always) pretty skillful at changing minds, independent of the validity of the content.
I do like the idea of formalizing it a little bit. Having a limited number of “rounds” is an interesting idea. Right now, one of the issues I see that I’m trying to deal with with this thing is the strategy of kind of blathering endlessly or constantly changing the subject, not really being responsive but talking without end. The current iteration of the bot will call you out on it when that happens, but it might be kind of better if it’s your chance and once it’s done it is done. Kind of like court: If the opponent raises a point, and you just ignore it, than by default they “win” that point and you don’t even have a chance to go back and correct it.
I don’t even necessarily like the idea of picking a “winner.” To me, that’s up to each reader, and often the truth is kind of in the middle or they are both valid arguments. It’s more of kind of a pass/fail on both sides: Are you being reasonable? There are a lot of strategies that look really reasonable, or at worst just like aggressively asserting your side, but if you’re good at using them you can literally make almost anything sound plausible. So, if neither side is doing that, then it’s fine! They just had a conversation, responded reasonably to each other’s points, everything moved forward. I am more on the side of “what truth did we figure out” as opposed to needing to assign a winner and a loser mechanically to each debate.
Yeah, modern day political TV debate is nonsense. Actually, even this format of debate in the video you sent, I don’t completely like. The woman is clearly full of shit. They’re setting up this format structure, this respect, this kind of “objective” format, and then they are welcoming someone to take an honored position within it that doesn’t deserve the respect. I didn’t watch much beyond the beginning, but I can almost guarantee that she is lying and rationalizing, and her underlying position is “red man good blue man bad.” I don’t really know how you can expose that in a taking turns long form “debate” format, that’s just my reaction seeing her. I feel like having something like Jon Stewart interviewing her and challenging her, still being fair and letting her talk but not letting her get away with bullshit, would be better than implicitly pretending that she is upholding the social contract when she is not.
Maybe I am wrong, that’s just my snap judgement seeing the first little bit. Actually, setting up a framework where being unfriendly to that kind of dishonesty is allowed and sanctioned, but being dishonest or shifty in your debating is “not allowed” in the same way that overt incivility is “not allowed” currently on Lemmy, is part of my goal here.
Those are my thoughts about it, in no real coherent order, it just took me a little time to watch a piece of the video and get back to you.