I first posted this on the Progress Forum but the forum has low activity and I got no responses.

Hi, I'm a philosopher specializing in epistemology and rationality. I learned about Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism from my mentor David Deutsch and I helped with his book The Beginning of Infinity. That gives a sense of the general point of view I'm coming from. I have two main things to suggest which are mostly independent but synergize well.

I developed improvements on Critical Rationalism, which I named Critical Fallibilism, which center around evaluating ideas in a binary way using decisive arguments rather than weighing arguments or evidence (which, like induction, doesn't actually work).

And I developed a plan for how to make progress in the world: encourage all public intellectuals to have written debate policies which specify in advance what debates they will accept and how they will behave in those debates. The goal is to have a merit-based system by using political philosophy concepts like rule of law (we write laws down in advance) and transparency. This challenges the current system focused on social climbing, not merit, where intellectuals frequently arbitrary ignore challenging ideas and outliers, follow inexplicit biases, and have little accountability. Because many intellectuals told their fans they're rational, the fans may be interested in holding them to it and seeing them debate in ways where they risk losing.

The underlying philosophical issue is that debates enable error correction, whereas refusing to debate is a way to stay wrong even when living people know corrections to your errors that they're willing to share (also, refusing to debate doesn't correct other people's errors in cases where you're right). Debate can happen via essays, forums and other formats, not just stage debates. Debate policies are a specific case of a broader concept, rationality policies, which are important for combatting bias. Giving people rationality tips and then saying to do their best, unconstrained by specific predetermined policies, isn't effective enough for addressing bias.

People sometimes claim they can't debate because it'd take too much time, but this is typically an excuse: yes there are valid concerns around time and good strategies are needed, but instead of trying to figure out how to make it work, I've seen many people rush to the conclusion that it can't work. They don't seem to actually want to make debate work, hear the strategies for saving time I've developed, or try to create any strategies of their own. Overall, I don't think there are enough rational intellectuals in the world with high social status, so I propose a popular movement.

These two ideas complement each other because decisive arguments allow debates to reach conclusions (currently most debates are inconclusive) and debates allow philosophy ideas to be impactful instead of ignored.

I don't know if people here would be interested in learning about these ideas or debating them. I found, for example, that the Effective Altruism community was unwilling to discuss these ideas or have organized debates about anything (including veganism, AGI and other issues they emphasize). I wrote a lot of criticism and analysis about EA but despite all the stuff they say about rationality and wanting criticism, they largely ignored my criticism. An issue that comes up with many communities or schools of thought is that people don't take personal responsibility for answering questions or criticisms because they think someone else can do it, and there can be hundreds of people thinking that and then no one actually answers a critic. Similarly, people will often say things like "There are lots of essays that refute Popper." and then dismiss Popper without specifying any essay in particular that they endorse and will take any responsibility for errors in.

It's hard to get high quality debate. I don't think this is a personal problem about me. I don't think I'm being gatekept for not having a PhD. People can be dismissive over missing credentials, but that's a sign they aren't rational and wouldn't be good debate opponents. I don't think having the credentials would actually get me good debates. I don't see many intellectuals having great debates with each other but excluding me. A lot of debates I see on social media are about politics not philosophy, and they're low quality and stop early. Academic journals aren't set up for much back and forth debate. Debates that take place on stages are generally too short and aren't followed up on enough, and often focus more on speaking to the audience than trying to engage with the other side.

The internet changed. Usenet is long gone. Yahoo Groups and other email lists were largely replaced by Facebook. Forums are less popular than Reddit. Reddit is sort of like a forum but significantly different because topics quickly leave the front page. On a forum, if someone posts in a topic, it goes back on top of the front page, so a discussion can continue for weeks. On Reddit, discussions rarely make it to day two. The late adopters diluted the internet and companies like Google didn't really try to preserve it. The old internet didn't solve the problem of high quality debate but it was closer and things got worse.

I used to get more debates by not asking for debate. If someone argues with you, and you argue back, they might respond. Now I often say "Do you want to debate this and try to reach a conclusion?" And they don't want to. But if I had just made an on-topic argument, I probably would have gotten another response, maybe several more. People seem to prefer non-committal, unstructured debates. But I don't. I want to try to reach a conclusion. I got tired of repeatedly going through the early parts of debates which then end midway. I don't want to keep repeating the same debate first halves with different people but not getting to do second halves. I want more of the later stages of debate that I have less experience with. The later parts of debate are inherently more varied; discussions often start in similar places (discussing standard topics and making standard initial points) but end up in different places as they branch repeatedly. The more branching points a discussion goes through, the more likely it's unique.

People who generally agree with me often won't debate even though I'm sure we disagree about some things. Some people are focusing on learning which is totally fine. But the world is full of people who think they already have the answers, so some of them ought to debate. Why debate if you already know the answers? Because when two people think they know the answers, but disagree, then at least one of them is wrong. If you're right, debating and showing the other guy he's wrong and overconfident is a good activity. In general, you shouldn't hoard your knowledge; you should be happy if other people learn, improve and partially catch up to you.

People who generally disagree with me are often dismissive. And people often only want to debate what they have direct expertise at. Bayesians usually don't know enough about Popper to engage effectively, and most deal with that by being dismissive not curious. A lot of people will debate a topic but if you question their premises for that topic then they won't debate, even though those premises are relevant to their preferred topic. Why? Defending their premises is hard and not their area of expertise, not what they're good at debating, not what they've spent a lot of time thinking about. Or they may already know a lot about three ways of defending their premises but not already know a lot about defending their premises against the specific challenges I'd bring up.

Solutions? I don't know. There are often career incentives and social dynamics making all of this much worse. The world has a lot of problematic power structures.