The structure here was “write an initial braindump on google docs, then invite people hash out disagreements in the comments
Is it possible that you did 90% of the work on those docs, at least of the kind that collects and cleans up existing arguments? This is sort of what I meant by “resistance”. E.g. if I wanted to have a formalized debated with my hypothetical grandma, she’d be confused about why I would need that, or why we can’t just talk like normal people, but this doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t play along, or that I wouldn’t find the results of the debate useful. I wonder what fraction of people, even rationalists, would feel similarly.
Well, that has fewer moving parts and fewer distinct kinds of text than I would appreciate. But I suspect that the greatest problem with this sort of thing would be a lack of persistent usage. That is, if a few people actually dedicated effort into having disagreements with a similar tool, even this simple, they might draw some benefit from it. But since such tools aren’t the least effort option for anybody, they end up unused. I guess google docs are pretty good in this sense, in that everyone has access to them, the docs are persistent and live in a familiar place (assuming the person uses google docs for other purposes), and maybe you can even be notified somehow, that “person X modified doc Y”.
Is it possible that you did 90% of the work on those docs, at least of the kind that collects and cleans up existing arguments? This is sort of what I meant by “resistance”. E.g. if I wanted to have a formalized debated with my hypothetical grandma, she’d be confused about why I would need that, or why we can’t just talk like normal people, but this doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t play along, or that I wouldn’t find the results of the debate useful. I wonder what fraction of people, even rationalists, would feel similarly.
Well, that has fewer moving parts and fewer distinct kinds of text than I would appreciate. But I suspect that the greatest problem with this sort of thing would be a lack of persistent usage. That is, if a few people actually dedicated effort into having disagreements with a similar tool, even this simple, they might draw some benefit from it. But since such tools aren’t the least effort option for anybody, they end up unused. I guess google docs are pretty good in this sense, in that everyone has access to them, the docs are persistent and live in a familiar place (assuming the person uses google docs for other purposes), and maybe you can even be notified somehow, that “person X modified doc Y”.