I hadn’t really considered what happens when using debate as a reward signal, I agree you get the benefits of open consultancy, thanks for pointing it out!
Using regular consultancy as a “debugging baseline” makes sense to me, I often read paper as paper trying to answer a question like “how can we use untrusted experts” (and here you should go for the best alternative to debate robust against scheming) but they are sometimes about “how can we make debate work” (and here the debugging baseline is more information).
About the search process over CoT: I agree this is often a good way to produce the justification for the correct side of the argument. It might be a terrible way to produce the incorrect side of the argument, so I think “generate CoTs until you get one that supports your side” is not a drop-in replacement for “generate a justification for your side”. So you often have to combine both the CoT and the post-hoc justification, and what you get is almost exactly what I call “Using open consultancy as evidence in a debate”. I agree that this gets you most of the way there. But my intuition is that for some tasks, the CoT of the open consultant is so much evidence compared to justifications optimized to convince you of potentially wrong answer that it starts to get weird to call that “debate”.
Thanks for the detailed answer!
I hadn’t really considered what happens when using debate as a reward signal, I agree you get the benefits of open consultancy, thanks for pointing it out!
Using regular consultancy as a “debugging baseline” makes sense to me, I often read paper as paper trying to answer a question like “how can we use untrusted experts” (and here you should go for the best alternative to debate robust against scheming) but they are sometimes about “how can we make debate work” (and here the debugging baseline is more information).
About the search process over CoT: I agree this is often a good way to produce the justification for the correct side of the argument. It might be a terrible way to produce the incorrect side of the argument, so I think “generate CoTs until you get one that supports your side” is not a drop-in replacement for “generate a justification for your side”. So you often have to combine both the CoT and the post-hoc justification, and what you get is almost exactly what I call “Using open consultancy as evidence in a debate”. I agree that this gets you most of the way there. But my intuition is that for some tasks, the CoT of the open consultant is so much evidence compared to justifications optimized to convince you of potentially wrong answer that it starts to get weird to call that “debate”.