Chimpanzee Politics
I loved Franz de Waal’s Primate Social Psychology class when I attended Emory.
Sudeep A
Karma: 2
Harry Potter had then presented the idea that scientists watched ideas fight to see which ones won, and you couldn’t fight without an opponent
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[S]cientists weren’t dumb, it would be obvious if you fixed the battle, it had to be a real fight, between two different theories that might both really be true, with a test that only the true hypothesis would win, something that actually would come out different ways depending on which hypothesis was actually correct, and there would be experienced scientists watching to make sure that was exactly what happened.I think this is how learning anything works - the true power of information gathering and the scientific method is learning when you are wrong and what hypotheses you can disprove. An opposing interlocutor and peer review were key to the Socratic method as well. Proper conduct needs to be maintained to ensure fairness. The best decisions I find are made with a pros/cons list.
Thank you for the reply. I don’t fret about low engagement. One response after a day is perfectly fine. After all, I’ve grown pretty accustomed to my posts disappearing regardless. To me, a post is like a message in a bottle. The algorithm decides where it ends up, not the quality of the argument. Only a few places really provide that on the internet, and they’re pretty disconnected from government. That’s the problem Agora is built to address.
To answer your questions directly:What does the platform offer to users?
A private AI coach that shows you the strongest version of your argument and your opponent’s argument before you publish. A prestige system built on argument quality rather than votes. With more users, I want Agora to become a public record of the structured reasoning that usually stays in people’s heads when they talk about political ideas. My goal is for it to become a place where arguments about real legislation are permanent and legible to governing bodies.
How and to who will you pitch it?
Friends and family so far. Then, posting more widely on the internet as I feel more confident in the MVP. There’s some serious political thinking happening across the internet without a structured place to share it right now. There are ideas scattered across disconnected signal groups, social media content, and comments sections. So at the same time, I will be pitching it to volunteer and mutual aid groups here in the Bay Area where I live.
The longer-term strategy is to build an organic user base of politically-minded people and experts in their respective fields—people who spend their lives trying to get closer to the truth. Academics, lawyers, scientists, and even politicians. Reaching out to them gives me direct feedback on how to improve the epistemic goals for the site, and, hopefully, they introduce their own arguments as well. This would establish the ground floor for the quality of reasoning and conduct that other users follow.
On debate
It’s a fair point and, in many circles, “debate” is synonymous with yelling matches and gotchas. I would say there is a good case for reclaiming “debate” rather than abandoning it. I think people find it entertaining to watch debates, despite them seeming stressful to personally participate in. Thousands of Americans tune in to presidential debates, political influencer battles, or Jubilee 20vs1 videos. Debates used to be a primary method for public reasoning. We’ve lost the prestige associated with the event, and I want to play my part in bringing it back.
Can you build a public debate platform that rewards argument quality over tribal affiliation? I’ve been trying to.
Hi everyone,
I’m new to LW and I’ve discovered it’s a place where the argument quality is really taken seriously. I’ve been building an online debate platform called Agora on the same premise. Certain UX structural requirements introduce friction into the publishing flow seen on other sites like Reddit, X, Facebook, etc. You must state your inferential step, you must engage with your strongest counterargument, and you can earn prestige through argument quality as determined by user votes and an AI coach. The site is live at debateagora.org. A few things I’d like the community to weigh in on: Can you get a high score on a weak, but carefully written argument? Does toggling Blind Read Mode, which strips author names, stance colors, and political labels, actually change how you read an argument? Is “neutral reading” even a rational goal? Can the prestige metric of Epistemic weight be gamed with coordination? These are all things I’d love the LW user base to give me feedback on because I know this is the best place for structured, substantive dialogue. Happy to share the GitHub repo and discuss any of the design decisions.
It was very simple, very human, it was the default if nothing else intervened. To Draco, his enemies weren’t people.
Unfortunately, I do find this to be humanity’s default: a drive to exploit and use others for personal advancement. Agamben calls it “bare life.”—a biological life stripped of political meaning. Your enemy does not deserve the dignity of humanity. They are the Other to be destroyed and trampled.
Thanks for the reply. It’s the exact kind of engagement I expected from this site. I’m having trouble identifying which areas an AI should have input over human speech patterns, whether it comes to claim specificity or truth-seeking. At the moment, there is an option to “sharpen” your claim with Vicara but I’m worried that a claim rewrite might reshape the original author‘s thought too much. At that point the user is forced to reword the claim again to better match their idea. For now, a claim specificity prompt is featured when scoring to nudge the user towards a more nuanced claim. I‘m not sure if that’s enough of a push to change behavior.
As for “truth,” I initially had a source reliability principle, to guide the site explicitly away from misinformation. The way I instituted it initially was a hierarchy of sources, with peer-reviewed sources held as closer to truth compared to personal testimony with regards to scoring. Since then, I have retracted that implementation as I didn’t want the site to bias academic speech over a layperson presenting an issue in their specific community—an issue that might not be studied academically yet. I decided to keep user argument replies as a way to question truth and validity of a published argument, like the community notes on other sites. I’m curious how you think the site could enforce “truth“ on a larger scale.
It’s still in active development and I plan to build out more of the features on the legislative side. The goal is to tie highly validated arguments to legislation as a living record of public comment. Of course, this doesn’t happen without a bigger user base. At the moment, you’re absolutely right that the hero section presents a false promise. I’ll be sure to change that.