Improving rationality / scout mindset on a debate group

post by Aryeh Englander (alenglander) · 2021-09-04T17:02:24.557Z · LW · GW · No comments

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(Cross-posted from my Facebook wall.)

I help run a decent-sized debate group on Facebook focused on arguments for / against religion in general and Orthodox Judaism in particular (I grew up Orthodox but stopped believing around 7 years ago). I think my fellow moderators and I have done a relatively decent job of ensuring that the discussion stays (mostly, usually) respectful. But beyond respectful dialogue, I'd like to also encourage members to use better epistemic standards. Especially, I would love to get people from both sides to do adversarial collaborations [? · GW], try to more often play "devil's advocate", steelman [? · GW] the other side's position, attempt to pass Ideological Turing Tests [? · GW], etc. - basically, to try to adopt more of a "scout mindset" rather than a "soldier mindset" [LW · GW].

I've tried directly asking people to try practicing these techniques more frequently, but with very limited success. I suppose it doesn't help that the group is explicitly a debate group - but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that's part of what attracts people to the group in the first place so I'm reluctant to change it. It also doesn't help that many people in the group (on all sides) really don't think that the people they're arguing against have anything going for their positions. We do at least have a few people in the group who really are great at scout mindset though. Better than I am, in fact - I will admit that I myself often have a lot of difficulty applying these techniques.

What are some ideas or suggestions for how I might be able to encourage better epistemic standards in this kind of group?

Group audience, if it's relevant (although probably some members of the group will disagree with these characterizations):

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