Adversarial System Hats

This is a nice proposal. I think the heart of the issue is the fact that the proposer of an idea or a suggestion gets a status boost if the idea is accepted. Thus, we experience a misalignment of incentives: ideally, I want my incentive structure to push me towards the truth, but actually I am pushed toward advocacy of ideas I proposed.

I would suggest some other roles:

The Fact Checker: this role seeks to ensure that the factual content of the proposed arguments are correct.

The Separator: the person in this role strives to separate terminal from instrumental values.

The Simplifier: the person seeks to simplify and refactor the arguments, making them as clean and direct as possible.

It would be fun to get a bunch of people, find some standard debating topic, assign roles, and see what kind of conclusions come out. In other words, to test the non-adversarial debating format and see what happens.

It's an interesting idea. I don't think it's necessary, but it may be convenient.

A peculiar feature of the idea is that it may not be desirable for the individual roles to be rational. In order to best fulfill certain roles, the people playing the part must play up the aspects of themselves that do what the role requires and stifle the aspects that serve the functions of others.

If you've taken up a role of generating new ideas, you need to lower your standards so that you're free to come up with things you wouldn't normally think of; if you're the skeptical evaluator for the group, you have to have very high standards and not offer any slack.

Sounds a bit like deBono's Six Thinking Hats, as well.

I'm completely uncertain whether this would work better, worse, or the same as more common methods of group decision-making. It's certainly an interesting idea.

I would make one caution, though. I find that businesses, schools, and decision-making workshops are far too willing to accept any cute or clever or radical sounding idea without any evidence that it works. It's easier to use them as an boast: "Don't say our decisions aren't rational. We care so much about being rational that we make all our decisions with special rationalist hats. If you're so rational, what do you do?" With "make decisions as well as possible based on available information" being a less acceptable answer than "have color coded teams using the Ten Step Rationalo-X Colors Method" or whatever.

For me to use this, I would need evidence that it worked. The best evidence would be assigning people to random groups, having one group talk it out informally and having the other use this hats method, and making them work on problems that are difficult but where there is one correct answer. If the hat people come to the correct answer more often than the non-hat people, then we use hats for everything.

I don't know why people don't do this more often for the common decision-making systems proposed, but I'll bet Robin Hanson would have some choice things to say about it.

It seems to me it would be helpful if people would at least explicitly TAG themselves as to their role. Even if they picked them themselves, we could get a better overall view of the argument, if there was only one person on side B, we could pay special attention to them etc.

Can't altruistic rationalists who want to be right as individuals, and want the group to be right more than they want to be known to be right avoid information cascades? All they have to do is form their own private opinion, and even if they are swayed toward the majority opinion by the evidence of the other rationalists' opinions, pretend to be contrarians, because of the consequences that will have for the rest of the group (providing them more information)? Or at least say something like "I accept the majority opinion because the majority accepts it and they are unlikely to be wrong, but here are some arguments against that opinion I came up with anyway?"

Another possible solution would be to let people choose to be part of the justice system, but NOT choose what role they play. Randomly assign them judge, prosecution, or defense. If we only need to ensure that equal effort is applied to both sides, it seems like this would be enough.