Adversarial Collaboration Project
web.sas.upenn.edu
web.sas.upenn.edu
I did notice that my research question was kind of ill-defined. The "classic" adversarial collaboration topic is something like the effectiveness of a medical intervention, or the effectiveness of a policy intervention. The format probably works best for that because there is some somewhat clearer notion about what it would mean for each position to be correct!
The next step is to track each adversaries progress over time and determine which group’s theories predict outcomes vs adding new auxiliary hypothesis to explain discrepancies.
This could help improve problems with pseudoscience and skepticism of scientific institutes: let all quacks collaborate by adding their programme to be comparison. Their lack of progress should then be simple enough for laymen to follow, and make it obvious that their theories have no predictive power.
Same goes with fraud: you are less likely to fabricate data if it is being publically compared to numerous other teams that have different biases.
The list of research projects on this website looks fascinating. Hope that these kinds of projects continue to get funded.
It forces both sides to argue in good faith, it forces clarity, and even in circumstances where no possible agreement can be reached, it pushes arguments on either side toward their strongest and most reasonable forms.
Of course, it does require that people on either side of a given argument need to be willing to engage and to do so in good faith.
(Captain Hindsight out.)
If adversarial studies occurred it would make those debates a lot more valuable, since the discussion could be based on comparisons of the adversarial research rather than the current ‘pharma bad’ or ‘skeptics bad’ framing.
Do you have a particular example in mind when that happened? I am trying to remember any live debate on Rogan, and could only come up Tim Pool vs Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde; but I do not remember them talking over each other.