Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [New LW Feature] "Debates", published by Ruby on April 1, 2023 on LessWrong.

Following the success of the 2021 MIRI Conversations in drawing out various people's views on key questions in AI and digging into their disagreements, the LessWrong team was inspired to build a more dedicated feature for hosting debates on LessWrong.

The MIRI conversations were mostly hosted on Discord and then via a laborious process shoehorned into the LessWrong editor. We figured it wouldn't be hard to do better. Among many benefits, the debates can be held on LessWrong itself; readers are able to comment "inline" on responses within the debate; and there will be customized "debate item" in the Latest Posts list on the frontpage that signals that 1) it's a debate, and 2) how many debate responses have been posted since you last viewed the debate. Hopefully all of this is intuitive from the UI.

The feature is designed so that debates can be held in private, possibly edited, and then published publicly. Or that the debate happens live on the site, allowing for live commenting.

As we're rolling out the feature, we'll initially just set up a few debates that we'd like to see, and then later potentially open up the feature to users more broadly. You're welcome to contact us [link] or comment here if you're interested in viewing or participating in a particular debate.

This announcement post will also serve as the Inaugural Debate using the new debate feature. We were lucky to find two willing participants on short notice, so big thanks to them. GPT-4 and Claude+ are going to discuss whether or not AI Safety via Debate is a promising Alignment strategy.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.