Hi, I'm a philosopher specializing in epistemology and rationality. I learned about Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism from my mentor David Deutsch and I helped with his book The Beginning of Infinity. That gives a sense of the general point of view I'm coming from. I have two main things to suggest which are mostly independent but synergize well.

I developed improvements on Critical Rationalism, which I named Critical Fallibilism, which center around evaluating ideas in a binary way using decisive arguments rather than weighing arguments or evidence (which, like induction, doesn't actually work).

And I developed a plan for how to make progress in the world: encourage all public intellectuals to have written debate policies which specify in advance what debates they will accept and how they will behave in those debates. The goal is to have a merit-based system by using political philosophy concepts like rule of law (we write laws down in advance) and transparency. This challenges the current system focused on social climbing, not merit, where intellectuals frequently arbitrary ignore challenging ideas and outliers, follow inexplicit biases, and have little accountability. Because many intellectuals told their fans they're rational, the fans may be interested in holding them to it and seeing them debate in ways where they risk losing.

The underlying philosophical issue is that debates enable error correction, whereas refusing to debate is a way to stay wrong even when living people know corrections to your errors that they're willing to share (also, refusing to debate doesn't correct other people's errors in cases where you're right). Debate can happen via essays, forums and other formats, not just stage debates. Debate policies are a specific case of a broader concept, rationality policies, which are important for combatting bias. Giving people rationality tips and then saying to do their best, unconstrained by specific predetermined policies, isn't effective enough for addressing bias.

People sometimes claim they can't debate because it'd take too much time, but this is typically an excuse: yes there are valid concerns around time and good strategies are needed, but instead of trying to figure out how to make it work, I've seen many people rush to the conclusion that it can't work. They don't seem to actually want to make debate work, hear the strategies for sa...

Tools for thought