This house believes that current EA/Open Philanthropy leadership is/isn't basically competent. 

This house believes that wild animals have net negative lives

The EA community should be cause area hubs rather than a single monolith.

David Nash & [idk, Benjamin Hilton]

David argues his line here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Zm6iaaJhoZsoZ2uMD/effective-altruism-as-coordination-and-field-incubation

An AI pause debate would be interesting (maybe @Matthew_Barnett would be interesting in debating someone?)

Climate Change is not a major contributor to existential risk. Suggested debaters: Luke Kemp and John Halstead

Are the top 1% more than 10,000x as efffective as the median

(suggested by @Hauke Hillebrandt here)

Suggested debaters: Brian Tomassik and Daniel 

Tomassik: 

Eight years later, I still think this post is basically correct. My argument is more plausible the more one expects a lot of parts of society to play a role in shaping how the future unfolds. If one believes that a small group of people (who can be identified in advance and who aren't already extremely well known) will have dramatically more influence over the future than most other parts of the world, then we might expect somewhat larger differences in cost-effectiveness.

Daniel: 

Link I can't access https://sci-hub.wf/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/phpe.12133

This house believes we should prioritise the longterm future

This house believes that the theories of change for most of non-research AI policy work are too underspecified to robustly conclude that it is net-positive in expectation.

This house believes that if digital minds are built, they will:

1. be conscious
2. experience valence (i.e., pleasure and/or pain)

I think this is an important debate to have because, as has been pointed out here and here, EA seems to largely ignore prioritization considerations around digital sentience and suffering risk.^[1]

To argue against the motion, I suggest David Pearce: see his view explained here. To argue for the motion, maybe—aiming high—David Chalmers: see his position outlined here.

1. ^{^}

   See the linked posts’ bullet points titled “I think EA ignores digital sentience too much,” and “Suffering-focused longtermism stuff seems weirdly sidelined,” respectively.

I think it would be very topical to have a debate about how much the EA community should focus on AI safety given rapid progress.

THB we should strongly disapprove of working at an AI lab, even on a safety team

There's been a lot of debate on the forum about whether StrongMinds should be considered a high impact charity. I think Ishaan (Principal SoGive Analyst and author of this work on StrongMinds) would have some good contributions to make on this.

Should the Existential Risk community collaborate with agents of doom (or make it more specific eg OpenAI or Anthropic should be treated as an enemy and not a friend)

This house believes that the strategy of developing advanced AI capabilities alongside safety techniques (as OpenAI does) increases AGI x-risk

THB EAs should stop working at major AI labs

Fundamental questions about AI, like:

• What exactly is AGI / superintelligence?
• Are large language models a precursor to AGI?

AGI is more likely to save us from all-cause existential risk than it is likely to kill us all. 

Nathan -- good idea. 

In my experience, the most interesting and valuable debates happen when the debaters are about 60-70% in agreement about a significant issue, but have significant differences in their prioritization of issues, their values and world-views, their professional backgrounds, and/or their preferred strategies and policies.

And, of course, steel-manning the opponents' arguments should be an important and formalized part of any debate.

THB that EA-minded college freshmen should study Computer Science over Biology

Highly effective causes saturate, making it impossible to distribute large sums of money especially more effectively.

THW double the size of EA.

EA should add systems change as a cause area - Macaskill or Ord v. [Someone with a view of history that favors systems change more who's been on 80k hours].

From hazy memory of their episodes it seems like Ian Morris, Mushtaq Khan, Christopher Brown, or Bear Braumoeller might espouse this type of view.

Make it an 'undebate'. 10 points for every time you learn something, and 150 points for changing your mind on the central proposition.

Also, I'd like to see RLHF^[1] debated. Whether any form of RL on realistic text data will be able to take us to a point where it's "smart enough", either to help us align higher intelligences or just smart enough for what we need.

1. ^{^}

   Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.^[2] A strategy for AI alignment.

2. ^{^}

   I wish the forum had the feature where if you write [[RLHF]], it automatically makes an internal link to the topic page or where RLHF is defined in the wiki. It's standard in personal knowledge management systems like Obsidian, Roam, RemNote, and I think Arbital does it.

Unsolicited procedural suggestions:

• It might be helpful for a third party to take notes in a real time argument map. There is a technique for this called "flowing" in high school / college debate in the US: https://thedebateguru.weebly.com/flowing.html
• Maybe consider hybrid text / oral debates? Each participant could have a written document of their position to start with. These would be more information dense than speeches. Like meetings at Amazon, where everybody apparently spends the first 10 minutes reading a text memo.

There are a couple of debate ideas I have, but I would most like to see a debate on whether ontological physicalism is the best view of the universe there is.

I would like to see someone like the theoretical physicist Sean Carroll represent physicalism, and someone like the professor Edward F. Kelly from the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia represent anti-physicalism. The researchers at the Division of Perceptual Studies study near-death experiences, claimed past-life memories in children and other parapsychological phenomena, and Edward F. Kelly has written three long books on why he thinks physicalism is false, relying largely on case studies that he says don't fit well with the physicalistic worldview. Based on my understanding, the mainstream scientific community treats the research by the Division of Perceptual Studies as fringe science.

I'm personally agnostic, but I have thought about making an efforpost on steelmanning anti-physicalism based on Edward F. Kelly's works for LessWrong, but I have doubted whether there would be any kind of interest for it because the people at LessWrong seem to be very certain of physicalism and think lowly of other positions. If you think there would be interest for it, you can say so. Physicalism has very good arguments for it, and the anti-physicalist position relies on non-verifiable case studies being accurate.