adversarial-debate-truthseeking
ResearchStrategy: Dialectic engine retuned for truth-seeking, not survival. A defender steelmans a claim into its MOST falsifiable form, a critic attacks to refute it, a judge classifies the exchange into BROKEN/CORROBORATED/UNFALSIFIABLE — the judge does NOT pick a winner or score persuasiveness. Methods: Irving debate (repurposed), Toulmin argumentation, Mayo severe testing.
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Adversarial Debate (Truth-Seeking Variant)
A retuning of classic critic-defender-judge debate. The classic version asks "which side argued better?" and outputs a survival/resilience verdict — a persuasiveness metric. That is wrong for research: a claim can win a debate by being slippery (un-pin-down-able) while being scientifically empty. This variant changes the roles and the judge's job so the debate produces a falsifiability classification, not a winner.
What changed from the original (multiagent-debate)
| Element | Original (publication) | This variant (truth-seeking) |
|---|---|---|
| Defender's job | Make the claim look strong / survive | State the claim in its MOST falsifiable form — maximize what it forbids |
| Critic's job | Find weaknesses to score against | Find one concrete observation/computation that would refute it |
| Judge's verdict | Winner + resilience score | Bucket: BROKEN / CORROBORATED / UNFALSIFIABLE |
| Success | Artifact survives | We learn whether the claim is even testable, and if so whether it holds |
| Slippery claim | Wins (un-attackable) | Flagged UNFALSIFIABLE (worst outcome) |
Roles
Defender (steelman-to-falsifiable)
The defender does NOT defend the claim as comfortable or vague. The defender's sole job is to restate the claim in the sharpest, most-forbidding form that is still faithful to what we actually meant. A claim of the form "the unification is elegant" is not a defendable form — it forbids nothing. "Under intervention X the law collapses to form A and NOT form B" is — it stakes out something an observation could contradict. If the defender cannot produce a forbidding form, that itself is the verdict (UNFALSIFIABLE) — the defender must report this honestly rather than retreat to vagueness.
Critic (refuter)
The critic does NOT accumulate debating points. The critic tries to produce ONE of: (a) a counterexample (a case the claim forbids but that occurs / could occur), (b) a derivation error (the claim does not follow from its stated premises), (c) a demonstration that the claim's "forbidden" set is empty (it forbids nothing → UNFALSIFIABLE). The critic must commit to a specific refuter before arguing, to prevent goalpost-shifting.
Judge (classifier, not picker)
The judge reads the exchange and assigns a bucket. The judge explicitly does NOT decide who argued better. The judge asks three questions in order:
- Did the defender produce a falsifiable form? If NO → UNFALSIFIABLE.
- Did the critic produce a valid refuter against that form? If YES → BROKEN (record the refutation).
- If the form was falsifiable and survived a severe critic attack (one that would likely have succeeded if the claim were false) → CORROBORATED (record what was forbidden-and-held). A survival against a weak/lazy attack is NOT corroboration — the judge sends it back for a more severe round.
Execution (per claim)
- debate-architect (import) — set rounds (budget), pick the single claim, brief the three roles on the truth-seeking variant explicitly.
- Defender turn — produce the most-falsifiable form. Record it verbatim.
- Critic turn — commit to a refuter type, then attack.
- Cross-examination (import cross-examination SOP) — judge probes the critic's refuter for validity and the defender's form for hidden escape hatches (the moves a slippery claim uses to dodge: redefining terms mid-debate, retreating to a weaker claim, "it's just a model").
- Severity check — judge asks: if the claim were false, would this attack have caught it? If not, escalate (more severe critic) before any CORROBORATED verdict.
- Bucketing — assign and record.
Severity rubric (Mayo)
A test/attack is severe to the degree that the claim would probably have FAILED it if the claim were false. Cheap severity wins: prefer the attack that, had the claim been wrong, would most obviously have broken it. A claim that passes only weak tests stays at "untested," never "corroborated."
Anti-patterns the judge must catch
- Definitional retreat — defender redefines a term to escape the counterexample. → counts as BROKEN of the original claim; the redefined claim is a NEW claim needing its own debate.
- Persuasiveness creep — either side scoring rhetorical points. → judge ignores; only refuters and forbidding-content count.
- Model-shield — "it's only a model, of course it's idealized" used to deflect a refuter that targets a load-bearing idealization. → does not save the claim; the idealization is the claim under test.
Output
DebateBucketing: per claim → {most-falsifiable form produced (or "none — UNFALSIFIABLE") | critic's committed refuter | cross-exam findings | severity of attack | bucket | recorded refutation-or-forbidden-content}.