Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Okay, tell me if I am understanding this correctly; basically this is a duel of creation of intellectual property?
I was originally going to comment on how misleading the thread title was, but only right now I noticed "Mental".
edited 12th Nov '12 8:21:52 AM by dRoy
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
I think there is some merit to the very idea, but I'm a little worried about the referees. Being able to properly judge works from such a huge variety should probably qualify themselves as competitors, as their limit to judge is determined by their understanding of the subjects the competitors might throw at them.
And I'm a little unsure about one can compare a drawing to, say, an article on healthy nutrition. They both have merit, but the methods, skills and results are not even in the same ballpark.
That said, maybe the best way to test this was by playing such a game as an experiment.
Why so serious?
This idea is fundamentally impossible to implement for one, simple reason: people don't judge other people's works by their objective merits, but rather by their presentation. A contest like this would consistently be won by the people with the most charisma, the deepest voice, the most muscular, tall physique, and the most skill in rhetoric and understanding of the way we unconsciously respond to behavioral cues of status and dominance.
In short, the only intellectual discipline measured would be manipulation/persuasion.
scratching at .8, just hopin'
...*reads OP*....You mean like the scientific method?
Wait, no, that doesn't apply to fiction or phenomena not observed in the natural world...
...so, you mean like adding more scientific thinking to philosophy and the arts? I'm all for it!
Who Am I?
I don't think this can be done, unless you restrict the domain of competition a lot more. Otherwise you have a serious apples vs.oranges problem. By what set of common criteria could one judge the quality of an improvement to a painting vs. one to, say, a computer program? However, if you limited this to rhetorical, then you might have something. Like a more sophisticated and precise version of your classic debate team competition. Since you're a Less Wrong fan, you know that most of the more common cognitive biases and logical fallacies have been identified and defined. We have such a list here at tvt, here: Logical Fallacies.
I would suggest something along the following lines: Select the two contestants and announce the topic, recruit a team of judges, give each contestant a number of points, and subtract from that total every time they commit a fallacy. After a set number of rounds, highest score wins.
If you are committed to the "any type of work" model, then I'm not sure how you can do it. The main challenge is developing a set of criteria by which works can be judged.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
I was thinking about the approach to rationality of Less Wrong (I lurk there a fair amount — I find that community a tad on the dogmatic side, personally, but they certainly do have some intriguing ideas, I think), and it came to my mind that it would be cool to develop a system for hosting and judging intellectual "duels" between people, in the interest of putting natural human competitiveness to the service of intellectual development.
As I see it, the fundamental requisites of such a system would be:
How would you suggest to develop a system like this? Are there any other requisites that you would suggest? Do you think that this is a dumb idea to begin with?
A possible, and very preliminary, sketch of such a system follows.
The length of each turn (I think that a week per turn would be frenetic enough to be interesting, but it may vary) and the number of turns (perhaps 4 turns for a short duel, 8 for a long one) are set in advance. Also, a group of referees is chosen.
Every two turns, every referee can assign a number of "points", from 1 to 10, to each participant (this is a weakness of the system, perhaps; but I don't see a way of having an entirely objective scoring system). The score can be anonymous or not, depending on circumstances. At the end of the game, the player who has scored the most points wins.
On odd turns, both players create a work of some kind. That can be literally anything — a painting, an explanation of a theorem, a poem, a program, whatever. There are no limits to what sources or methods the players can use in order to make their submission: the only requirement is that they have to do it alone (unless it is a duel between teams, but let's keep it simple for now). If it is not the first turn, the submission should be of a genre and a kind as different from anything that has been submitted before as possible: the referees are encouraged to take away points harshly if that is not the case.
On even turns, each participant has to take the work of the opponent and improve it in some way. They should not criticize it per se, although they can certainly modify it if they think it contains mistakes, but at the end of the turn they should present a "better" version of their opponent's work; and again, they can use whatever sources or methods they feel like using.
Then both players are scored by the referees on the basis of the quality of their original submission and the degree of their improvement of the opponent's submission; and then, the works are discarded, and both players start again with some new work.
What do you think? Do you have suggestions and/or comments?
edited 12th Nov '12 3:05:17 AM by Carciofus
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.