Created: July 10, 2020
Modified: July 10, 2020
Modified: July 10, 2020
adversarial system
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- I don't even know where to start. This concept shows up everywhere. Many human systems are constructed from adversarial mechanisms. This is seemingly necessary, but leads to huge costs and inefficiency.
- Examples:
- The law. Judges rely on seeing both sides of an argument developed and presented. Each side has an incentive to find the most compelling argument they can. Judges are discriminative models.
- political debate
- capitalism
- (implicitly) group or team decision making. To be ratified by a group, a position must have arguments articulated for it that can 'justify' it in the shared cognitive space. Coming up with such arguments takes effort and skill beyond simply coming up with the position itself. And being motivated to come up with such arguments usually results from at least kind-of believing the position. It's usually the arguments that come second. There may not be a formal adversarial process---everyone's has the same goals, hopefully, and many decisions will be made without argument---but implicitly there is a battle of ideas. (does this really count?)