Debate Policy

A debate policy is a document, written and posted in advance, declaring what issues you will debate, with whom, and using what methods. Temple’s analogy is the rule of law: just as written laws constrain kings and judges, limiting arbitrary, biased, or favoritism-driven decisions, a debate policy makes an intellectual give up some discretionary control over whom to engage. To matter, it must sometimes overrule the author’s in-the-moment preference about ducking a critic.

A good policy covers three phases. The start: objective conditions for which requests are accepted (e.g. a word-count or relevant-writing threshold) instead of vague filters like “no idiots,” which invite biased filtering. The middle: conduct rules, format, citations, and discussion structure. The end: conditions for concluding, so debates neither terminate the instant someone is losing nor drag on forever.

CF grounds this in fallibilism and error correction: refusing to engage a correct critic is a common way to stay wrong. Counterintuitively, Temple reports a policy saves time. Serious critics meeting its conditions self-select in; unserious ones decline formal rules; and a written failsafe lets him end low-value discussions confidently, knowing a mistakenly-dismissed critic can still invoke it. It operationalizes Paths Forward (his broader backup mechanism) and pairs with prerequisites of debate and rejecting on the merits. Trusting one’s own judgment to recognize positive outliers is the failure mode it pre-commits against; experts may delegate via representatives.