Adversarial Debate (Truth-Seeking Variant)

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)

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:

1. Did the defender produce a falsifiable form? If NO → UNFALSIFIABLE.
2. Did the critic produce a valid refuter against that form? If YES → BROKEN (record the refutation).
3. 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)

1. debate-architect (import) — set rounds (budget), pick the single claim, brief the three roles on the truth-seeking variant explicitly.
2. Defender turn — produce the most-falsifiable form. Record it verbatim.
3. Critic turn — commit to a refuter type, then attack.
4. 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").
5. 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.
6. 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."