Debate update: Obfuscated arguments problem
Beth BarnesDate not recordedOriginal︎ ↗Archived copy
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We tested the debate protocol introduced in AI Safety via Debate with human judges and debaters. We found various problems and improved the mechanism to fix these issues (details of these are in the appendix). However, we discovered that a dishonest debater can often create arguments that have a fatal error, but where it is very hard to locate the error. We don’t have a fix for this “obfuscated argument” problem, and believe it might be an important quantitative limitation for both IDA and Debate.
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- Beth Barnes
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- https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/PJLABqQ962hZEqhdB/debate-update-obfuscated-arguments-problem
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- https://web.archive.org/web/20261006123334/https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/PJLABqQ962hZEqhdB/debate-update-obfuscated-arguments-problem
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- Nov 11, 2026
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