Mindmade Debatable - A hilarious party game for people who love to argue

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In a circle or small group, one person makes an statement (i.e. “Traffic in the Bay Area is at an all-time high.). The next person adds on by saying, “which leads to…” and the next person adds on by saying, “which leads to…” Each result should be increasingly bigger and more impactful to “blow up the balloon”. Who were the last three people to survive in the balloon, and why were they considered so important?

Rearrange the classroom so that the opposing groups face one another and the observers are seated at one side.

Invite students to share their answers with the class. This debate game can be repeated with any other topic as well. This is a hard activity by yourself, but you can put statements on index cards and draw them out of a hat. Let’s take the peanut butter angle from game one. Each participant gets up in front of the group and makes their statement again. Now the crowd comes at them. Not with pitchforks, not with moral judgement, but with a simple question asked in unison: Note down the roles of the stakeholders on the index cards, one stakeholder per card. Be sure you have at least three index cards for each stakeholder role. Instead, they may be tempted to promise the ban of useless debate games if they ever got to have it their way. Now people may infer they’re self-referential comics who try to circumvent saying something of significance by pointing out the elephant in the room.

The majority of our paper analyzes debate as a concept; the experiments above are quite preliminary. In the future we’d like to do more difficult visual experiments and eventually experiments in natural language. The judges should eventually be humans (or models trained from sparse human judgements) rather than ML models that metaphorically represent humans. The agents should eventually be powerful ML systems that do things humans can’t directly comprehend. It will also be important to test debates over value-laden questions where human biases play a role, testing if it’s possible to get aligned behavior from biased human judges. Get the students to form a seated circle. There should be one fewer seat than the number of participants. Standing in the middle, give a statement, starting ‘Cross the circle if…’ that students can either agree or disagree with. As the rules are being learnt, start with simple verifiable facts such as ‘… if you have brown hair’ or ‘… if your name starts with a letter in the first half of the alphabet’. Round 2 – Each proposal may be best at something, but this doesn’t yet allow us to choose which is best overall.Each student will give a 30-second explanation of why their character should be allowed to stay in the balloon, using a point and an explanation. After these arguments, the rest of the students should vote on who should be thrown out of the balloon. This can be repeated until only one person remains in the balloon. Students will learn to keep their cards for when they have a very important point to make so you can reward players with extra cards for making excellent points or asking important questions.