sylweb

What do you mean by Ultimate Reality? 

If all you mean by "Ultimate Reality" is some vague sense of order and natural or moral law, then you haven't really dealt with God. God isn't just order and reality. When we talk about God, we generally mean a personal God with intentions, actions, discretion, and maybe even a name. 

A French-language debate about abortion. Should be interesting.

Ironically, Newton did hold to theistic views; his beliefs were not totally orthodox but he was far from an atheist.

Anyhow, this should not discredit the proposal itself, since it could be true regardless of what Newton believed.

There are many things that cannot be settled by experiment, but are still worthwhile to debate. For instance, morality cannot be settled by physical experiment. You could argue that morality can be elucidated via thought experiments, but there's still no experiment that would allow you to prove the moral validity of thought experiments, so morality as a whole has no experimental basis.

Furthermore, while the idea of a generic god is not falsifiable, the idea of a specific religion's God is. If a certain religion is true, then certain truth claims it makes would also be true. In this situation, there would be holy books that would have to be internally consistent and claims about miracles, about creation, about morality that could be discussed.

I think removing bias will be an important part of creating a better voting system. In deciding how best to reduce bias, however, we must recognize that our judgment of how biased everyone else is is dependent on what our own biases are. Realistically, people do vote partially according to their biases, but it's not going to be as extreme as your proposition of a total left-wing domination of DART would make it seem.

Creating a voting system where people would get bigger votes if they vote against their own opinions seems, on the surface, to make some sense. However, linking it to the personal views of the debaters themselves might not be the best idea. Debaters often play Devil's advocate and may hold maverick views. Such a system would also harm the fairness of debates not relating to politics, leaving it to random chance. (e.g. a conservative and a liberal hold a joke debate about croissants. The conservative makes the better arguments. 3 people vote for the conservative and 2 for the liberal. All 5 people happen to be conservative. The conservative loses 3-4.) If we do choose to implement this idea, it should be on an opt-in basis.

A better system might be to make the voting system easier with web 2.0 technologies. In this system, the voter would get to highlight, mark up, and add comments to the debate so he doesn't have to summarize everything, and we could even use certain metrics (e.g. level of detail of the justifications) to change the worth of votes and reduce bias.

It's a relatively short two-round debate. Please leave your vote. Thank you!

Is it allowed to debate in a non-English language? I would very much love to try my hand in debating in French or in Chinese. I am concerned that it might not be allowed because it would require using Google Translate to see if the debates break the rules. Could somebody on the moderation team clarify this for me? Thank you very much.