How to Deepen Understanding Through Discourse
The beauty of adversarial collaboration
For the past several weeks, a friend of mine and I have been writing an adversarial collaboration essay addressing the topic of gene editing technologies for treatment applications in humans. While we have been working together and becoming collectively more informed on an incredibly complex issue, my opinions have undergone considerable transformation as I have been rethinking my reasons for holding them.
Through this process, I have become more convinced that adversarial collaboration is the wave of the future, necessary for productive discussions on issues that divide us and perhaps even necessary for the survival of our species. The most paradigm-shifting innovations will likely occur at the intersection of adversarial collaboration, which Slate Star Codex describes as follows:
An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial with both prosecutor and defense will give the jury a balanced view of the evidence for and against a suspect, so we hope an adversarial collaboration will give readers a balanced view of evidence for and against some thesis.
