Debate

Web interface for information-asymmetric debates.

This code was used to run the experiments in the following paper:

Debate Helps Supervise Unreliable Experts. Julian Michael,* Salsabila Mahdi,* David Rein,* Jackson Petty, Julien Dirani, Vishakh Padmakumar, and Samuel R. Bowman.

See the 2023-nyu-experiments branch for full details and data.

Usage

Requirements

• Install Mill.

For the analytics server, you'll also need Python 3. I recommend using it in a virtual environment. To get set up, run:

python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the webapp

For development, run

mill -j 0 debate.dev.serve

in the base directory of this repository. (-j 0 will parallelize and speed up compilation.)

You can also pass in flags at runtime:

• --port: the port to host the server at. (default: 8080)
• --analytics-port: the port the analytics server will be hosted at. (default: 8081)
• --save: the directory to save the server state at. (default: save)
• --help: print command info instead of running the server.

To run HTTPS, there is also an --ssl flag which has the server look for a keystore.jks and password under debate/resources, but I normally run behind a proxy which takes care of this. The difference between development and production is that production mode uses fully-optimized JS compilation, which takes longer but produces a much smaller and faster-running JS file.

To run unit tests, use mill debate.jvm.test. (JS tests aren't working at the moment; see #76.)

Running the model debate server

To run debates with GPT-4 as a participant, you will need to have the packages in model-debate/requirements.txt installed. You will also need a SECRETS file in the model-debate directory with the following format (without braces):

NYU_ORG={our NYU OPENAI API organization ID}
API_KEY={your OPENAI API key)

To start the server (which formats and processes POST requests sent from the main Scala webapp, before sending the debate transcript to GPT-4), navigate to the subdirectory model-debate and run

uvicorn app:app

You can also pass in the following flags:

• ---port: the port to host the server at.
• ---reload: if you're doing development on the server, and want automatic reloading.

Running the analytics server

There's a python server to produce the visualizations in the Analytics tab of the interface. After activating your virtual environment and installing dependencies as described above, run To start this, run:

FLASK_APP=vis/server.py python -m flask run --port 8081

and the analytics pane should work in the debate webapp assuming you ran that also without changing any command line arguments). The --port argument (default: 5000) should match the --analytics-port argument from the main webapp. If you are using a save directory other than save, you can pass it in using the DATA_DIR environment variable, e.g.:

FLASK_APP=vis/server.py DATA_DIR=scratch/save-server python -m flask run --port 8081

The value you pass in for DATA_DIR should match that of --save for the main webapp.

Contents

• build.sc: Mill build file.
• debate/src{,-jvm,-js}: Scala source for all platforms.
• debate/test/src: Tests.
• vis/: Python code for the analytics visualization server.
• scripts/: Some python scripts for working with QuALITY stories.

Development

JVM entry point (debate webapp server):

• Serve.scala

JS entry point (debate webapp client):

• App.scala

Python entry point (analytics visualization server):

• server.py

Live Testing

After starting up the server, go to the page and open the Admin tab. There you can add/remove debater profiles, create debates, etc.

If you change the JS source only, then you can run mill debate.js.fastestOpt and hard refresh the page when it's done to load the changes. If you change the JVM or shared source as well, then you'll need to restart the server (i.e., interrupt and re-run mill debate.dev.serve).

Suggestions for using VSCode

• Install the Scala Metals extension.
  • Why? This gives you nice stuff like type-at-point, completion with types, etc.
  • Check out the button on the left-hand-side of vscode. It has a lot of useful stuff.
• Use bloop as the build server.
• Use scalafix somewhat-often. Check out e.g. mill debate.jvm.fix.

Setting up a powerful instance for fast builds

Jess Smith did the following to speed up compilation and linking. This was, in his view, surprisingly cheap for the productivity gains. (Julian has not had problems with Metals in VSCode on his M2 Air, but fastestOpt sometimes takes ~10s, and YMMV.)

1. Set up a powerful instance on google cloud platform. (be sure to shut this down when you're done using it, else you can be billed a lot) Jess uses a c2d-highcpu-8 instance in us-central1-a using debian-11-bullseye-v20221206. (As of 11 Dec 2022.)
2. Install homebrew. (This was, in his experience, the least painful way to set up mill.)
3. Install mill using homebrew.
4. Use vscode remote ssh to connect to the instance.
5. Use ssh forwarding to connect to the instance from your local machine. (This lets you use e.g. localhost:8080 to connect to server:8080).
6. Reminder again to shut down the instance when you're done using it. :)

Background

The code in this repository is written in Scala in functional style.

On Scala and FP:

• Why Scala? By Li Haoyi
• What's Functional Programming All About? By Li Haoyi

Relevant libraries to reference:

• cats: Basic functional programming abstractions
• cats-effect: Basic functional programming abstractions
• monocle: Optics for accessing/transforming immutable data
• scalajs-react: React facade for Scala
• jjm: My personal library of utilities on top of these tools
• munit: Unit testing