Suggestion: Implement a Change My View Feature

post by Chris_Leong · 2017-10-31T00:46:58.753Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

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I know that the devs are pretty busy at the moment, and won't be able to do anything like this for a long time, but if I don't post this now, I'll probably forget it.

Change My View: is an extremely popular sub on Reddit and the responses tend to be pretty good. However, there are some questions that rationalists might have that can't be asked there due to lack of knowledge. Just off the top of my head, these might include:

• CMV: I believe that we should two box in Newcomb's problem
• CMV: I believe that hypothetical problems tend to be too abstract to be worth discussing
• CMV: I believe that philosophy does not have much value for discovering the truth

Just as in Change My View, you would be expected to elaborate on your view.

The best way to implement this would probably be to have a special cmv tag. These posts would then have a special option to allow the OP to award a delta when their view was changed (we could also copy this suggestion of big and little deltas for big and little changes respectively). I think that deltas would be good as they provide incentive for people to say something that might change a persons view and they also encourage a person to acknowledge when their view has changed.

We could consider importing some of the rules or norms of change my view for these threads, ie:

• Top level responses should challenge at least one aspect of the view or ask for a clarification
• You must be open to changing the view if the evidence points that direction
• You must personally hold the view and not be playing devil's advocate or neutral
• The person who wants their view changed should be active in the thread
• No soapboxing

I'll admit that someone could create a Change My View thread already, but I believe that implementing this feature would make people more aware of this and nudge them towards actually doing putting their beliefs on the line. It would also allow people to filter these threads if they felt that there were too many of them.

So, as I said at the start, this is intended as a long term suggestion only, but it seems like it would be worth implementing eventually.

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