Rational discussion of politics

Have you considered a CAPTCHA-like system whereby you must solve some propositonal logic puzzle or calculate conditional probabilities before being allowed to comment?

It seems to me that something like this may help promote constructive discussion by (1) filtering out those of low analytical ability, (2) bumping those with sufficient analytical ability up into system 2 thinking, and (3) priming everyone with a problem in which they are actually seeking an answer rather than merely justifying a previously held belief.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dsv/is_politics_the_mindkiller_an_inconclusive_test/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/dwa/politics_discussion_thread_august_2012/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/frv/politics_discussion_thread_december_2012/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/g6n/politics_discussion_thread_january_2013/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gli/politics_discussion_thread_february_2013/

Short summary: Politics discussions remained civilized on Less Wrong, but ultimately I saw no evidence there was any net benefit, apart from the enjoyment individual participants gained from engaging in the discussions.

That said I think politics are an important area of discussion - http://lesswrong.com/lw/gr4/why_politics_are_important_to_less_wrong/ . I just don't think Less Wrong is actually rational enough to have a serious political discussion.

As for my opinion of your attempt? The existence of censorship, limiting membership and topics, will eventually result in a population which believes there is greater consensus on their shared beliefs than actually exists, and who will be amazingly ignorant about basic political positions outside the sphere of discussion permitted. Those in control will think it is amazingly rational, because they will have controlled decisions about censorship, membership limitation, and topic limitation, thus directing the local opinions to coincide with their own. But they'll be just as ignorant as the broader membership.

Why discuss politics instead of policies?

I hope this works out, but I would have much prefered to see this done with an already existing system such as Reddit (which is the basis for this site), Discourse or Groups.io.

If a forum was created, I think it would be desireable for the content not to be Googleable. That way people wouldn't come to the site directly, only through less wrong or word of mouth. This could still lead to the degradation of the site, but it would at least buy it time to develop its own culture.

Excellent! Great initiative.

Another strategy for fighting cold start: have a few posts prepared in advance to share during the first few weeks the site is in operation. (Anyone who thinks this project is a good idea could probably thus help it out by starting on a draft of a contribution for the site now.)

Thank you for this! I saw this post just as I was working on a mammoth post on an economic topic with strong political implications. (Before posting it, I was going to nicely ask people in the next open thread if they allow me to make a top-level discussion post on this and if maybe I wouldn't cause gigantic disturbances in the Force if I opened that can of worms.)

Signed up. Just a small suggestion: the fields in the registration form are too narrow. In particular I don't know whether the form recorded the entirety of my password (I follow that piece of advice that says you should have really long passwords.) Would it be difficult to expand them a little?

Also, how long does it take until I receive the authentication email?

Edit: After browsing the format for a few more minutes, I'm not sure this is sufficiently forum-like for my preferences. There doesn't seem to be a way to propose new or non-traditional discussion topics, the discussion seems to be US-centric, there doesn't seem to be any format for threading, and the questions raised frame the discussion too much in terms of simple agreement/disagreement; there's no apparent room for more nuanced views on the topics.

I would like to note that on what basis the automation is done is really sensitive whether indirect moderation is exercised. If you have categories or subject topics then a) it's hard to impossible to differentiate within a subject area b) the bonudary drawing is a moderation choice (ie who gets to suffer from their "neighbours" bad karma). Another naive failure mode is that if a user is as a whole bucketed as good or bad. This would misbehave if the person contributes to one area but gets really button pushed on another area.

And while it doesn't place that much limitations on the "free" part it might make limitations on the "speech" part. If you have multiple echo chambers that preach to the choir the cross-cultural interaction is missed out on even if cultural segregation is fully successful. That is while it would be text and there would be low amount of conflict based interruptions it would not be that communicative. In order to make transimission of information make sense you have to be able to send information that the receiver doesn't already have.

I find that #1 does not work. Many times the moderators become ideological dictators kicking out any opinion that they don't agree with, counter to evidence.

Limiting membership. Leaning toward the problem with option 1.

Declaring topics off limits. Isn't that leaning toward the problem with option 1?

Collaborative filtering makes obvious sense. Looks like you're doing it category based. No Netflix/Amazon style similarity based?

Brute force filtering, like following particular people or subjects, goes a long way too.

When I try to sign up, I get an error.

I tried to sign up (same username as LW), but when I try to log in I just get an error.

On the new website, we are going to experiment with a different method. In brief, the idea is to use an automated recommendation system which sorts content, raising the best comments to the top and (optionally) hiding the worst.

That sounds like Reddit which doesn't really have a reputation for deep political debate.

Super cool! Talk about entrepreneurship in action! You perceived a demand and you decided to tackle it. You took a risk... hopefully there will be a huge reward.

I've already signed up and am eagerly awaiting the chance to see how your product compares to the competition.

Regarding sorting... the best method would be to facilitate micropayments. In that thread I gave some reasonably detailed points about how and why.