Fractal Discussion Groups

post by whpearson · 2016-12-22T15:03:31.402Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 26 comments

Contents

26 comments

One problem with current discussion groups is that they naturally gravitate towards a single world view.

When people in a community find a double crux which ends up in statements that currently can't collect evidence for, what should the community do?

If the community tries to stick as one then discussion will be dominated by X vs not X. Both sides will be frustrated by the inability to progress or elaborate their view point. People will likely stop participating in discussions that they don't think are fruitful. This will have a network effect pushing the conversation in one direction.

It is important to keep discussion around not X inside the community as there long as there is some chance. So we need a community structure that can keep them around, but out of the way of the people that believe X. There should be a high level view of what is going on in both the X and the not-X sub-communities so that strategies can be decided upon.

To this end we should try the following structure. An email list is created for a certain question - E.g. How can we create clean energy for our future? When an un-provable statement is found that email list should split it two.

In the sub-group you are not allowed to question the un-provable statement. You must take it as given if you want to discuss there. Any disagreement must be done in the original group.

All the topics subject and a summaries posted in both the sub-lists will get posted to the level above (but not the replies). 

The grand parent list will only get a daily summary of the new topics of the grandchild list, And the great-grand parent list and above will only get numbers of posts happening in the great-grandchild list and below.

So lets take our energy future example further.

Let us say the first double crux found is: "Non-stellar fusion is possible/easy in the next 20 years". The community can agree that if we can find non-stellar fusion in 20 years they should work towards that. But they disagree that it can be found within that time. So the community splits, then splits again (the fusion side splitting between tokamaks and containment fusion, the other side between clean fission and renewables etc etc until there are bits of the community that can work together to explore that solution). 

If you subscribe to the original list you will get discussion of the future of fusion but also summaries of discussion  such"Break-through in storage tech makes renewable future cheap" and one email a day with a list of discussions like "Pebble beds vs Thorium reactors". Finally you'd get to see things like a large number of posts happening on the "Gaseous Uranium Hexaflouride" list which might indicate an imminent breakthrough.

You can move up and down the lists, dependent on whether you are working more at the strategy or the tactical level of things. So you only getting the required information.

This method of organisation of discussion would allow multiple discussions to go on, but not fracture or silo the members of the  community with people that agree with them (unless they ignore the upper layers).

The potential problems with this approach:

• Disagreements about the double crux to split a discussion.
• Too many levels would hide the lower level discussions
• Keeping people to the correct discussion level would be tricky.
• Moderating very niche/low traffic groups would be tricky.

26 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.