Proposal: Rationality Quotes Thread With Attributions in rot13

That sounds interesting. If there are quotes that are sources of usable insight from people who are not otherwise rational, hiding the source could lead to more attention being focused on the quote, instead of the author.

There's a couple of web forums I use that support a way of hiding any part of what you post. The relevant markup is recognised and automatically replaced with a graphic that indicates there is something hidden. It is revealed, on one site by mousing over the graphic, and on the other by clicking on it.

It's quite useful, but I don't know how much work it would be to implement it here.

a[href$="/spoiler"] {
    background: #888 !important;
    color: #888 !important;
}
a[href$="/spoiler"]:hover {
    background: #bbb !important;
    color: black !important;
}

Sub-proposal:

Try out a hidden-name system in two weeks, weeks away from the regular quotes threads, as a trial run.

As an experimental run, begin a quotes thread with the following title and text:

Title:

Rationality Quotes Thread With Hidden Attributions and Voting

Text:

This thread has an experimental format for posting rationality quotes. Here is the format:

For those posting quotes:

Post the quote, but not the author, original language translated from, or other information.

As a reply to your comment, reply with the author and any other relevant information. This will be downvoted to -3 until it is hidden to users using the default setting of -3 downvotes. As another reply to your comment, comment with the single word "dynamo" and this comment will be voted up to +3, to offset downvotes from the other comment.

As a reply to the author's name, comment with the word "evaluate".

For those judging quotes:

Do not vote on the quote itself. Express your approval or disapproval by voting on the "evaluate" tab hidden within the tab containing the author's information and context. Author's names are downvoted to hide both them and the votes received by each quote. Ideally, every individual's first impression and interpretation of a quote will be unaffected by its author or knowledge of how others on LW have responded to it.

For this experimental thread only:

Please post quotes that appeared in an LW quote thread no more recently than one year ago. Feel free to choose quotes that would be interesting out of context.

I think a much more important voting bias is whether the voter agrees with the conclusion that the quote argues for.

I say to go for it.

I think this is a good idea and an interesting experiment. I also thought of a possible technical concern with rot13ing the names that I wanted to share. This may be obvious, but I felt it was probably safer to say it anyway.

Rationality Quote 1, posted on October 1st.

• Ryvrmre Lhqxbjfxl

Rationality Quote 3, posted on October 1st.

• yhxrcebt

Rationality Quote 6, posted on October 1st.

• Nyvpbea

If you upvoted these three quotes, checked who the sources of your favorites are, and promised yourself that you would not change my opinion or upvote them after looking, and you then check back in the thread tomorrow, you might see:

Rationality Quote 10, posted on October 2nd.

• Ryvrmre Lhqxbjfxl

Think that it is really a good quote, and then realize you remember who Ryvrmre Lhqxbjfxl is before you made your voting decision because you checked him yesterday.

I didn't want to just find a problem and leave it there because it is an interesting experiment, so I thought of a number of ways to avoid this particular problem:

1: Tell people not to check in the middle in case they remember a particular encryption-decryption on a later check. 2: Disallow duplicate quotes. 3: Use a system that doesn't have encryption-decryption pairs. 4: Have all names linked externally so there is no accidentally readable encryption decryption pair.

As far as I can tell, 4 is probably the best. It's unlikely that you will accidentally click and read a link you didn't mean to click, but you might happen to accidentally derot13 something mentally if you see it multiple times. As long as the link offers no hints as to the author, it should be a secure system.

3 is rather complex for this type of experiment, although it would also be secure. 2 is no fun, because sometimes there are multiple quotes from a single person that you want to share. 1 is also a possible idea, but it seems like it might be more frusturating than 4. However, it would be easier to implement.

This is admittedly a not a very substantial problem and will probably not have changed the results, and if it did would probably have not changed the results by very much, but since you were interested in an experimental idea I liked, I wanted to discuss possible ways to help the experimental protocol.