Rational discussion of politics
In a recent poll, many LW members expressed interest in a separate website for rational discussion of political topics. The website has been created, but we need a group of volunteers to help us test it and calibrate its recommendation system (see below).
If you would like to help (by participating in one or two discussions and giving us your feedback) please sign up here.
About individual recommendation system
All internet forums face a choice between freedom of speech and quality of debate. In absence of censorship, constructive discussions can be easily disrupted by the inflow of the mind-killed which causes the more intelligent participants to leave or descend to the same level.
Preserving quality thus usually requires at least one of the following methods:
Appointing censors (a.k.a. moderators).
Limiting membership.
Declaring certain topics (e.g., politics) off limits.
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. The sorting is done based on the individual preferences, allowing each user to avoid what he or she (rather than moderators or anyone else) defines as low quality content. In this way we should be able to enhance quality without imposing limits on free speech.
UPDATE. The discussions are scheduled to start on May 1.
- Should you write longer comments? (Statistical analysis of the relationship between comment length and ratings) by (20 Jul 2015 14:09 UTC; 18 points)
- Rational Discussion of Controversial Topics by (1 Jul 2015 11:15 UTC; 15 points)
- Measuring open-mindedness by (2 Jun 2015 13:35 UTC; 15 points)
- 's comment on Open thread, Aug. 03 - Aug. 09, 2015 by (3 Aug 2015 8:48 UTC; 3 points)
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.
I think that that would be a very interesting experiment. You’d have to choose a problem that people couldn’t simply Google, but we aren’t aiming for a perfect filter, just a good enough filter.
I am not convinced you use the same circuits for these two. I mean, if you mean politics in the sense “does a proposed law X make things better” then yes, but if you want to go deeper into ideologies and philosophies and trying to hunt down and slay the mind-killers, like, getting to the point where people don’t get their panties in a bunch when they hear words like capitalism or socialism, you need to use more empathy driven circuits, mirror neurons...
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?
The website is intended for discussion of all ideologically divisive issues that are currently avoided on LW (economic policies, historical analysis etc.).
Economic policies and historical analysis are not avoided on LW and are totally on-topic. Politics is avoided and would be off-topic. Do you understand the difference?
Hence, I would assume, the presence of the qualifier “ideologically divisive”.
I don’t see anything wrong with discussing ideologically divisive issues, and it occasionally happens here. Rationalism is useless unless you learn how to apply it in real life, and “ideologically divisive” issues are the ones most in need of rationalist analysis.
Take abortion. A rationalist analysis would probably include some known biological facts, some philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness and self, and some utilitarian calculus about trading one life for another.
On an issue like abortion I don’t think we could really resolve the political argument by simply sitting down and spending a few days thinking rationally. But this is only because in my own analysis the problem reduces to issues of philosophy of mind and terminal ethical values that are still unresolved in general. But I do think that it would be an extremely useful exercise to see such a highly political issue discharged into a matter of facts, epistemic philosophy, and ethics, rather than tribalism.
I don’t understand the difference. Would you please define your terms?
My understanding of “politics” and/or “policies” must differ from yours (Mark_Friedenbach’s) & shminux’s (and maybe ChristianKl’s & Dahlen’s too).
I understand public policy, economic policy included, to be a subset of politics. (I’d say some but not all historical analysis is political.) Given that, shminux’s question reads as bizarre, as does the idea that “[e]conomic policies [...] are not avoided on LW and are totally on-topic” while “[p]olitics is avoided and would be off-topic”.
“Politics” as the word is used here means tribalism: red vs blue. You pick a side that you identify with, that side has enemies, and you argue your position up and your enemies positions down. This is a built-in instinctual behavior in humans. It is also anti-rationalist (meaning, anti-truth-seeking). Remember the litany of Tarski: if the solution is True, I want to believe that the solution is Ture (my side is right). If the solution is not True, I want to believe that the solution is not True (my political opponent is right). Let me not become attached to beliefs I may want (no tribalism!).
Politics is tribalism over contentious issues. But just because there is widespread disagreement over what policy to implement, that doesn’t mean that there can’t be rationalist’s agreement over which policy or policies are best. But you can’t figure that out starting from a tribalistic mindset. So, rationalist policy discussion is welcome here. Politics (tribalism) is not.
Politics is the business of governing. As this necessarily involves telling others what to do (or what not to do), it’s no surprise that it gets contentious. There’s also a lot of status at stake, making matters worse.
You can abstract away the details and have a rational discussion about what kinds of policies are better. You can make a good deal of progress by keeping things somewhat vague on the minutiae, but I don’t expect even rationalists to be able to agree on the exact implementation details without a good amount of politicking.
As someone who has actually worked in government, I can tell you that politics is not the business of governing. Politics often gets in the way of actual governance. Think of the phrase “office politics” and all that it entails—petty squabbling over power structures and influence, i.e. tribalism. I assure you that at the largest scale “office politics” very much exist. We just drop the “office” qualifier.
Government implements policy. Enacting policy is the goal of governance. Politics is a catch-all category for the social competition to establish policies which is intrinsic to human nature and exists in various forms in all cultures. As rationalists we have a better mechanism for deciding policy than glorified piss competitions that pass for politics today. But although we reject tribalistic politics we should not shy away from matters of policy.
Just because political matters are liable to be controversial discussion topics that may attract hotheads on both (or on all) sides of the debate, doesn’t mean that the Official Definition of politics inherently includes tribalism. People just aren’t versed in the art of steering political discussions towards productive outcomes, and that comes with experience, a good starting intelligence, and a great deal of wisdom. It wouldn’t be impossible, for example, to have a LW Sequence on collaborative debates and getting along with debate partners.
Besides, there’s a difference between discussing politics and doing politics; only the latter is Dark-Artsy almost by necessity.
Solutions are not true or false. They are effective or ineffective ways of accomplishing certain goals, which can be argued to be more or less worthy of pursuing. So there are (at least) two sides to your faction being “right”. Where you want to go, and how you intend to get there. That’s a very schematic summary of political discussion; it gets a lot more complicated than that, when you introduce instrumental goals, agents part of the same polity but with only partially overlapping values etc.
I’ll generalize it even further: there are more and less optimal ways of accomplishing a certain goal and what is “optimal” depends on what are you optimizing for and the weights you assign to different values that you trade off against each other.
That clarifies things, thanks (my definition of “politics” is indeed different).
Heh. The definition itself is contentious :-)
I would define politics as practical distribution and application of power. Accordingly, policies are rules for distribution and application of power.
What’s the distinction between politics and policy then?
Policies are, basically, sets of rules. Politics is a activity, a sphere of human action.
There are loops here, of course. On the one hand, policies are implementation tools of politics, on the other hand, policies can define the rules by which the game of politics is played.
I’m not sure how that is different from what I said above, except presented in a different light.
I also think that policy discussion is a useful subject.
At the moment a website like Avaaz allows people to give their signature to signal that they support a specific policy proposal. The problem is that most of the policy proposal on Avaaz are badly thought out.
I think there room for a liquid democracy driven website that’s like Avaaz but where users can vote on ammendments to existing policy proposals. That could allow for very detailed policy proposals.
It would also be possible to develop model legislation (model bills) in that way as part of the policy proposal, which in turn can raise the political impact.
I think such a project could have a meaningful impact on the political landscape where at the moment a lot of people don’t like to talk about details.
Because policies are more of a matter of “how” rather than of “why”. For a policy to be even worthy of the name, it necessarily has to assume the status quo as a starting point and then build up from that. To limit a discussion to strictly policies (rather than politics) is to confine the end result to a state only a few legal projects away from the status quo. And the status quo varies from country to country, so this discussion format doesn’t favor international participants.
Consider a change as complex and as sweeping as the Revolution of 1917. It’s something that stays within the realm of relevant political discussion, since, well, it happened and it deeply influenced the history of many countries, yet how could it imaginably qualify as a policy discussion?
Because the minefield of politics prevents the rational discussion of policies. Propose a policy, someone says “but that is capitalist/socialist” and the shit starts to fly. I think if the emotional effect of such words could be defanged—and that means discussing politics—policies could be discussed on a higher level.
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.
Sorry for the confusion.
To avoid cold start, we wanted to sign up a sufficiently large group of people before opening the discussions. The site is scheduled to be opened on May 1 (you’ll receive an email notification).
The site is not officially open yet. So far, we just had several test runs with randomly selected people.
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.
You raise very relevant points. I’ll try to address them without getting too technical.
Our recommendation system estimates the probability that a user A will like a comment B. It is then a personal choice of a user A to decide what is the right threshold (read all comments, ignore comments rated below 60%, etc.).
We use a bit more sophisticated method.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate on this?
We use two methods to solve this problem. The first is to let people choose among several possible filters. For instance, the people can sort comments based on recommendations for their own in-group or they can read comments popular among large outgroups (liberals, conservatives, libertarians etc.). The second is to split all debate arguments in two groups – pros and cons. Users will then be able to read the best arguments (i.e. those recommended by their own group) against their current position.
I don’t know how it works but if you have user buckets for basic political denominations (as somewhat suggested by your use of language) then the buckets determine whos posts will compete for the same audiences. That is if the groups are not formed by some dynamics and in that way be either based on user choice or some “fair” mechanism then the decision on what buckets there exist is a moderation choice. That is do we recognise subcategories of libertarians? There can be charged terms like “free market” or “socialism” that might have (semi)-standardised meanings within a group (ie for some socialism might mean anything they don’t like that vaguely smells like red, while for others it migth be a spesific political line within the left spectrum different from other leftist ideologies). While it would be good discussion practise to always be certain that the sense used is sufficently clear, if you have a bucket that often uses the same terms with slight deviations having that group of persons as one bucket (ie all libertarians) makes differentiating between the senses harder, while having it as multiple buckets (ie each kind of libertarian as it’s won kind) avoids forming as wide stereotypes (but then there is the diffculty of keeping up with the “thought zoo”).
In saying that a probability is used doesn’t tell anythign on what the probability is based on. It just tells me that the result is a sliding scale between 0 and 1 but doesn’t tell me whether it’s a completely made up number. What is the reference class used in the “liked cases per viewed cases” estimation? For example I could use a weighted average of denomination score, author score and recommendation score. Now there are many weightings and details about how to turn individual recommendations in to a recommendation score, but I could be sceptical for this method of score keeping in that it’s just a averaging of naive methods. No amount of weighting could get rid of the strucutres it inherits, we could only find a tolerable balance on the way it’s stupid (choosing between flavours to make an okay taste). That is that kind of sophistication would still require moderation choice in the demonimation bucket definitions, there would still be harder times to correctly peg users with great variance in their writing content and you still get the echochamber effect of users of a set mind more likely exposed to content that resonates with them.
For example if there is a “pros and cons” viewing that means you need to be able to categorise posts as pros and cons (duh!). But how do posts that are not pro or con appear in such a view? How do you determine whether a post is pro or con? Author checks a box? Readers check a box? This can give incentives for a adversial mindset and framing. This could be seen as a medium property advocating politics as war. Can a post be a fraction of pro and con if it is pro with reservations? Is this kind of post a thing different from a low-quality fully pro post?
Users’ preferences are determined based on how they rate content, not on how they self-label.
I don’t think users need to know the actual equations (especially since the math is somewhat complicated). But they would easily find out if the numbers are made up (average probabilities for comments they like would be the same as for comments they don’t like).
Our recommendation system is based on principles of collaborative filtering. The average recommendation accuracy depends on the number of ratings in our database. With a relatively small number of users we can distinguish basic population clusters (e.g., left vs right or highbrow vs lowbrow). With a larger dataset we would be able to make more nuanced distinctions.
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.
It is similarity based.
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.
Sorry for the confusion.
To avoid cold start, we wanted to sign up a sufficiently large group of people before opening the discussions. The site is scheduled to be opened on May 1 (you’ll receive an email notification).
I signed up and it just said Thank you! Where is the website?
Edit: found it it’s http://www.omnilibrium.com/ but I can’t get in either, I need to authenticate, but I didn’t receive any notification to do so (same user as LessWrong).
That sounds like Reddit which doesn’t really have a reputation for deep political debate.
Does Reddit have personalized ranking? I think that’s the main idea of the OP’s proposal.
One essential difference is that our recommendation system is guided by the individual rather than the group preferences. Reddit is based on finding the lowest common denominator.
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.