(1) We can agree to stop assigning reputation based on beliefs.
I don’t think that this is a realistic option, even ignoring the loss of information. Sure, if David Icke signed up on Less Wrong, I could claim that I was assigning his beliefs an equal amount of reputation as everyone else’s… but I wouldn’t actually be doing that, and neither would anyone else here who claimed to.
(2) We can agree to always report honest beliefs even though we know it will cost us reputation.
This one doesn’t seem realistic either. We can certainly try to encourage people to always report their honest beliefs, but there’s no way you can enforce that, and many people will keep hiding beliefs if they think that revealing those beliefs would hurt them. Note that this would also force many people to use pseudonyms, since any unpopular opinions that are posted here will also be visible to Google, which might hurt them in real life.
I think that it’s important to signal that we don’t expect anyone to have psychologically unrealistic levels of altruism or community commitment. People are going to act according to their own self-interest here, and that’s perfectly fine as long as it doesn’t actively hurt the community. Associating with LW shouldn’t make anyone feel actively uncomfortable, and compulsory radical honesty is going to make a lot of people feel uncomfortable. Keeping some of your beliefs as secrets is fine; everyone here has their right to mental privacy.
Also, self-censorship of publicly expressed beliefs also has value in improving the signal to noise ratio. If someone here really did believe that shape-shifting reptilian aliens controlled all the major governments, we wouldn’t want them to regularly bring up this position.
I agree that it would be hard to enforce 2. This really is like a prisoners dilemma. 1 however is very possible to do in an online community by not posting usernames with comments.
I don’t think that this is a realistic option, even ignoring the loss of information. Sure, if David Icke signed up on Less Wrong, I could claim that I was assigning his beliefs an equal amount of reputation as everyone else’s… but I wouldn’t actually be doing that, and neither would anyone else here who claimed to.
This one doesn’t seem realistic either. We can certainly try to encourage people to always report their honest beliefs, but there’s no way you can enforce that, and many people will keep hiding beliefs if they think that revealing those beliefs would hurt them. Note that this would also force many people to use pseudonyms, since any unpopular opinions that are posted here will also be visible to Google, which might hurt them in real life.
I think that it’s important to signal that we don’t expect anyone to have psychologically unrealistic levels of altruism or community commitment. People are going to act according to their own self-interest here, and that’s perfectly fine as long as it doesn’t actively hurt the community. Associating with LW shouldn’t make anyone feel actively uncomfortable, and compulsory radical honesty is going to make a lot of people feel uncomfortable. Keeping some of your beliefs as secrets is fine; everyone here has their right to mental privacy.
Also, self-censorship of publicly expressed beliefs also has value in improving the signal to noise ratio. If someone here really did believe that shape-shifting reptilian aliens controlled all the major governments, we wouldn’t want them to regularly bring up this position.
I agree that it would be hard to enforce 2. This really is like a prisoners dilemma. 1 however is very possible to do in an online community by not posting usernames with comments.
As a result you get the quality of discussion that exist on 4Chan and venues such as YouTube commends where nobody knows each other.
Good point.