Also, if anyone is curious to see another example, in 2007-8 there was a long series of extraordinarily time-consuming and frustrating arguments between me and one particular wikipedia editor who was very bad at physics but infinitely patient and persistent and rule-following. (DM me and I can send links … I don’t want to link publicly in case this guy is googling himself and then pops up in this conversation!) The combination of {patient, persistent, rule-following, infinite time to spend, object-level nutso} is a very very bad combination, it really puts a strain on any system (maybe benevolent dictatorship would solve that problem, while creating other ones). (Gerard also fits that profile, apparently.) Luckily I had about as much free time and persistence as this crackpot physicist did … this was around 2007-8. He ended up getting permanently banned from wikipedia by the arbitration committee (wikipedia supreme court), but boy it was a hell of a journey to get there.
I think something based on prediction markets can counteract this kind of war-of-attrition strategy. There are two main advantages of this solution: (a) it requires users to stake their reputation on their claims, and so if you ever double down really really hard on something that’s obviously wrong, it will cost you a lot, and (b) in general prediction markets solve the problem of providing a cheap way to approximate a very expensive process if it’s obvious to everyone what the output of the very expensive process will be, which nullifies an entire swathe of bad-faith arguing techiques.
To avoid the Arbital failure mode, I think the right strategy is to (i) start simple and implement one feature at a time and see how it interacts with actual conversations (every successful complex system grows out of a simple one—maybe we can start with literally just a LW clone but the voting algorithm is entirely using the community notes algorithm), and (ii) for the people implementing the ideas to be basically the same people coming up with the ideas.
Related: Arbital postmortem.
Also, if anyone is curious to see another example, in 2007-8 there was a long series of extraordinarily time-consuming and frustrating arguments between me and one particular wikipedia editor who was very bad at physics but infinitely patient and persistent and rule-following. (DM me and I can send links … I don’t want to link publicly in case this guy is googling himself and then pops up in this conversation!) The combination of {patient, persistent, rule-following, infinite time to spend, object-level nutso} is a very very bad combination, it really puts a strain on any system (maybe benevolent dictatorship would solve that problem, while creating other ones). (Gerard also fits that profile, apparently.) Luckily I had about as much free time and persistence as this crackpot physicist did … this was around 2007-8. He ended up getting permanently banned from wikipedia by the arbitration committee (wikipedia supreme court), but boy it was a hell of a journey to get there.
I think something based on prediction markets can counteract this kind of war-of-attrition strategy. There are two main advantages of this solution: (a) it requires users to stake their reputation on their claims, and so if you ever double down really really hard on something that’s obviously wrong, it will cost you a lot, and (b) in general prediction markets solve the problem of providing a cheap way to approximate a very expensive process if it’s obvious to everyone what the output of the very expensive process will be, which nullifies an entire swathe of bad-faith arguing techiques.
To avoid the Arbital failure mode, I think the right strategy is to (i) start simple and implement one feature at a time and see how it interacts with actual conversations (every successful complex system grows out of a simple one—maybe we can start with literally just a LW clone but the voting algorithm is entirely using the community notes algorithm), and (ii) for the people implementing the ideas to be basically the same people coming up with the ideas.
Where are your DMs so I can get the links?
If you click my username it goes to my lesswrong user page, which has a “Message” link that you can click.