Yeah, on Wikipedia David Gerard-type characters are an absolute nuisance—I reckon gwern can sing youa song about that. And Gerard is only one case. Sometimes I get an edit reverted, and I go to check the users’ profile: Hundreds of deletions, large and small, on innocuous and fairly innocuous edits—see e.g. the user Bon Courage or the Fountains of Bryn Mawr, who have taken over the job from Gerard of reverting most of the edits on the cryonics page (SurfingOrca2045 has, finally, been blocked from editing the article). Let’s see what Bon Courage has to say about how Wikipedia can conduct itself:
1. Wikipedia is famously the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. This is not necessarily a good thing.
[…]
4. Any editor who argues their point by invoking “editor retention”, is not an editor Wikipedia wants to retain.
Uh oh.
(Actually, checking their contributions, Bon Courage is not half bad, compared to other editors…)
I’d be excited about a version of Wikipedia that is built from the ground up to operate in an environment where truth is difficult to find and there is great incentive to shape the discourse. Perhaps there are new epistemic technologies similar to community notes that are yet to be invented.
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.
From my perspective, the dominant limitation on “a better version of wikipedia/forums” is not design, but instead network effects and getting the right people.
For instance, the limiting factor on LW being better is mostly which people regularly use LW, rather than any specific aspect of the site design.
I wish a bunch of people who are reasonable used LW to communicate more relative to other platforms.
Twitter/X sucks. If all potentially interesting content in making the future go well was cross posted to LW and mostly discussed on LW (as opposed to other places), this seems like a vast status quo improvement IMO.
I wish some people posted less as their comments/posts seem sufficiently bad that they are net negative.
(I think a decent amount of the problem is that a bunch of people don’t post of LW because they disagree with what seems to be the consensus on the website. See e.g. here. I think people are insufficiently appreciating a “be the change you want to see in the world” approach where you help to move the dominant conversation by participating.)
So, I would say “first solve the problem of making a version of LW which works well and has the right group of people”.
It’s possible that various aspects of more “wikipedia style” projects make the network effect issues less bad than LW, but I doubt it.
Still think it will be hard to defend against determined and competent adversaries committed to sabotaging the collective epistemic. I wonder if prediction markets can be utilised somehow?
Yeah, on Wikipedia David Gerard-type characters are an absolute nuisance—I reckon gwern can sing you a song about that. And Gerard is only one case. Sometimes I get an edit reverted, and I go to check the users’ profile: Hundreds of deletions, large and small, on innocuous and fairly innocuous edits—see e.g. the user Bon Courage or the Fountains of Bryn Mawr, who have taken over the job from Gerard of reverting most of the edits on the cryonics page (SurfingOrca2045 has, finally, been blocked from editing the article). Let’s see what Bon Courage has to say about how Wikipedia can conduct itself:
Uh oh.
(Actually, checking their contributions, Bon Courage is not half bad, compared to other editors…)
I’d be excited about a version of Wikipedia that is built from the ground up to operate in an environment where truth is difficult to find and there is great incentive to shape the discourse. Perhaps there are new epistemic technologies similar to community notes that are yet to be invented.
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.
From my perspective, the dominant limitation on “a better version of wikipedia/forums” is not design, but instead network effects and getting the right people.
For instance, the limiting factor on LW being better is mostly which people regularly use LW, rather than any specific aspect of the site design.
I wish a bunch of people who are reasonable used LW to communicate more relative to other platforms.
Twitter/X sucks. If all potentially interesting content in making the future go well was cross posted to LW and mostly discussed on LW (as opposed to other places), this seems like a vast status quo improvement IMO.
I wish some people posted less as their comments/posts seem sufficiently bad that they are net negative.
(I think a decent amount of the problem is that a bunch of people don’t post of LW because they disagree with what seems to be the consensus on the website. See e.g. here. I think people are insufficiently appreciating a “be the change you want to see in the world” approach where you help to move the dominant conversation by participating.)
So, I would say “first solve the problem of making a version of LW which works well and has the right group of people”.
It’s possible that various aspects of more “wikipedia style” projects make the network effect issues less bad than LW, but I doubt it.
If anyone’s interested in thinking through the basic issues and speculating about possibilities, DM me and let’s have a call.
Still think it will be hard to defend against determined and competent adversaries committed to sabotaging the collective epistemic. I wonder if prediction markets can be utilised somehow?