No, not really. Opportunities for good and insightful discussion open up from time to time in all kinds of places, and sometimes particular forums can have especially good streaks, but all of this is transient. I don’t know any places that are particularly good these days.
Could this be solved by setting up a new forum and being sufficiently selective about whom to let in (e.g. only sufficiently high-quality and sufficiently non-ideological thinkers, as vetted by some local aristocracy based on comment history elsewhere), or is there some other limiting factor?
I would love there to be a place suitable for rational discussion of possibly outrageous political and otherwise ideologically charged ideas, even though I wouldn’t want it to be LessWrong and I wouldn’t want it to be directly associated with LessWrong.
I’d love to have such a place too, and based on my off-line conversations with some people here, I think there are also others who would. So maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to set up a new forum or mailing list, perhaps even one without public visibility. I have no idea how well this would work in practice—there are certainly many failure modes imaginable—but it might be worth trying.
Here’s one thing I’m worried about. What if discussion between those of widely varying ideological background assumptions is just intrinsically unproductive because they can never take basic concepts for granted? Even the best thinkers seem to mostly have strongly, stably different ideological outlooks. You could pre-select for ideology and possibly have multiple groups, but that has its own downsides.
Reddit. If you create your own subreddit I know you get to moderate it, but I don’t know how well it would work for a deliberately exclusive community.
Presumably it’d be easy to clone LW’s git code, change the logos, ask SingInst to host it, and put it behind a locked gate. https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong . Louie would be the SingInst guy to ask I think. Besides that, no.
Maybe make it hidden to the public (like Koala Wallop’s Octagon) and invitation-only, with any given member limited to one invitation per hundred upvotes they’ve received?
Or… a nested thing, maybe. The onion has as many layers as the Grand High Administrator deigns to create, and said administrator can initiate anyone to any desired depth, or revoke such access, at will. A given user can issue one invite to their current layer per 100 net upvotes they have received on the layer in question; when someone receives 100 net downvotes on a given layer, they are banned from that layer until reinvited (at which point they start from scratch). Invites to a given layer can only be directed to users who have already been initiated to the layer immediately outside that one.
There might also be a branching structure; nobody knows for sure until they find parallel layers.
I am curious as to whether such a thing actually exists, do you or anyone else here end up producing an exclusive, private, invite only community in order to commune in high signal political discussion?
Do you know of a forum where this could be discussed productively?
No, not really. Opportunities for good and insightful discussion open up from time to time in all kinds of places, and sometimes particular forums can have especially good streaks, but all of this is transient. I don’t know any places that are particularly good these days.
Could this be solved by setting up a new forum and being sufficiently selective about whom to let in (e.g. only sufficiently high-quality and sufficiently non-ideological thinkers, as vetted by some local aristocracy based on comment history elsewhere), or is there some other limiting factor?
I would love there to be a place suitable for rational discussion of possibly outrageous political and otherwise ideologically charged ideas, even though I wouldn’t want it to be LessWrong and I wouldn’t want it to be directly associated with LessWrong.
I’d love to have such a place too, and based on my off-line conversations with some people here, I think there are also others who would. So maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to set up a new forum or mailing list, perhaps even one without public visibility. I have no idea how well this would work in practice—there are certainly many failure modes imaginable—but it might be worth trying.
Here’s one thing I’m worried about. What if discussion between those of widely varying ideological background assumptions is just intrinsically unproductive because they can never take basic concepts for granted? Even the best thinkers seem to mostly have strongly, stably different ideological outlooks. You could pre-select for ideology and possibly have multiple groups, but that has its own downsides.
That would mean a collection of echo chambers which are worse than useless.
Strongly agree. Mailing lists are easy but damn have I become addicted to nested comments and upvoting/downvoting (automatic moderation!).
I know what you mean. I follow along with the decision theory list but is almost painful being limited to email format!
(Yup. Can’t downvote Stuart. Frustrating. And the impact of saying so aloud without anonymity is not quite what I want to enact.)
Do you or does anyone else know of free online services, analogous to mailing lists, that allow such nesting and upvoting/downvoting?
Reddit. If you create your own subreddit I know you get to moderate it, but I don’t know how well it would work for a deliberately exclusive community.
Presumably it’d be easy to clone LW’s git code, change the logos, ask SingInst to host it, and put it behind a locked gate. https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong . Louie would be the SingInst guy to ask I think. Besides that, no.
Maybe make it hidden to the public (like Koala Wallop’s Octagon) and invitation-only, with any given member limited to one invitation per hundred upvotes they’ve received?
Or… a nested thing, maybe. The onion has as many layers as the Grand High Administrator deigns to create, and said administrator can initiate anyone to any desired depth, or revoke such access, at will. A given user can issue one invite to their current layer per 100 net upvotes they have received on the layer in question; when someone receives 100 net downvotes on a given layer, they are banned from that layer until reinvited (at which point they start from scratch). Invites to a given layer can only be directed to users who have already been initiated to the layer immediately outside that one.
There might also be a branching structure; nobody knows for sure until they find parallel layers.
I am curious as to whether such a thing actually exists, do you or anyone else here end up producing an exclusive, private, invite only community in order to commune in high signal political discussion?