But my proposal might be too convoluted a solution for a problem that I haven’t really noticed here.
You haven’t noticed this problem here because political debates are expressly discouraged at LessWrong. But we can easily imagine LW-like sites with the mission of making policy decision-making more rational and transparent: there is a fairly large literature on open politics, open source politics (a pun on two different usages of “open source”!), open source governance, e-democracy etc.
It’s the same problem Robin Hanson wants to address with his decision markets, though his solution is to avoid all the issues with deliberation by just deferring to the output of a betting market.
This isn’t Hanson’s position at all. Decision markets don’t solve the problem “how do we make a good decision”—they just improve incentives by deferring it to the investors. The investors still have the problem of what decision would be best, and deliberation mechanisms could still play an important role.
You haven’t noticed this problem here because political debates are expressly discouraged at LessWrong. But we can easily imagine LW-like sites with the mission of making policy decision-making more rational and transparent: there is a fairly large literature on open politics, open source politics (a pun on two different usages of “open source”!), open source governance, e-democracy etc.
It’s the same problem Robin Hanson wants to address with his decision markets, though his solution is to avoid all the issues with deliberation by just deferring to the output of a betting market.
This isn’t Hanson’s position at all. Decision markets don’t solve the problem “how do we make a good decision”—they just improve incentives by deferring it to the investors. The investors still have the problem of what decision would be best, and deliberation mechanisms could still play an important role.