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Breakfast comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong
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Hrm. Well, if politics itself is any example to judge by, that may make for a resilient institution -- but the mess of allegiances and biases created by splitting people into well-defined factions probably entails that the institution would be much worse off in terms of truth-finding, because devoting too much of its energies to internecine squabbling.
I suppose you need to strike a balance between unproductive antagonism, and ending up as a group of like-minded folks just patting each other on the back. Thankfully, LW seems to have a strong dose of "Let's get to the bottom of this"-type norms, and the appropriately rigorous/persnickety personalities, to stop it from getting too back-patty.
Still I think we'd need some measure to prevent becoming permanently entrenched into factions. Maybe have an artificial time-limit for clearly defined factions. Every two weeks we tell everyone to give up factional loyalties and consider the evidence given. Then after a couple days re-form the factions along new boundaries.
That sounds pretty confusing. You might as well just not have officially sanctioned factions in the first place, right? People who agree on a given issue will naturally band together on it, but they won't be so afflicted with the bias or the pressure that comes of being on a well-defined Side, to have their whole range of opinions cohere with those held by the group. There are already de facto 'factions' on any issue we might discuss, and everyone is already felt to be continually obliged to examine the rationality of their positions, so it kind of seems like we're already there!
I took bogus's point to be that we can avoid some of the harms of bad faith arguments if we make motivations explicit with clearly defined factions. That would be a reason to prefer official factions to de facto factions.
But my proposal might be too convoluted a solution for a problem that I haven't really noticed here. And I'm not sure how much officially sanctioned factions actually would prevent bad faith arguments.
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.