Nitpick:
If red paid 4 cents to blue's 7 cents, it would be right to bet on red every time.
Nope.
Consider a deck of 10 cards; 7 blue and 3 red. You write down a list of 10 predictions, in order, and the cards are dealt out; for every card that matches the corresponding prediction you get a reward based on the card color.
If you make 10 blue predictions, and blue cards are worth 7 points, you get 7 correct answers and 49 points.
If you make 10 red predictions, you get 3 correct answers, and red cards have to be worth 16.33 for you to break even.
Fixed. I meant to add a cent to red after making it fair, but accidentally set it up such that the .7 chance one got the seven cents rather than the three in the fair case.
I would like LW to be an environment in which we can learn by having honest and productive conversations. Fortunately, it substantially is such a place, but we can do better.
I would like to make a post about judging others favorably in the near future. To this end I think a useful mechanism would be to encourage people to post as comments scenarios in which they made erroneous assumptions about others' intent, and hide the conclusion in which they learned of their error from view until the reader has performed the exercise of considering what the innocuous actual explanation might be.
The purpose would be to make a repository of stories in which people could read the scenario, fail to think of how the situation could be resolved, and then see how in the previously hidden comment. Each bias involved in misjudgment - thinking one's enemies innately evil, believing one's own argument from ignorance about what the best possible explanation could be, and so forth - would be identified.
I don't know that hiding the conclusions of stories would be technically easy. One hack would be to have people post the conclusion within the comment in which they laid out the story. people could then downvote the child comment and upvote the parent. However, not everyone has the hiding threshold set at -3, and the first people to see the comment would see the conclusion, not everyone has unlimited dowvotes, etc.
Alternatively, the conclusion to each story could be in rot13.
As a protocols, analogously to how people are discouraged from quoting themselves, I would think to limit posts about when others misjudged the author's intent to a maximum, perhaps one for every two submissions in which an author posts he or she misjudged the intent of others.
As another protocol posts in which others on LW misjudged one's intent would be off-limits.
Comments are encouraged, whether on my proposed protocols, how to format, etc.