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ChristianKl comments on Parallelizing Rationality: How Should Rationalists Think in Groups? - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
LW is a venue for rationalists to think together, but not a technique for rationalists to think together. Despite the term "disputation arenas", what almkglor is talking about is the latter, not the former.
I suppose you could say that "start a discussion in LW and see what happens" is a "disputation arena" in almkglor's sense. So, therefore, is "just get a bunch of people together in a room and let them talk about it". Presumably the techniques almkglor describes were designed because just putting people together in a room has been found not to work very well. Do you have grounds for thinking that putting people together in an LW thread works better? Or that rationalists are immune to groupthink and failure to reach consensus?
I think that those two criteria's are insufficent to judge the quality of a "disputation arena" for rationalists. The core problem is that encouraging participation isn't one of the criteria. If you want to get things done in the real world than it's vitally important to encourage participation. A disputation arena without participants is worthless.
I also doubt that reaching consensus is always a good thing. Singularity is one of the topic that almkglor thinks about. If you would take a year to get all LessWrong participants to have a consensus belief about the singularity I think that would be bad.
In year two you will have massive group think problems when you continue to discuss the singularity because all participants know the consensus belief of year one. I would prefer a system with more diversity in opinions.
As far as avoiding group think, there are other strategies. Encouraging more members of the community to play devil's advocate would be one way.
I think you may have been led astray by the terminology into thinking that "disputation arena" means, y'know, an arena for disputation, when in fact it seems to mean a technique for discussing things. Techniques like the Delphi method are intended for groups that already exist and need to do some thinking.
Is anyone claiming it is? My understanding is that these "disputation arenas" are methods a group can use to arrive at consensus when they need to do so. (Also #1: I'd think most of them are adaptable to the case where you don't particularly need a consensus as such. Also #2: a consensus can be a complicated one with probabilities and things in, and it seems to me that agreement on such a consensus would avoid many of the perils of the usual sort of groupthink.)
I prefer "disputation arena" because "group thinking" is too close to "groupthinking".
Is there a better term for "techniques for discussing things so that lots of thinking people can give their input and get a single coherent set of probabilities for what are the best possible choices for action" other than "disputation arena" or "group thinking technique"?
I do want to be precise, and "disputation arena" sounded kewl, but whatever.
I don't know of any other term with that meaning. Making one up wouldn't really be any worse than using "disputation arena", I think, because to an excellent first approximation no one knows what "disputation arena" means anyway.
I don't think that's the goal layed out in the first paragarph of the post. It ends with:
Getting groups of rationalists to think together is a goal where it's important to design the system in a way that makes it easy and motivates participants to participate.
Okay, so that's a sub-goal that I didn't think about. I will think about this a little more.
Still, assuming that group exists and needs to do some thinking together, I think techniques like Delphi are fine.
Anyway, I assumed that LW's groups are more cohesive and willing to cooperate in thinking exercises in groups (this is what I was thinking when I said "This makes it not only desirable to find ways to effectively get groups of rationalists to think together, but also increasingly necessary."), but apparently it's not as cohesive as I thought.
Successful online communities have a low bar to entry. As a result they aren't as cohesize as a hierachical institution where you can simply order a group to make some decision via Delphi.
LessWrong is a network. It's no hierachical institution and isn't market driven.
If you want some high level understanding of the network paradigma, I recommend "In Search of How Societies Work" by David Ronfeld.