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Tretton comments on Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: lukeprog 13 August 2013 05:55PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 15 August 2013 12:34:26AM *  0 points [-]

I think LW would profit immensely from a team of professional moderators who

  • take a thread with lots of comments and turn it into a structured overview of arguments and counterarguments (and give an evaluation of how open or complete the discussion is)

    • and mark open discussion points and important aspects that haven't gotten propper attention yet
  • rate comments in a way that is more informative than mere up/downvotes, possibly in more than one dimension ( Relevance / logical structure of the comment / Quality of the central argument)

  • promote high quality comments, especially if they put a new perspective on a topic that had seemed to be closed

  • take interesting spin-off discussions and promote them as a thread on its own

Of course, funding these moderators might run into this problem:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/

But if we don't get funding organized, we really suck as rationalists.

Comment author: AlexMennen 16 August 2013 01:50:09AM 0 points [-]

That sounds awfully expensive. Also, it might actually be hard to find someone who can do that competently enough to do more good than harm.

Comment author: palladias 16 August 2013 01:41:47AM 0 points [-]

One lower cost way to do this is to explicitly ask people more to expand a comment into a Main-level post. Or ask people to pause a disagreement and expand it into a dialogue in discussion. This is a technique I use to curate comments on my blog. It helps highlight high quality stuff without making everyone trawl through the threads.