Not to mention the quis custodiet ipsos custodes? problem.
You can't create an algorithm for generally promoting good comments -- that would have to be an artificial intelligence that would recognize a good comment from a bad one. You can only create algorithms that make it more easy or more difficult to protect the community values... whatever they are.
Imagine a website with 10 people, where 11th person comes a writes a good comment. But for some irrational reasons, the original 10 people all dislike the comment. Does the system allow them to remove the comment? Yes or no?
If you say "yes", you have the "quis custodiet ipsos custodes" situation. But if you say "no", then the situation will be exactly the same if the 11th persons posts a genuinely bad comment... the original 10 people will not be allowed to remove it. Which is bad, and much more frequent.
the rest of the visitors still see everything there is.
That's not a good solution! It means that if there are hundreds of trollish comments on the website, regardless of how all my friends downvote them, I still have to see all of them. Too much noise.
That's not a good solution! It means that if there are hundreds of trollish comments on the website, regardless of how all my friends downvote them, I still have to see all of them.
We will have to disagree about that.
I explicitly do NOT want other people to filter my information input. Don't take this as an absolute -- I'm fine with spam filters -- but at this point in this particular context we do not have " hundreds of trollish comments" and what's often downvoted is what the local population disagrees with.
I don't want another echo chamber.
Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.
Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!
In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?
Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:
Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)
To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.
In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.