You did write a long post on different systems for discussion and you did ignore it in that post.

I thought it would be unnecessary, as I thought the people here would already know and it would be repetitive to do reiterate what is already known here. I'll try to see if I can come up with some description of the local status quo, then, and edit the article to include it. I'm a little busy, Christmas is important in this country.

Within your list you didn't discuss systems that have shown to work in the real world to solve the kind of issues that you want to solve.

Huh? These are techniques that have been studied with papers backing them (at least according to some very basic searches through Google). I have no idea how good those papers are, but maybe you do. Can you show some study specifically showing that Delphi works worse then typical internet forums?

take an online community like Wikipedia as an example.

Again, since LW also has a Wiki, I thought it would be superfluous to add it to the article too. I'll find time to update it then.

If you however want to solve those kinds of problems in your country than you have to choose. One way would be to get the IWF to promote some Good Government program in your country in a top-down way. The other way involves finding supporters in your own country.

For both strategies I doubt that the LessWrong public is the right audience. Join/found some Liquid Feedback based political party in your country.

Thank you for this information.

One of the most effective calls for support to highly intelligent nerds was probably Julian Assange's call that among other thing involved him telling the audience that they won't get Christmas presents when they don't cooperate. Julian Assange didn't try to organise some vote to get consenus.

Okay.

The fact that I have an opinion about where the evidence as a whole leads does not prima facie make me impossible to argue with.

So you're saying that if the evidence goes against you, you are going to stop being a Christian and self-identify as atheist (note that we do not capitalize that word)?

I don't think you understand what I mean with the word highly formalized in this context. LessWrong has also a bunch of rules. Those rules are however made in a way where they don't constrain the way one can use LessWrong as much as the rules of Delphi constrain it's participants.

Okay, what exactly do you mean by "highly formalized"?

Constraints on behavior are not necessarily bad, in much the same way that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy: constraining things to a subset that can be shown to work can help. So I don't really see "current LW has more freedom!!" as a significant advantage - because it might have more freedom to err. Of course, the probability of that being true is low - but can we at least try to show that?

After all, LW code is derived from Reddit. Of course, the online system is just part of the overarching system, and the system as a whole (including current community members) is different (there are more stringent rules for acceptance into the community here than on Reddit), but it might do well to consider that things may be made better.

At the very least, we need to consider what other systems are available, and specifically de-emphasize the local status quo, since we might not be thinking perfectly rationally about it.

No, if you propose an alternative it makes sense to explain how it would improve the status quo. Ignoring the status quo that provides a system that actually works in practice is a bad idea.

I said "de-emphasize", not ignore. What I mean by "de-emphasize" is, acknowledge its existence, but treat it as an idea you have already thought about, i.e. keep it on hand and don't forget about it, but don't keep thinking about it at the expense of other, external ideas. In any case, I thought that it would be unnecessary to have to discuss the local status quo, since I would assume that members already know it.

Should I discuss the current status quo? I am not a regular member, despite reading OB before and LW for years, so I don't feel qualified to get into its details. I mostly read the sequences and hardly look at discussion. Or even comments on the articles, anyway. So my knowledge of LW informal rules are minimal to say the least. Can you describe the status quo for me?

At the moment there no working Delphi system that allows rationalists to discuss solutions for handling insane governments. The cases where Delphi was used successfully are cases where it gets implented top-down. Whether the same approach works in an online community is up for discussion. I don't know of a single case where such a system got enough users to work.

So should we, at this point, completely discard Delphi methods? How about NGT?

I suspect that it's possible to modify LW's polls to add some kind of Real-Time Delphi Method, as I mentioned in the article: (1) allow members to change their chosen options (2) require members to give a short justification for their chosen option (3) give randomized samples of justifications from other members. We can even have a flag that specifies normal forum polls or Delphi-style polls. But if the cost of making this modification is higher than the expected probability of that kind of Delphi being successful times the expected utility of that kind of Delphi methods in general for the rest of LW's lifetime, then fine - let's not do it.

If you think otherwise, please illustrate how you would tackle the issue you brought forward in your post with Prediction Markets. How to tackle it with Delphi would also be interesting.

I don't know how to tackle it with Prediction Markets other than by futarchy: first vote on what measurements are to be used, then run a prediction market about whether particular policy decisions will improve or reduce those measurements. Insane governments are more sane if they have less corruption, better bureacratic efficiency blah blah - we may need to vote on that. Then we need to propose actual policy decisions and predict if they will lead to less corruption etc. or not. Unfortunately, I don't understand enough of futarchy yet to make a proper judgment about it - it's currently a mostly black box to me. I'm disturbed that futarchy_discuss appears to be defunct - I'm not sure if it's because prediction markets have turned out to fail badly, or what.

Assuming those same measures can be agreed upon - less corruption, better bureacratic efficiency - then I suppose a Delphi Method can be made with "what policies should reduce corruption blah blah? How can we impose those policies from below? What feasible actions can we use to get those policies accepted?" as the questions.

(if you think that my definition of "insane government" isn't very good, please understand that I live in a shitty little third-world country where the most troubling problems of the government is corruption and inefficiency, not whether or not the government should raise taxes)

I'm also not clear about why we need to find consensus on "insane governments, insane societies, insane individuals, and the singularity".

Because I think lack of consensus is one reason why our kind can't cooperate.

Can we at least try to pull together on this one?

I'm worried about the bits that are internal to a person, where people just have some common failure modes when trying to solve problems.

shrugs Well, seatbelts don't stop accidents, but they do reduce the side effects of getting into one. While the disputation arenas do not directly prevent such internal failure modes, they help prevent that internal failure mode in a key influential person from spreading to the rest of the group. Yes, hold off on proposing solutions (don't drink and drive). But also put some extra railing and padding so that others making a mistake do not necessarily get you into error either (seatbelts)

LessWrong is one way of implementing groups of rationalists thinking together. One might say that it provides a centripetal phase: the discussion forums. But what centrifugal phase exists that prevents groupthink? Yes, we have "hold off on proposing solutions" - but remember that no current rationalist is perfect, and LW may grow soon (indeed, spreading rationality may require growing LW).

Also remember that people - including LessWrong members - tend to favor status quos, and given a chance, people tend to defend status quos to the death.

At the very least, we need to consider what other systems are available, and specifically de-emphasize the local status quo, since we might not be thinking perfectly rationally about it.

It's not highly formalized but that makes it a lot more flexible.

The Turing machine is highly formalized and is the most flexible possible computational machine. I get "false dichotomy" signals from this statement.

If you say you want groups of rationalists to solve problems together, which problems are you thinking about? What sort of problems do you want to solve?

insane governments, insane societies, insane individuals, and the singularity, in that rough order of priority.

Because the article about it specifically mentions that this is the failure mode to avoid:

Norman R. F. Maier noted that when a group faces a problem, the natural tendency of its members is to propose possible solutions as they begin to discuss the problem. Consequently, the group interaction focuses on the merits and problems of the proposed solutions, people become emotionally attached to the ones they have suggested, and superior solutions are not suggested. Maier enacted an edict to enhance group problem solving: "Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any."

So "hold off on proposing solutions" is just one possible solution. Deciding to take that solution immediately, without considering other options (such as NGT's approach) is precisely falling into that same trap.

In short, hold off on proposing the solution of "hold off on proposing solutions". v(^.^)v

edit:

Consider that under NGT, you are given 10 to 15 minutes to think of solutions before anyone gets to propose any solutions. That strikes me as longer than a typical "hold off".

"Hold off on proposing solutions" is an important technique because the Human brain is lazy, and once it thinks of one solution, it will not try to look for another.

I'd say that the interface between the "centrifugal phase" and the "centripetal phase" implicitly reduces the explicit need to protect ideation using "hold off on proposing solutions" - sure, you can present the solution you thought about in the "centrifugal phase" immediately, but the solution gets pushed into the meat grinder of whatever "centripetal phase" there is, as it must compete against other solutions. Ideally, none of the solutions presented at the start of the centripetal phase will be designated as the "best" solution (hopefully, given the anonymizing effects of Delphi and the self-consistency pushed on you by writing your ideas in the NGT (nominal group technique)).

Even in brainstorm sessions, "hold off on proposing solutions" is needed only if the initial idea(s) presented are given undue weight compared to later ideas. Delphi causes the initial ideas to be mixed with the others - ideally, your summarizer will be given the expert's answer sheets in random order, and in the real-time online form that's the reason why the group qualitative answer is randomized. Ideally in an NGT the facilitator will steer everyone away from overly discussing one idea at the expense of the rest - it is noted there with an IMPORTANT scare tag, after all. For prediction markets, you don't discuss ideas anyway, so that is not even an issue.

I proffer the following quotes rather than an entire article (I think the major problem with post-modernism isn't irrationality, but verbosity. JUST LOOK AT YOURSELF):

"For the sake of sanity, use ET CETERA: When you say 'Mary is a good girl!' be aware that Mary is much more than 'good'. Mary is 'good', nice, kind, et cetera, meaning she also has other characteristics." - A.E. Van Vogt, World of Null-A

"For the sake of sanity, use QUOTATIONS: For instance 'conscious' and 'unconscious' mind are useful descriptive terms, but it has yet to be proved that the terms themselves accurately reflect the 'process' level of events. They are maps of a territory about which we can possibly never have exact information. Since Null-A training is for the individuals, the important thing is to be conscious of the 'multiordinal' -that is the many valued- meaning of the words one hears or speaks." - A.E. Van Vogt, World of Null-A

How about an expanded version: if we could be a timeless spaceless perfect observer of the universe(s), what evidence would we expect to see?