Yeah, that's certainly a possibility, but I think it's still worth exploring in case there is a way they can complement each other.

Very much like greed powers markets to produce wealth, tribalism powers the "bridging" algorithm to produce societal trust

We also have a system that uses greed to produce societal trust in information - prediction markets. Could we combine both somehow? What if we used bridging-based ranking on a prediction market data? Would giving more weight to similar bets by people who bet differently on other things make prediction markets even more accurate and trustworthy?

I looked into bridging-based ranking a bit more. The term seems to have been introduced in Aviv Ovadya's paper from 2022. Aviv and his partner Luke Thorburn have a website dedicated to Bridging systems. And this article seems like a good explanation of the concept and how it's applied in community notes.

I haven't found applications to voting.

Are there voting systems which function similarly to their bridging algorithm?

e.g, approval voting, but if I get a vote from two people whose other votes are different then it counts more?

Right, that was never the intention. I actually think there's something noble about them realizing and expressing the ideal values even though they fell short of them. It would be very easy to rationalize their shortcomings, as most people do and did all throughout history. Instead, they left an unfulfilled ideal as legacy for future generations to fulfill. That dream was their gift to tomorrow.

Yes, this will be discussed in more length inside the book. But I think by saying that our civilization is founded on the idea I am implying its aspirational nature as you suggested, rather than claiming it is fully realised (indeed, the point of my book is exactly that it still isn't). And if we look at the US I think it's literally true that it has been "founded" (as in, "the founding of the united states") on this idea, since it is stated in the deceleration of independence (though phrased very differently, of course)

Hmm... I'm not sure I see the connection, honestly. But thanks for the comment :)

I don't think comparing 5 to 7 is correct, because we don't want to compare to downvote to no-vote, we want to compare one ordering of votes to another ordering of votes. So, what would be the difference if it went up before it went back down again, rather than first go down like it has.

I think we do agree that if I didn't ask why it was downvoted it would have remained at 5 rather than go up to 15, and that this is suboptimal, right?

To me it feels like mid-popularity posts are affected too much by noise and when they get posted.

I don't think that's enough? I have 3.5k Karma, which gives me a strong vote power of 7, but when I made this post the other post was on 5 Karma and long gone from the front page. It only started gaining karma and came back to the frontpage after I made this post.

And I kinda dislike "why am I getting downvoted" posts, so I would like mechanisms that make them unnecessary. 

Thanks for the feedback. I've been writing it for a year already without talking about it much publicly, and wanted to put it out there so people know what I'm doing. I see it similarly to the updates people give here on their research agendas or work they intend to do. I agree that for LW (but not for twitter, for which this was originally written) it's probably good to put more meat and give more detail about what the book will discuss. Maybe I'll edit it in.

Edit: I added a list at the end of the post of things I plan to discuss or look into