Suggestion: Implement a Change My View Feature
I know that the devs are pretty busy at the moment, and won’t be able to do anything like this for a long time, but if I don’t post this now, I’ll probably forget it.
Change My View: is an extremely popular sub on Reddit and the responses tend to be pretty good. However, there are some questions that rationalists might have that can’t be asked there due to lack of knowledge. Just off the top of my head, these might include:
CMV: I believe that we should two box in Newcomb’s problem
CMV: I believe that hypothetical problems tend to be too abstract to be worth discussing
CMV: I believe that philosophy does not have much value for discovering the truth
Just as in Change My View, you would be expected to elaborate on your view.
The best way to implement this would probably be to have a special cmv tag. These posts would then have a special option to allow the OP to award a delta when their view was changed (we could also copy this suggestion of big and little deltas for big and little changes respectively). I think that deltas would be good as they provide incentive for people to say something that might change a persons view and they also encourage a person to acknowledge when their view has changed.
We could consider importing some of the rules or norms of change my view for these threads, ie:
Top level responses should challenge at least one aspect of the view or ask for a clarification
You must be open to changing the view if the evidence points that direction
You must personally hold the view and not be playing devil’s advocate or neutral
The person who wants their view changed should be active in the thread
No soapboxing
I’ll admit that someone could create a Change My View thread already, but I believe that implementing this feature would make people more aware of this and nudge them towards actually doing putting their beliefs on the line. It would also allow people to filter these threads if they felt that there were too many of them.
So, as I said at the start, this is intended as a long term suggestion only, but it seems like it would be worth implementing eventually.
Yeah, I really want to see a bunch of stuff like this, but am hesitant to create new top-level content types for each idea that looks as promising as this.
I feel that tagging here might help. We might be able to create a tag for this, and with a tag comes some link to a further explanation of what the deal with that tag is. That way we could sustain a variety of stuff like this, without needing to create new top-level content types for each.
Interested in other people’s input.
I agree that a tag would be the best way to handle this and I really like the idea of being certain tags having explanations attached to them.