One obvious flaw with this proposal is that the quality-indicator would only be a measure of expected rating by a moderator. But who says that our moderators are the best judges of quality? Like, the scheme is ripe for corruption, and simply pushing the popularity contest one level up to a small group of elites.
One answer is that if you don’t like the mods, you can go somewhere else. Vote with your feet, etc.
A more turtles-all-the-way-down answer is that the stakeholders of LW (the users, and possibly influential community members/investors?) agree on an aggregate set of metrics for how well the moderators are collectively capturing quality. Then, for each unit of time (eg year) and each potential moderator, set up a conditional prediction market with real dollars on whether that person being a moderator causes the metrics to go up/down compared to the previous time unit. Hire the ones that people predict will be best for the site.
I guess the question is, what is the optimal amount of consensus. Where do we want to be, on the scale from Eternal September to Echo Chamber?
Seems the me that the answer depends on how much correct we are, on average. To emphasise: how much correct we actually are, not how much correct we want to be, or imagine ourselves to be.
On a website where moderators are correct about almost everything, most disagreement is a noise. (It may provide a valuable feedback on “what other people believe”, but not on how things actually are.) It is okay to punish disagreement, because in the rare situations where it is correct and you notice it, you can afford the karma hit for opposing the moderators. (And hopefully the moderators are smart enough to start paying attention when a member in good standing surprisingly decides to take a karma hit.)
On a website where moderators are quite often wrong, punishing disagreement means that the community will select for people who share the same biases, or who are good at reading the room.
I believe that people are likely to overestimate how much “other reasonable people” agree with them, which is why echo chambers can happen to people who genuinely see themselves as “open to other opinions, as long as those opinions are not obviously wrong (spoiler: most opinions you disagree with do seem obviously wrong)”. As a safety precaution against going too far in a positive feedback loop (because even if you believe that the moderators already go too far in some direction, the prediction voting incentivizes you to downvote all comments that point it out), there should be a mechanism to express thoughs that go against the moderator consensus. Like, a regular thread to say “I believe the moderators are wrong about X” without being automatically punished for being right. That is, a thread with special rules where moderators would upvote comments for being well-articulated without necessarily being correct.
One obvious flaw with this proposal is that the quality-indicator would only be a measure of expected rating by a moderator. But who says that our moderators are the best judges of quality? Like, the scheme is ripe for corruption, and simply pushing the popularity contest one level up to a small group of elites.
One answer is that if you don’t like the mods, you can go somewhere else. Vote with your feet, etc.
A more turtles-all-the-way-down answer is that the stakeholders of LW (the users, and possibly influential community members/investors?) agree on an aggregate set of metrics for how well the moderators are collectively capturing quality. Then, for each unit of time (eg year) and each potential moderator, set up a conditional prediction market with real dollars on whether that person being a moderator causes the metrics to go up/down compared to the previous time unit. Hire the ones that people predict will be best for the site.
I guess the question is, what is the optimal amount of consensus. Where do we want to be, on the scale from Eternal September to Echo Chamber?
Seems the me that the answer depends on how much correct we are, on average. To emphasise: how much correct we actually are, not how much correct we want to be, or imagine ourselves to be.
On a website where moderators are correct about almost everything, most disagreement is a noise. (It may provide a valuable feedback on “what other people believe”, but not on how things actually are.) It is okay to punish disagreement, because in the rare situations where it is correct and you notice it, you can afford the karma hit for opposing the moderators. (And hopefully the moderators are smart enough to start paying attention when a member in good standing surprisingly decides to take a karma hit.)
On a website where moderators are quite often wrong, punishing disagreement means that the community will select for people who share the same biases, or who are good at reading the room.
I believe that people are likely to overestimate how much “other reasonable people” agree with them, which is why echo chambers can happen to people who genuinely see themselves as “open to other opinions, as long as those opinions are not obviously wrong (spoiler: most opinions you disagree with do seem obviously wrong)”. As a safety precaution against going too far in a positive feedback loop (because even if you believe that the moderators already go too far in some direction, the prediction voting incentivizes you to downvote all comments that point it out), there should be a mechanism to express thoughs that go against the moderator consensus. Like, a regular thread to say “I believe the moderators are wrong about X” without being automatically punished for being right. That is, a thread with special rules where moderators would upvote comments for being well-articulated without necessarily being correct.