Also, if you post a poll late in a politics thread, you’ll disproportionately reach people who 1) are interested in politics and 2) didn’t think the thread was a failure.
Which is measuring the result of a particular thread of conversation, which is not -quite- the same as judging whether or not the conversation should have been had to begin with. That would be substituting your posterior certainty of a particular claim for your prior certainty for all subsequent claims.
It’s data, but you’d need a lot more of that kind of data in order to make claims with any kind of certainty about what your prior certainty should be going forward. There’s also the question of whether that data would be collected at all if a particular line of conversation were productive.
I had also made a poll on this question once; it ended up exactly tied, so I decided to keep the status quo and not create a politics thread. But I was in favor of creating one, as I argued here.
which may be continued or discontinued based on its success or failure.
This thread and the other rare times I see LW commentators political leanings make me see how radically I have miscalibrated my estimations of them. This is useful information of a sort. It is probably helpful for people to be reminded that ‘rational’ people can disagree with them.
Whether the quality of the actual discussions is much above what you’d get on any other forum I don’t know, it seems notably more aggressive than standard LW discussion.
The poll (link) was a mess, so it’s incorrect to justify this project by its “results”.
Also, if you post a poll late in a politics thread, you’ll disproportionately reach people who 1) are interested in politics and 2) didn’t think the thread was a failure.
What signal I can get from the poll suggests this project, which may be continued or discontinued based on its success or failure.
It seems suboptimal to only use a single poll result when we have a lot more data available. For example, there was a poll here.
Which is measuring the result of a particular thread of conversation, which is not -quite- the same as judging whether or not the conversation should have been had to begin with. That would be substituting your posterior certainty of a particular claim for your prior certainty for all subsequent claims.
It’s data, but you’d need a lot more of that kind of data in order to make claims with any kind of certainty about what your prior certainty should be going forward. There’s also the question of whether that data would be collected at all if a particular line of conversation were productive.
I had also made a poll on this question once; it ended up exactly tied, so I decided to keep the status quo and not create a politics thread. But I was in favor of creating one, as I argued here.
With consolidated evidence, LWers should Aumann update over whether or not they can Aumann update over politics...
This thread and the other rare times I see LW commentators political leanings make me see how radically I have miscalibrated my estimations of them. This is useful information of a sort. It is probably helpful for people to be reminded that ‘rational’ people can disagree with them.
Whether the quality of the actual discussions is much above what you’d get on any other forum I don’t know, it seems notably more aggressive than standard LW discussion.