The move from Reddit to a dedicated forum is a huge opportunity to mix things up. We should take advantage. Never let a crisis go to waste, etc.
One thing I would suggest (if technical limitations allow) would be the addition of a two-tiered voting system, somewhat like what LessWrong has implemented, where users can vote both on the quality of a post, and separately on whether or not they agree with it. I think this could have really positive effects for the kind of community and discussion the Motte was created to promote. The Motte's raison d'etre is to promote discussion and debate with people you disagree with. Separating voting on quality from voting on agreement would promote that goal in a couple different ways. Fundamentally, there is a tension between upvoting a post you think is well-done, and downvoting that same post because you disagree with its content. I think the Motte wants to be a place that encourages outsider or minority views, and separating the "quality" vote from the "agreement" vote would help promote this. From what I have noticed in this community, despite our commitments to encouraging debate and discussion with people you disagree with, posts coming from a more liberal/left-wing/social justice/woke viewpoint tend to get downvoted, even when their quality is equivalent or superior to other posts.
I'll also quote from the reasons given on the above LessWrong post about this feature, because I think the reasons given are good ones.:
I personally feel much more comfortable upvoting good comments that I disagree with or whose truth value I am highly uncertain about, because I don’t feel that my vote will be mistaken as setting the social reality of what is true.
I also feel very comfortable strong-agreeing with things while not up/downvoting on them, so as to indicate which side of an argument seems true to me without my voting being read as “this person gets to keep accruing more and more social status for just repeating a common position at length”.
Similarly to the first bullet, I think that many writers have interesting and valuable ideas but whose truth-value I am quite unsure about or even disagree with. This split allows voters to repeatedly signal that a given writer's comments are of high value, without building a false-consensus that LessWrong has high confidence that the ideas are true. (For example, many people have incompatible but valuable ideas about how AGI development will go, and I want authors to get lots of karma and visibility for excellent contributions without this ambiguity.)
There are many comments I think are bad but am averse to downvoting, because I feel that it is ambiguous whether the person is being downvoted because everyone thinks their take is unfashionable or whether it's because the person is wasting the commons with their behavior (e.g. belittling, starting bravery debates, not doing basic reading comprehension, etc). With this split I feel more comfortable downvoting bad comments without worrying that everyone else who states the position will worry if they'll also be downvoted.
I have seen some comments that previously would have been "downvoted to hell" are now on positive karma, and are instead "disagreed to hell". I won't point them out to avoid focusing on individuals, but this seems like an obvious improvement in communication ability.
Would this be a doable change? And would it be a good one? I am strongly in favor, but open to reasons why I'm wrong.
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Notes -
Could you really imagine, say, a well done argument for homeopathy? I could imagine an argument for homeopathy that deceives in a well done way, but I can't imagine an honest argument for homeopathy that is well done.
If I have position X, that implies that I think that opponents of X have bad evidence, are making logical fallacies, etc. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't have position X. Of course, in everyday life where a lot of people believe things for social reasons, they may believe X without considering evidence or arguments at all. I can imagine such a person thinking an opposing argument is well done. But I find it hard to imagine that to anyone who arrives at their positions by rational thinking, they could really find an opposing argument well done.
There may be an edge case where someone uses premises I disagree with but they argue well based on these premises, but in practice nobody seems to argue that way. Even abortion opponents don't say "I am trying to convince you that abortion is wrong, based on the premise that a fetus is a human being". They try to convince other people using those people's premises, regardless of whether they share them themselves.
Furthermore, quite aside from all that, the problem with any measure to prevent the use of votes as weapons is that votes work as weapons. If your system hides posts or otherwise does things weapon-like based on votes, you'll never solve the problem.
I agree that this doesn't solve the problem of people voting "politically," as it were, but I think it might mitigate it slightly.
As to your other point , I strongly disagree. Rationality can only work once certain premises have been accepted. There is no rational way to choose what premises you start an argument with. In the abortion context, for example, if someone starts from the premise that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life, no matter how much suffering it might experience or cause, they'll reach a certain set of conclusions, and if someone starts from a utilitarian set of premises, they'll reach another. Yes, you can argue about the rational basis for premises to some extent, but at a certain point you just hit intuition. Thus, two equally rational people could reach wildly different conclusions simply because they have different intuitions about the premises of the argument.
But that's not how arguments to convince other people work. If you want to convince other people, you either have to go by their premises (which leads to the problem I described), or you need to sneak in your own premises (which makes it inherently a low quality argument because of the sneakiness). Just openly arguing based on premises that another person doesn't share won't convince him.
Nobody says "Well, I'm going to convince you of homeopathy. You just need to assume that molecular patterns are a thing...."
That doesn't even work. You can think it's wrong to take an innocent human life, but disagree that a fetus is an innocent human life (or a human life at all).
Your claim was that you "find it hard to imagine that to anyone who arrives at their positions by rational thinking . . . could really find an opposing argument well done."
All I'm saying is that a rational person could easily find an opposing argument "well done" if their only problem with the argument was that it began from premises derived from intuitions they don't share.
Just about nobody will make such an argument openly, because it wouldn't be convincing. If they make it sneakily, it's not a good argument because it's sneaky. So while this is possible in theory given a certain kind of mistake, it's a rare edge case.
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