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At one point in the past there were no internet discussion forums, and then someone invented one and the world was changed. At one point in the past there were

At one point in the past there were no internet discussion forums, and then someone invented one and the world was changed. At one point in the past there were no internet discussion forums with voting, and then someone invented one and the world was changed. At one point in the past there were no internet discussion forums with threaded conversations, and then someone invented one and the world was changed. Has mankind reached the pinnacle of what can be achieved with respect to the optimization of intellectual discussion on internet forums, or might there be a few different things that have not yet been tried, or even thought of (if large quantities of intelligent people set their minds to the task)? EDIT: An additional wrinkle of complexity: what if someone builds one, and it takes off and becomes a powerful juggernaut in the domain of thought-shaping-at-scale, but the founders are evil, or can be converted, or displaced? We arguably see some examples of this already.

dang 5y ago
Ah ok. I feel pretty sure that there are other improvements to be made! But most likely any significant ones would come from somebody starting a new forum with a different set of initial conditions.
- mistermann 5y ago
  If those who currently run forums consciously choose to not consider expanding functionality to truly maximize the optimization of their goal (in this case, intellectual curiosity), this seems true by definition.
  - dang 5y ago
    The problem with your argument is that what you call "expanding functionality" can easily have negative effects. Nobody's "choosing not to consider" anything. If you have a specific idea that you're confident would help HN to optimize better for intellectual curiosity, I'd like to hear it.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      I have many ideas, ranging from simple to extremely complex (some of which would require an entirely new platform). A few examples (if ever implementing such things, I would do it in an "experimental mode" that can be enabled for specific threads): - offer more options than simply upvoting & downvoting, perhaps something like a list of tags (epistemically unsound, speculative, smart, insightful, outside-the-box thinking, etc) - When downvoting a user, offer/force the downvoter to provide a reason from a list (which could be voted on by others who agree/disagree), perhaps with the additional ability to provide specific reasoning. Some benefits of this might be for the downvoted user to actually have some insight into why they are being downvoted, it may make the downvoter put a little more effort into considering why they are downvoting, and it would provide additional metadata on conversations which could be used for a variety of things. - Some sort "cultural mode" for threads of certain kinds, which might include things like "epistemic strictness". So for example, for culture war (politics) threads, it might be interesting to set Epistemic Strictness = High, meaning certain common behaviors would be forbidden, such as asserting imaginary beliefs as facts (mind reading, future reading, etc). Or, the same idea could be run under two threads, with opposite ends of the spectrum of a specific dimension...so if we were discussing the viability of nuclear power, one might have one thread for "extreme optimism" (the goal being to collect as large as possible set of why it is plausibly a good idea), and its counterpart could be "extreme pessimism" (why it is plausibly not a good idea). Of course, some of these are better/easier than others, all of them are debateable from a cost/benefit/risk perspective, opinions would vary (a HN meta-thread seems like a fine approach for that...or as a general idea), etc. My basic thinking is this: HN is an influential site, populated by intelligent and influential people, and the world has a lot of complex problems going on simultaneously (some people even think some of these problems are in the existential threat to humanity category). Considering this, is it possible that the HN Hivemind (a massive cluster of knowledge and skilled biological compute) produce some valuable new for humanity (new ideas, new ways of thinking, etc) if this cluster was orchestrated in a more optimal manner? And of course: this is not your job. It is no one's job. And if hard jobs with no plausible economic return are not assigned to someone, they often do not get done, and humanity eventually suffers the consequences (with or without realizing why).
      - 5y ago

dang 5y ago

Ah ok. I feel pretty sure that there are other improvements to be made! But most likely any significant ones would come from somebody starting a new forum with a different set of initial conditions.

mistermann 5y ago
If those who currently run forums consciously choose to not consider expanding functionality to truly maximize the optimization of their goal (in this case, intellectual curiosity), this seems true by definition.
- dang 5y ago
  The problem with your argument is that what you call "expanding functionality" can easily have negative effects. Nobody's "choosing not to consider" anything. If you have a specific idea that you're confident would help HN to optimize better for intellectual curiosity, I'd like to hear it.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    I have many ideas, ranging from simple to extremely complex (some of which would require an entirely new platform). A few examples (if ever implementing such things, I would do it in an "experimental mode" that can be enabled for specific threads): - offer more options than simply upvoting & downvoting, perhaps something like a list of tags (epistemically unsound, speculative, smart, insightful, outside-the-box thinking, etc) - When downvoting a user, offer/force the downvoter to provide a reason from a list (which could be voted on by others who agree/disagree), perhaps with the additional ability to provide specific reasoning. Some benefits of this might be for the downvoted user to actually have some insight into why they are being downvoted, it may make the downvoter put a little more effort into considering why they are downvoting, and it would provide additional metadata on conversations which could be used for a variety of things. - Some sort "cultural mode" for threads of certain kinds, which might include things like "epistemic strictness". So for example, for culture war (politics) threads, it might be interesting to set Epistemic Strictness = High, meaning certain common behaviors would be forbidden, such as asserting imaginary beliefs as facts (mind reading, future reading, etc). Or, the same idea could be run under two threads, with opposite ends of the spectrum of a specific dimension...so if we were discussing the viability of nuclear power, one might have one thread for "extreme optimism" (the goal being to collect as large as possible set of why it is plausibly a good idea), and its counterpart could be "extreme pessimism" (why it is plausibly not a good idea). Of course, some of these are better/easier than others, all of them are debateable from a cost/benefit/risk perspective, opinions would vary (a HN meta-thread seems like a fine approach for that...or as a general idea), etc. My basic thinking is this: HN is an influential site, populated by intelligent and influential people, and the world has a lot of complex problems going on simultaneously (some people even think some of these problems are in the existential threat to humanity category). Considering this, is it possible that the HN Hivemind (a massive cluster of knowledge and skilled biological compute) produce some valuable new for humanity (new ideas, new ways of thinking, etc) if this cluster was orchestrated in a more optimal manner? And of course: this is not your job. It is no one's job. And if hard jobs with no plausible economic return are not assigned to someone, they often do not get done, and humanity eventually suffers the consequences (with or without realizing why).
    - 5y ago