I agree it’s not a panacea, but I could imagine it helping mitigate bias/politicization in a few ways:
It prompts people to think about ‘liking’ and ‘agreeing’ as two separate questions at all. I don’t expect this to totally de-bias either ‘liking’ or ‘agreeing’, but I do expect some progress if people are prompted like this.
Goodwill and trust is generated when people are upvoted in spite of having an unpopular-on-the-forum view. This can create virtuous cycles, where those people reciprocate and in general there are fewer comment sections that turn into ‘one side mass-downvotes the other side, the other side retaliates, etc.’.
Example: Improving EA Forum discourse by 8% would obviously be worth it, even if this is via a “superficial improvement” that doesn’t fix the whole problem.
I agree it’s not a panacea, but I could imagine it helping mitigate bias/politicization in a few ways:
It prompts people to think about ‘liking’ and ‘agreeing’ as two separate questions at all. I don’t expect this to totally de-bias either ‘liking’ or ‘agreeing’, but I do expect some progress if people are prompted like this.
Goodwill and trust is generated when people are upvoted in spite of having an unpopular-on-the-forum view. This can create virtuous cycles, where those people reciprocate and in general there are fewer comment sections that turn into ‘one side mass-downvotes the other side, the other side retaliates, etc.’.
Example: Improving EA Forum discourse by 8% would obviously be worth it, even if this is via a “superficial improvement” that doesn’t fix the whole problem.