I’m in favour of the project, but here’s a consideration against: Making people in the community more confident about what the community thinks about a subject, can be potentially harmfwl.
Testimonial evidence is the stuff you get purely because you trust another reasoner (Aumann-agreement fashion), and technical evidence is everything else (observation, math, argument).
Making people more aware of testimonial evidence will also make them more likely to update on it, if they’re good Bayesians. But this also reduces the relative influence that technical evidence has on their beliefs. So although you are potentially increasing the accuracy of each member’s beliefs, you are also weakening the link community opinion has to technical evidence, and that leaves us more prone to information cascades and slower to update on new discoveries/arguments.
But this is mainly a problem for uniform communities where everyone assigns the same amount of trust to everyone else. If, on the other hand, we have “thought leaders” (highly trusted researchers who severely distrust others’ opinions and stubbornly refuse to update on anything other than technical evidence), then their technical-evidence grounded beliefs can filter through to the rest of the community, and we get the best of both worlds.
I think that’s a good idea to reduce groupthink! Also, I think it can be helpful to uncover if specific individuals and sub-groups think a proposal is promising based on their estimates, since rarely will an entire group view something similarly. This could bring individuals together to further discuss and potentially support/execute the idea.
I’m in favour of the project, but here’s a consideration against: Making people in the community more confident about what the community thinks about a subject, can be potentially harmfwl.
Testimonial evidence is the stuff you get purely because you trust another reasoner (Aumann-agreement fashion), and technical evidence is everything else (observation, math, argument).
Making people more aware of testimonial evidence will also make them more likely to update on it, if they’re good Bayesians. But this also reduces the relative influence that technical evidence has on their beliefs. So although you are potentially increasing the accuracy of each member’s beliefs, you are also weakening the link community opinion has to technical evidence, and that leaves us more prone to information cascades and slower to update on new discoveries/arguments.
But this is mainly a problem for uniform communities where everyone assigns the same amount of trust to everyone else. If, on the other hand, we have “thought leaders” (highly trusted researchers who severely distrust others’ opinions and stubbornly refuse to update on anything other than technical evidence), then their technical-evidence grounded beliefs can filter through to the rest of the community, and we get the best of both worlds.
One of the approaches here, is to A) require people sign up, and B) don’t show people aggregated predictions until they have posted their own.
I think that’s a good idea to reduce groupthink! Also, I think it can be helpful to uncover if specific individuals and sub-groups think a proposal is promising based on their estimates, since rarely will an entire group view something similarly. This could bring individuals together to further discuss and potentially support/execute the idea.