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random idea for a voting system (i'm a few centuries late. this is just for fun.)
instead of voting directly, everyone is assigned to a discussion group of x (say 5) of themself and others near them. the group meets to discuss at an official location (attendance is optional). only if those who showed up reach consensus does the group cast one vote.
many of these groups would not reach consensus, say 70-90%. that's fine. the point is that most of the ones which do would be composed of people who make and/or are receptive to valid arguments. this would then shift the memetic focus of politics towards rational arguments instead of being mostly rhetoric/bias reinforcement (which is unlikely to produce consensus when repeated in this setting).
possible downside: another possible equilibrium is memetics teaching people how to pressure others into agreeing during the group discussion, when e.g it's 3 against 2 or 4 against 1. possible remedy: have each discussion group be composed of a proportional amount of each party's supporters. or maybe have them be 1-on-1 discussions instead of groups of x>2 because those tend to go better anyways.
also, this would let misrepresented minority positions be heard correctly.
i don't think this would have saved humanity from ending up in an inadequate equilibrium, but maybe would have at least been less bad.
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As a moderator: I do think sunwillrise was being a bit obnoxious here. I think the norms they used here were fine for frontpage LW posts, but shortform is trying to do something that is more casual and more welcoming of early-stage ideas, and this kind of psychologizing I think has reasonably strong chilling-effects on people feeling comfortable with that.
I don't think it's a huge deal, my best guess is I would just ask sunwillrise to comment less on quila's stuff in-particular, and if it becomes a recurring theme, to maybe more generally try to chan...
1111[anonymous]
Separately from the more meta discussion about norms, I believe the failure mode I mentioned is quite different from yours in an important respect that is revealed by the potential remedy you pointed out ("have each discussion group be composed of a proportional amount of each party's supporters. or maybe have them be 1-on-1 discussions instead of groups of x>2 because those tend to go better anyways").
Together with your explanation of the failure mode ("when e.g it's 3 against 2 or 4 against 1"), it seems to me like you are thinking of a situation where one Republican, for instance, is in a group with 4 Democrats, and thus feels pressure from all sides in a group discussion because everyone there has strong priors that disagree with his/hers. Or, as another example, when a person arguing for a minority position is faced with 4 others who might be aggresively conventional-minded and instantly disapprove of any deviation from the Overton window. (I could very easily be misinterpreting what you are saying, though, so I am less than 95% confident of your meaning.)
In this spot, the remedy makes a lot of sense: prevent these gang-up-on-the-lonely-dissenter spots by making the ideological mix-up of the group more uniform or by encouraging 1-on-1 conversations in which each ideology or system of beliefs will only have one representative arguing for it.
But I am talking about a failure mode that focuses on the power of one single individual to swing the room towards him/her, regardless of how many are initially on his/her side from a coalitional perspective. Not because those who disagree are initially in the minority and thus cowed into staying silent (and fuming, or in any case not being internally convinced), but rather because the "combination of charisma, social skills, and assertiveness in dialogue" would take control of the conversation and turn the entire room in its favor, likely by getting the others to genuinely believe that they are being persuaded for rati