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.
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.
The problem with your argument is that what you call "expanding functionality" can easily have negative effects. 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.
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).
We've considered things like that over the years, but I think these and similar ideas suffer from a common flaw: people who disagree about X would disagree about reasons for upvoting/downvoting X or the level of "epistemic strictness" re X. So you'd just get the same arguments repeated at a meta level, which would not be a win.
I'm sorry to sound so dismissive; it's at least partly because I'm writing hastily. I don't mean to reflexively put down new ideas and I know it's all too easy to come across that way. At the same time, we're not going to add more metaness to HN because it actually goes against the core value of curiosity. Metaness has a peculiar attraction but it's not intellectual curiosity; I've sometimes called it the crack of internet forums.
You don't think HN users are capable of realizing when they are engaged in mind/future reading, even if it was an explicit rule? You surely know the userbase better than me, but this seems unlikely.
If you want nothing to change, so be it, but the idea that functionality changes cannot have an effect is very frustrating.
Correct. Not only HN users but humans in general—I just don't think we work that way. The way we work is that we have our preference on X and then we propagate that preference through every edge in our mental graph of associations from X.
One can imagine a user saying something like "Although I personally am against nuclear power, since this is the 'optimism' thread it isn't the best place for my counterarguments so I'll post them in the 'pessimism' thread instead". However, such people are somewhere between vanishingly rare and unicorns. Statistically they may as well not exist.
> Correct. Not only HN users but humans in general—I just don't think we work that way.
I am curious if this is actually true (that humans are unable, with concentration, to realize they cannot read minds), but maybe I have an excess of curiosity! :)
