“Review My Politics” communication format
I don’t like mass manipulation. I don’t like how its used to pit groups of people against one another resulting in disastrous conflicts. Emotionally, it’s much easier to look critically at your opponent’s reasoning and find flaws there, rather than in your own reasoning. Ideally the people from the opposing camps would talk to each other and help each other to dispel the manipulations used on them. However, in practice, it doesn’t work for a number of reasons that have to do with defensiveness, misaligned motivations, emotions taking over, time and effort etc.
While searching for a communication format that could help to improve this situation I’ve come up with the following. This is a platform that has two roles: writer and reviewer. Users play each of those roles at different times. The interaction goes like this:
- Writer types out a doc with an explanation of why he holds some of his political opinions. It is not shared publicly.
- Writer requests a review from one of the reviewers.
- The reviewer reviews the doc and inserts comments about potential flaws in writer’s reasoning, blind spots etc. The review comments are not shared publicly.
- Writer reads the review and rates it (optionally commenting on what he liked or didn’t like about the review, in general terms, like if it was thought provoking, respectful etc.). Reviewer’s ratings are publically available.
- Writer makes adjustments to his doc, taking into account the review that he has received.
The process repeats as the user sends out his doc to different reviewers, considers their reviews, makes incremental adjustments to his doc and reviews the docs of other users when requested.
Potential advantages:
- This is not a debate and there is no audience. This means that there is no incentive to interrupt, create confusion, make the other person look bad and look right instead of being right.
- There is no time pressure. You have all the time and space that you need to think and convey your thinking, to process your emotions from reading someone’s doc before submitting your review comments on it and to process your emotions when reading the reviews that you receive.
- You don’t need to defend yourself. Once you get a review you are not supposed to reply to the reviewer, the interaction ends there. Nobody else sees this review so there is nothing distracting you from honestly considering how this review applies to your political thinking.
Potential disadvantages:
- It may feel too daunting to consider and to formulate why you think your political positions are correct so people aren’t going to try. Or they will try, realise that it’s hard and not worth their effort.
Do you think that there is something to this format? How can it be improved?