1) I'm sure some will approach it that way. Some of those will continue with it that way. Other people will learn from the ongoing debate and incorporate new learning in their positions. They will learn logical argumentation and some facts because thought leaders will emerge who leverage logic and facts. Those thought leaders can be incorporated into webs of trust as preferenced by individual users.
2) I'm not looking to decrease polarization, necessarily. If anything, different echo chambers would necessarily form as like-minded sets of users would agree with and upvote similar arguments. If user sammy upvotes weak creationist arguments made by weak creationist supporters, fine. Within the region of the web of trust of weak creationist arguers, sammy may be king. The site should allow him his due, but when sammy goes to upvote a new argument that crusso is following, it should affect the ranking/view of that argument little if at all -- since crusso tends to not upvote weak creationist arguments and creationist argument supporters.
Although mechanics that allow for increasing polarization sounds bad (I hear it), the conventional approach of decreasing polarization is to beat the crap out of outliers with monolithic, single-dimension voting systems that reward populism and emotional rhetoric.
I'd rather let some polarization thrive because different people have different value systems... but what I would envision as being a "good" for a site like this is to allow people to both have their polarization AND to allow them to transcend their echo chambers by viewing the arguments of other thought leaders in other echo chambers using similar tools and metrics for evaluating arguments.
2) I'm not looking to decrease polarization, necessarily. If anything, different echo chambers would necessarily form as like-minded sets of users would agree with and upvote similar arguments. If user sammy upvotes weak creationist arguments made by weak creationist supporters, fine. Within the region of the web of trust of weak creationist arguers, sammy may be king. The site should allow him his due, but when sammy goes to upvote a new argument that crusso is following, it should affect the ranking/view of that argument little if at all -- since crusso tends to not upvote weak creationist arguments and creationist argument supporters.
Although mechanics that allow for increasing polarization sounds bad (I hear it), the conventional approach of decreasing polarization is to beat the crap out of outliers with monolithic, single-dimension voting systems that reward populism and emotional rhetoric.
I'd rather let some polarization thrive because different people have different value systems... but what I would envision as being a "good" for a site like this is to allow people to both have their polarization AND to allow them to transcend their echo chambers by viewing the arguments of other thought leaders in other echo chambers using similar tools and metrics for evaluating arguments.