What is required for people to reach consensus in public?
To be specific, I'm talking about written statements in public that individuals will attest to.
It seems necessary that participants are sufficiently:
- grounded in shared reality; a common foundation
- motivated; inclined to participate
- comfortable; they feel safe to participate
- communicative; skilled at interactions
- intelligent; able to comprehend the ideas being discussed
- disinterested; without conflicts of interest
- self-confident; making a mistake or being wrong is ok
- authentic; willing and able to share their ideas
- truth-seeking; striving to advance our understanding
It seems likely that correct consensus can only be reached unless people are trained and practiced in:
- logic
- critical thinking
- rationality
- calibration: until people have a track record of making predictions, it is usually premature to give their predictions any particular degree of credibility.
I should also mention that many of the tools of probability that modern rationalists take for granted are often less than 50 years old! For some reason, rigorous probability took a shockingly long time to reach us!