Questions and answers are meant to be clearly expressed and referenced. This should be immune to cognitive bias, in all but extreme examples.
But I feel that every other interaction on this subsite (a least) is implicated by cognitive biases, both at the individual and group level. What do you think could be done to counteract these biases?
I'm asking this question because I've asked questions before which have left me doubting that anything I say makes sense sense -- at all.
Openness has a boundary when it conflicts with the very purpose of a stackexchange.
In all seriousness, when looking something up in a SE, I do not want to read narratives or opinions, but questions and answers that have some kind of factual background. And the facts in philosophy happen to be books, fragments, letters and articles, so that is what we should build both questions and answers on.
And I think you are to some extend right, this would reduce the danger of cognitive bias. But it does not prevent it (as there are several different readings for every philosopher out there, although I personally do not get how this could ever happen) and the big question remains wether the sheer amount of moderation and direct influence by moderators really is what we want. In the end, it should be the community that corrects itself via votes. Problem being: It doesn't. The blabla questions and answers have thousands of views and hundreds of votes, while most of the good ones barely make it to 100 views.
However, changing this through great effort by the moderator team (for which nobody pays them and they would have to endure much hate while given little support) may reduce popularity among some people and especially laymen, but the current status clearly prevents this site from gaining popularity among more experienced students and professionals, of which it would profit the most imho.
Why? Well, point one for me is that I honestly doubt that the special problems I ask can be answered here! Because both a look at some question titles and looking for certain philosopher's tags and the Q/A ratio and quality will make me doubt and out of experience. Point two, which is intertwined: People in academics chronically suffer under lack of time. I am myself contributing because I see it as a little exercise in fields I am interested in anyways and it is a mean for my procrastination.
Now normally if you are short of time, you would need to have the certainty that it is worth to contribute because you get something back out of it. But if 99% of the question are (certainly) philosophical, but not at the actuality and depth you need (postgrad philosophers need to do something NEW on texts with contemporary sources), you think twice. If you have to dig up sources basic and nevertheless specific enough because questions are overly broad for properly answering it (according to the standards you got used to!), it also is just not worth it.
This is not arrogance or snobbishness...it is mere necessity. Once the community of professionals is big enough to perpetuate and self-sustain the level of mutual benefit, everything's fine. After that point, spare time can be invested into more general or basic questions by them as well. But to be honest, my main benefits are mostly procrastination and nurturing my slightly narcisstic parts at the moment. In some rare moments it is remembering stuff I almost forgot or precising certain readings of specific concepts, which is fine. But is it worth it digging through pages of questions about basic logic, naming of fallacies, the existence of God and wether it is wrong to kill babies? In case, I will rather write an email to a fellow researcher and meet them for a coffee...
I, personally, have no problem in having a process of forming a question/answer, i.e. helping through comments to let them rest on a factual basis. It's just that I all too often sit there and ask myself: Seriously? or Again? while upvotes pop up out of nowhere.
Regarding your network question in particular - I just reread it and realised that the answer does not really answer it. That's actually not your fault, it is shabby reading on our side (I explicitely include myself here). It totally makes sense to ask wether ideas similar to Hegel's Geist are discussed in recent philosophy. But I see no problem with cognitive bias there...
Isn't the wish to control or not to control expression to limit cognitive bias a cognitive bias? Some folks like safety and others feel stifled by rules.
Then the only logical answer is 'nothing can really be done'.
So this is not really a reasonable goal to pursue. There is no bright line between simply genuinely holding a position and having a cognitive bias. The writer has chosen which tradition(s) in which to frame his answer, or has been led to his question, with the prejudice of his entire experience.
IMHO all we can really hope for is to cultivate openness in the readers.
That is a goal that I can see us actually working on. There are a lot of folks who fail to give consideration to answers, or who attack them out of hand, or with too much force because they have long ago decided to disagree with all related positions, and not because they can actually see a genuine weakness present.
This is part of a problem which seems to arise often in Meta. There is a theory that many members of the SE adhere to, that we can have an objectively accurate and thriving site. I don't see how these two things can both be possible, given the user base.
The theory is that we pursue objective accuracy, but the only really objectively answerable question would be of the sort "What did philosopher X say?" to which the answer would be "He said this (insert quote)" any interpretation or application of what was said to any more nuanced a question becomes subjective opinion, as Philip Klocking points out in his answer, "there are several different readings for every philosopher out there" (although I do not share his failure to understand how this could be, given the considerable and often deliberate circumlocution in philosophical texts).
A glance through the recent questions will show that the SE simply does not have a user base wanting that kind of answer, and this is hardly surprising. Professional philosophers have other professional philosophers to ask, students have their tutors and an extensive library. We're left with mainly amateurs. What's more, very few of them want simply to know what was said, they want some insight into what it means. This is, of course subjective, but no more so than programmers over at Stack Overflow offering different versions of the "best" solution to a particular software problem, and SO works just fine, in fact it's the model site.
Furthermore there are no restrictions on asking factually-based questions or providing completely objective answers. The idea that this will put experts off is either an insult to the experts or frighteningly true. Are expert philosophers really so snobbish that they can't bear to on the same site as someone asking a slightly plebish question, or giving a less than doctorate standard answer? I sincerely hope not. Generally , questions on this site (of the sort we're talking about here) get; a couple of references to relevant wikipedia or SEP articles in the comments, an answer outlining the positions of the relevant philosophical schools, an slightly more opinionated answer favouring one school and occasionally a very opinionated answer promoting a personal philosophy followed by a discussion in comments migrated to chat. The questioner can take their pick, the community can (and does) vote, I don't see the problem with this.
The only aspect which I think is likely to have a negative impact on users is, exactly as Jobermark points out, if people are not genuinely open to each other's answers and the honest sense of inquiry in most questions. The trouble is I think we each have a different view of what that openness would look like, but it's something work working towards.
