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When a scientist wants to make progress in some field, the scientist first educates herself on the state of the art, and then does novel research that pushes th

When a scientist wants to make progress in some field, the scientist first educates herself on the state of the art, and then does novel research that pushes the frontier. When you have a discussion on facebook/reddit/HN about your favorite political issue, you just post your gut feeling and what you heard on TV instead of educating yourself on the issue, learning what the foremost experts are currently debating and what arguments are already refuted. Super shitty example fix: Facebook Clippy "It sounds like you're having a discussion about abortion - are you aware that the smartest people on this topic are not actually discussing X, but rather have moved on to Y?" Side problem: When we DO make some bump of progress, only a few people benefit (the people reading the thread, at best), and everyone else does not. A million parallel discussions rehash the issue until after a decade, "culture" incrementally improves. How can my facebook discussion, in which I made a good point, prevent that same discussion from ever happening again?

Balgair 9y ago
This is a great idea, as it is a 'meta' idea, in that it is about making the new ideas faster and better. However, I think that what is proposed is a moderation issue. GAIs seem to be a bit of a ways off still, so humans are still the ones that need to write these messages and determine what would be prompted to be shown. As such, I think that a (gasp) market economy may be a good way to get people to do this. Maybe you can get an 'expert' to be paid to write these messages and as payment, they get some percentage of "ModCoins" that are mined in the background. I know that's not very much, right now, but who knows.
gt_ 9y ago
I love where you're going. I would eagerly join a team working on this problem. If approached in a critical fashion, I do belive there could be a cohesive approach. There are numerous seemingly impassible problems and barriers, but this kind of thing is rarely done from a truly critical angle. My thoughts here may lack some formbut one of the paradoxical issues I see are that a brand must be developed, but by way of a keen awareness of the problems of branding. The brand would have to be defended without alienation before market domination. But also, there is not a market for a convention such as knowledge to be automated. The competition is brands which automate opinion validation instead. I think your idea is already stepping ahead of this by automating away the process of deciding on sources. The result would need to be something like automated research as it is done in a library.
sjg007 9y ago
Well education is how you solve this but we chronically underfund it and every kid is a blank new mind so progress is lost when we don’t teach. In the West we have two general views on the nature of humans; intrinsically good or fundamentally bad. The rest of modern politics is shaped from this. The internet and Facebook helps to find a diversity of thought but also in general does not promote critical thinking skills (which you’re suppose to learn in high school)... since as we’ve seen facebook just degenerates into an echo chamber where blatant propaganda is unquestioned and in fact promoted. Critics are fake news and we refuse to critically debate. You see this in Congress where they blatantly lie about tax cuts, health care etc...
- vehementi 9y ago
  Education doesn't fully solve it. Education remedies the deficiencies. To use PG's method: in 200 years, do you think that we will have 100M parallel, entry level discussions about the merits of abortion (or the political issue du jour)? No, obviously our discussion experience will be augmented such that we are easily led to the forefront of the debate and build on top of the pertinent points and progress being made. How do we invent that future?
  - sjg007 9y ago
    I don’t think it will happen that way. The courts already ruled in roe vs wade and yet people still go back to first principles to argue.
    - vehementi 9y ago
      People can disagree with Roe v Wade. There's still a foundation, that I think you're not noticing - we as a culture have made progress on it, the arguments are not the same as they would have been 100 years ago. More dramatically, the arguments about slavery are not the same, we are past it.
      - sjg007 9y ago
        There’s a legal foundation but it’s still an active political argument as is teen birth control. We have made progress but I wouldn’t say anything is guaranteed.

Balgair 9y ago

This is a great idea, as it is a 'meta' idea, in that it is about making the new ideas faster and better. However, I think that what is proposed is a moderation issue. GAIs seem to be a bit of a ways off still, so humans are still the ones that need to write these messages and determine what would be prompted to be shown. As such, I think that a (gasp) market economy may be a good way to get people to do this. Maybe you can get an 'expert' to be paid to write these messages and as payment, they get some percentage of "ModCoins" that are mined in the background. I know that's not very much, right now, but who knows.

gt_ 9y ago

I love where you're going. I would eagerly join a team working on this problem. If approached in a critical fashion, I do belive there could be a cohesive approach. There are numerous seemingly impassible problems and barriers, but this kind of thing is rarely done from a truly critical angle. My thoughts here may lack some formbut one of the paradoxical issues I see are that a brand must be developed, but by way of a keen awareness of the problems of branding. The brand would have to be defended without alienation before market domination. But also, there is not a market for a convention such as knowledge to be automated. The competition is brands which automate opinion validation instead. I think your idea is already stepping ahead of this by automating away the process of deciding on sources. The result would need to be something like automated research as it is done in a library.

sjg007 9y ago

Well education is how you solve this but we chronically underfund it and every kid is a blank new mind so progress is lost when we don’t teach. In the West we have two general views on the nature of humans; intrinsically good or fundamentally bad. The rest of modern politics is shaped from this. The internet and Facebook helps to find a diversity of thought but also in general does not promote critical thinking skills (which you’re suppose to learn in high school)... since as we’ve seen facebook just degenerates into an echo chamber where blatant propaganda is unquestioned and in fact promoted. Critics are fake news and we refuse to critically debate. You see this in Congress where they blatantly lie about tax cuts, health care etc...

vehementi 9y ago
Education doesn't fully solve it. Education remedies the deficiencies. To use PG's method: in 200 years, do you think that we will have 100M parallel, entry level discussions about the merits of abortion (or the political issue du jour)? No, obviously our discussion experience will be augmented such that we are easily led to the forefront of the debate and build on top of the pertinent points and progress being made. How do we invent that future?
- sjg007 9y ago
  I don’t think it will happen that way. The courts already ruled in roe vs wade and yet people still go back to first principles to argue.
  - vehementi 9y ago
    People can disagree with Roe v Wade. There's still a foundation, that I think you're not noticing - we as a culture have made progress on it, the arguments are not the same as they would have been 100 years ago. More dramatically, the arguments about slavery are not the same, we are past it.
    - sjg007 9y ago
      There’s a legal foundation but it’s still an active political argument as is teen birth control. We have made progress but I wouldn’t say anything is guaranteed.