In a nutshell, it might be cool to make a website and organization that promotes data collections and debate.
Rationalism requires access to high quality empirical evidence. Holding your hypotheses up to constantly changing data is a major theme of this site.
We can only rationally discuss our hypotheses and beliefs when we have something to test and the quality of datasets floating around on the internet is often low or inaccessible.
A good rationalist project might be to highlight resources for empirical evidence, run “data debates” where experts attack and defend each others datasets; a wiki for best-practices in data collection, or a wiki for navigating popular issues through good datasets (try as a nonexpert to find what studies on taxation and inequality are best and you can end up running in circles).
I think you would want to tailor this kind of project toward non experts, giving people (especially journalists) a good starting place for finding meaningful, well-collected data that can form a good jump point for rational analysis.
A project like this also leaves the door open to many interpretations and many goals, so it isn’t necessarily cutting down on the number of voices out there.
In a nutshell, it might be cool to make a website and organization that promotes data collections and debate.
Rationalism requires access to high quality empirical evidence. Holding your hypotheses up to constantly changing data is a major theme of this site.
We can only rationally discuss our hypotheses and beliefs when we have something to test and the quality of datasets floating around on the internet is often low or inaccessible.
A good rationalist project might be to highlight resources for empirical evidence, run “data debates” where experts attack and defend each others datasets; a wiki for best-practices in data collection, or a wiki for navigating popular issues through good datasets (try as a nonexpert to find what studies on taxation and inequality are best and you can end up running in circles).
I think you would want to tailor this kind of project toward non experts, giving people (especially journalists) a good starting place for finding meaningful, well-collected data that can form a good jump point for rational analysis.
A project like this also leaves the door open to many interpretations and many goals, so it isn’t necessarily cutting down on the number of voices out there.
I would also be interested in cataloging failed attempts. More and more I have been trying to look at survivorship biases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) behind all my beliefs.
Are there any good examples of projects like this in existence? Maybe we can leverage the community here to throw our weight behind one.
I like most of your ideas, but I wonder how many journalists are willing to sacrifice readability or sensationalism for truth and accuracy.