Society Explained: a tool for efficiently exploring >100 theories of society
There are many competing theories of how society does and should function, from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to Steven Pinker and Eliezer Yudkowsky. These theories are often hard to understand—you may need to read an entire book (or dozens of articles) to feel like you get the key claims of a single theory. At Clearer Thinking, we just launched a new tool called Society Explained to make understanding key ideas from these theories much faster and easier.
The way it works is that you simply pick from over 100 thinkers, and then get to see the key causal claims that they are making laid out in a visual diagram format, with explanations alongside that make it easy to understand what the key elements are and how they connect together. If you’re curious to try it, click here (it’s free).
Extremely cool project!
Can you talk more about your methodology for deciding to include particular thinkers?
I’m also curious how ambitious you are with this. After reading a few entries, I wish this could become a standard resource deployed in educational settings, but I notice that it’s actual form isn’t really amenable to wide-scale adoption in various ways (eg the over-representation of Our Guys relative to historical figures), and it also seems unlikely to become popular without some kind of press push (although maybe you’re planning one?).
Thanks for checking it out! We tried to include quite a wide range of thinkers, including those from different categories (e.g., left, right, classical, modern, western, non-western, etc.). We hope to add more over time.
I really like this idea and it seems very much like the style of this website to try to create an overview of all human thought so far.
One thing I would love to see is what empirical claims are made by each of these thinkers and how well those hold up in history.
Thanks for the feedback! Looking at the accuracy of their empirical claims would be cool.
After reading three entries, it does look like the criticism section tends to include information about how their empirical claims have held up.