Awesome idea but incredibly ambitious. How do you plan on profiting enough to pay for hosting and maintaining the site?
A concern: what sorts of propositions do you have in mind? You mention “fairly sophisticated levels of mutual understanding”, but smart people are way too good at finding nits to pick, and for most propositions you need a lot of precision before people are willing to identify ‘x/10’ with them. This might need to needless forking and version of the same proposition with varying amounts of complexity, making the site ugly and difficult to navigate.
That said, concerns like that are premature, and we don’t need solutions for them now. It’s still a good idea to get started on development.
Thanks for the comments. I will try to address them.
I am less concerned about hosting/maintenance than I am about development costs. If it is not successful, then it won’t be large, or need large bandwidth—costs will be low. If it is successful, then some sort of freemium, ad-supported model may be possible. Of course, the territory between these two extremes might be awkward. Joel Spolsky [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky] has taken his Stack_Overflow engine [http://stackoverflow.com/] and gotten VC funding for an attempt to roll it out as a social network platform [http://stackexchange.com/].
All sorts of propositions are acceptable, as I tried to make clear—although I do think that it will be important to seed the site with ‘good’ models—perhaps some of the ‘sequences’ here at LW, for instance. It doesn’t matter to me if the system is used by a cult who think that John Lennon was the second coming of the Messiah.
On the ‘nit-picking’ point, there is a characteristic of the model offered by ‘A Pattern Language’ which might help—the Conclusion section of the proposition is stated deliberately in open terms, rather than attempting to be rigourously prescriptive. So, instead of ‘Thou shalt not kill’, one might conclude that killing people is almost never justifiable, and offer links to other propositions on, say ‘self-defence’, and ‘assisted suicide’. One need not aim for a structure that would satisfy a formal logic analysis (although there is no reason not to attempt such).
My own propositions would be a set which describe my own web of beliefs, in a way that is cloudy enough to admit nuanced interpretation, but clear enough to be useful. I would hope that this would make it possible;1 for others to register interest in them, and 2 for me to accept refinements suggested by others. I think that many of EY’s posts conclude in the same way—offering tools and strategies, rather than hard-and-fast rules.
I think you are right about forking. However, I would contrast this with the status quo. I have been trying to locate my own ‘community of interest’ on the web for over a decade—I believed that the internet would allow like-minded people—particularly ones with minority interests that could be adequately communicated in words - to find each other. Sites like LW are the poor best that I have found. Why poor best? Well, while there is much of interest here, I am already concerned that certain ideas I hold dear may prove to be anathema here. EY set the site up, and it has a clear and strong thrust. It would be foolish/rude/ineffectual to push ideas which are antithetical to that thrust here. So, sites like this are too rigid—forking is not allowed. More general forums are too loose for the concept of forking to even have a meaning.
You see, I would be happy to work with even 5 people at a very high level of agreement.
I imagine that there would be many sets of groups which would share broad foundations of shared propositions, but grow increasingly fragmented as the propositions began to operate at more detailed levels. Perhaps it will be important to allow associations of groups,
Precisely these sort of considerations are what I hoped for. Even if this remains a thought experiment, I will find it immensely valuable.
Awesome idea but incredibly ambitious. How do you plan on profiting enough to pay for hosting and maintaining the site?
A concern: what sorts of propositions do you have in mind? You mention “fairly sophisticated levels of mutual understanding”, but smart people are way too good at finding nits to pick, and for most propositions you need a lot of precision before people are willing to identify ‘x/10’ with them. This might need to needless forking and version of the same proposition with varying amounts of complexity, making the site ugly and difficult to navigate.
That said, concerns like that are premature, and we don’t need solutions for them now. It’s still a good idea to get started on development.
For reference, hosting a lightly-used site is really freakin’ cheap.
Thanks for the comments. I will try to address them.
I am less concerned about hosting/maintenance than I am about development costs. If it is not successful, then it won’t be large, or need large bandwidth—costs will be low. If it is successful, then some sort of freemium, ad-supported model may be possible. Of course, the territory between these two extremes might be awkward. Joel Spolsky [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky] has taken his Stack_Overflow engine [http://stackoverflow.com/] and gotten VC funding for an attempt to roll it out as a social network platform [http://stackexchange.com/].
All sorts of propositions are acceptable, as I tried to make clear—although I do think that it will be important to seed the site with ‘good’ models—perhaps some of the ‘sequences’ here at LW, for instance. It doesn’t matter to me if the system is used by a cult who think that John Lennon was the second coming of the Messiah.
On the ‘nit-picking’ point, there is a characteristic of the model offered by ‘A Pattern Language’ which might help—the Conclusion section of the proposition is stated deliberately in open terms, rather than attempting to be rigourously prescriptive. So, instead of ‘Thou shalt not kill’, one might conclude that killing people is almost never justifiable, and offer links to other propositions on, say ‘self-defence’, and ‘assisted suicide’. One need not aim for a structure that would satisfy a formal logic analysis (although there is no reason not to attempt such). My own propositions would be a set which describe my own web of beliefs, in a way that is cloudy enough to admit nuanced interpretation, but clear enough to be useful. I would hope that this would make it possible;1 for others to register interest in them, and 2 for me to accept refinements suggested by others. I think that many of EY’s posts conclude in the same way—offering tools and strategies, rather than hard-and-fast rules.
I think you are right about forking. However, I would contrast this with the status quo. I have been trying to locate my own ‘community of interest’ on the web for over a decade—I believed that the internet would allow like-minded people—particularly ones with minority interests that could be adequately communicated in words - to find each other. Sites like LW are the poor best that I have found. Why poor best? Well, while there is much of interest here, I am already concerned that certain ideas I hold dear may prove to be anathema here. EY set the site up, and it has a clear and strong thrust. It would be foolish/rude/ineffectual to push ideas which are antithetical to that thrust here. So, sites like this are too rigid—forking is not allowed. More general forums are too loose for the concept of forking to even have a meaning. You see, I would be happy to work with even 5 people at a very high level of agreement. I imagine that there would be many sets of groups which would share broad foundations of shared propositions, but grow increasingly fragmented as the propositions began to operate at more detailed levels. Perhaps it will be important to allow associations of groups,
Precisely these sort of considerations are what I hoped for. Even if this remains a thought experiment, I will find it immensely valuable.