I don’t know if FLF knows about what Elicit is doing in pursuit of similar goals: https://elicit.com/blog/mission/
Bruce Lewis
Karma: 90
The eminent philosophers of Monty Python said it best of all.
The linked video is now private. Perhaps quote them inline?
If I understand correctly, the problem is when a participant in spoken in-person conversation is working from an assumption they think to be obviously true to everyone, and other participants don’t think so.
For written conversation, hypertext can help; the “obvious” info can be behind a link that people don’t need to follow if they agree it’s obvious. For spoken in-person conversation, I don’t see how there could be any solution beyond what you describe in the last three paragraphs. But it sounds like you intuitively think some further solution might be out there. Can you identify what feeds this intuition?
To “asynchronously develop ideas discussed at meetups into long-form writings” couldn’t one attendee just start a draft post here on lesswrong and use its sharing features on the draft to collaborate on developing it into long form?
>Write up notes on particularly interesting meetup discussions, and add those to a shared archive.
Couldn’t this just be a tag here on lesswrong?
>Create an online platform for community members to asynchronously develop ideas discussed at meetups into long-form writings.
If you assume there’s a primary author of such a writing, isn’t lesswrong’s draft-sharing function already good enough?
Thanks! Yes, it definitely resembles the structure of an argument map.
Percent probabilities would be more Bayesian and fit certain questions better, but I wanted to show what’s possible without any scary math at all. Also, for a lot of questions, any percent probabilities people put down would be made up anyway.
The power of a simple 3-way truth scale
Pardon my noob mistake. I’ve edited the post with a correction.
Isn’t one’s opinion of whether the statement is false, debatable, or true the epistemic status of that statement according to that person?
Hi, sorry for the late reply. That iteration of HowTruthful only got 2 paying customers, both of whom were people I knew. I realized I needed to improve the aesthetics, UX, and SEO, plus move to a more modern tech stack, so I rewrote it.
Thanks for the detailed suggestions. I want to implement a few of them, but most of them probably not, my reasoning hinging on the fact that adding complexity adds friction that discourages people from using it.
LessWrong’s goals overlap HowTruthful’s
The project I’ve been quietly working on now has its second iteration, better than ever: https://www.howtruthful.com/
I’m eager to talk about it, but won’t be able to during the workday today. Try it out. Comment and I’ll answer tonight.
The video linked from the link above can be watched at 2x speed if you only want to get the gist. If you do that and stop at the how-to-use part, it’s only 4 minutes. Watching the entire video at regular speed is 12 minutes, but since this is different from things you’ve already seen, that might be 12 minutes well spent.
The best path forward might be for @DPiepgrass to make a prototype or mockup, borrowing ideas from HowTruthful and then discussing from there.
What’s happening behind the scenes with my HowTruthful project
This comment is a level 1 lie! (I’m replying to it now with a level 5 lie.)
I don’t think 11 needs to be a community value. If someone comes in believing in the supernatural, in cryptozoology, UFOs, P = NP, or other ideas that haven’t been scientifically verified, who cares as long as they’re interested in changing their way of modeling the world to be more evidence-based?
Sympathize with them, but also with those affected by them.
I strongly upvoted this post because I believe epistemic empathy is important.
The word “irrational” has too many meanings, and I try to avoid it. And I try to direct criticism at arguments rather than people. But I do want to answer your final question as best I can. I’ll just phrase it as problems with arguments rather than people’s irrationality.
In my experience, the problem with arguments against COVID-19 vaccines is that they mainly consist of evidence that there’s risk involved in getting vaccinated. To usefully argue against getting vaccinated, one needs evidence not only that vaccine risks exist, but that they’re worse risks than those of remaining unvaccinated.
Similarly, arguments against masks are usually arguing against the wrong statement. They argue against “Masks always prevent transmission”, when to be useful, they should be arguing against “Masks reduce transmission”.
Good points are made in other comments about the significance of weakest bonds, but mostly I want to say that I like this post because it’s making a clear point with clear reasoning, and was very readable.
Have you tried to steel-man arguments for the idea that an upgrade to truth-seekers’ ability to find and scrutinize information, to build and share fuller pictures of topics at hand, would not grow popular?