There are more than a few misconceptions about the idea of god as it is a word that can mean wildly different things (as the article points). When people have discussions they tend to support or refute the more naive formulations of god and then generalise to all the rest. The hard thing for a rationalist is to suspend the decision of holding a view and feel comfortable in admiting ignorance. For example rationalists (in my experience) tend to be atheists instead of re-exploring the philosophical implications of the god concept in all its different formulations. In the case of people pulling away from irrational beliefs this might be essential as a cooling period but it can lead someone away from the search for truth into yet another belief system.
I will give you an example:
There are formulations that state that there is an approach towards life, connected to selflesness, that has a particular effect to the individual. It is not understood through the intelect but is experienced. Its result is direction of action. The trust of the indication of the direction they call faith. In more primitive cultures such formulations were connected to the idea of god for practical reasons but it is not neccessary.
So in this formulation (which we do not know if it is true), faith is not based on belief but on some kind of experiential knowledge. This is a rational proposition with the possibility of being true and it has abstracted the idea of God to “something outside of them that humans can by their nature interact with”.
Naive rationality can sometimes, philosophically speaking, throw out “the baby with the bathwater”.
(This is my first post so please kindly point me to my misconceptions if there are any)
It is not that strange when dealing with technological solutions to problems that we haven’t yet understood. You define your goal as creating a “commons of knowledge”. Consider a few points:
[1] There seems to be a confusion between information and knowledge. I know that the LW community is attempting to provide a rational methodology towards knowledge but I have not seen this been done in any way that is substantially different. It is discussion as always with more commitment towards rationality (which is great!).
[2] We do not have an efficent way of representing arguments. Argument mapping is an attempt to that direction. I personally tend to use a numbering convention inspired by Wittgenstein (I am using it here as an example). The bottom line is that discussions tend to be quite unordered and opinions tend to be conflated with truths (see [1]).
[3] From [1] and [2] as an outsider I do not understand what the root group represents. Are these the people that are more rational? Who has decided that?
So maybe that is what Plethora meant. I am myself really interested in this problem and have been thinking about it for some time. My recommendation would be to focus first in smaller issues such as how to represent an argument in a way that can extract a truth rating. But even that is too ambitious at the moment. How about a technological solution for representing arguments with clarity so that both sides:
can see what is being said in clearly labeled propositions.
can identify errors in logic and mark them down.
can weed out opinions from experimentally confirmed scientific facts.
can link to sources and have a way to recursively examine their ‘truth rating’ down to the most primary source.
These are just a few indicative challenges. There are also issues with methods for source verification exemplified by the ongoing scandals with data forging in psychology and neuroscience and the list goes on..