> Taking as an example my own experience, I've been jotting down my thoughts on several social, political and personal topics, dedicating myself to it entirely so that I can gather the thoughts of each side, but also read articles about it, to develop my own opinion with all that I've found. I also try to update them regularly to see if they're still in line with my current opinion, or if the latter changed.
I assume after some time you start to assemble a fairly high dimensional model of reality on these various topics. During this journey, has it ever caught your attention that the articles you read assert that reality is(!) a certain way, but due to your greater depth of knowledge, you know that the article is not actually true? (essentially: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) It's easy to overlook this because it's basically the norm, it's "just" "how it is", it's "just" standard bias, "everyone does it", etc. But objectively, what is happening is that a false model of reality is continuously pushed into people's minds. Sometimes the falsities are obvious and egregious, and other times they are benign (or at least, seem to be benign). Regardless, the process continues, and hardly anyone realizes that this is how it (the manufacturing of reality) works - people just perceive it as "reading/watching the news".
> I didn't know Kialo (thanks for the discovery), and I truly like the concept even though there are many flaws. The thing I disagree with the most is the pros/cons system, which incites one to have a radical opinion on every subject and prevents from having a nuanced view, something which I find particularly damaging these days as most people will tend to view everything as black or white and just put the gray part in the trash can. Sure, one can assert that a nuanced view is only made of some pros and some cons, but I would find it far more valuable if they were not separated. Still, I think Kialo benefits from great bases, and hopefully it might be used to build something even better.
Agreed, very good point...and this point has many, many siblings. There is a surprising amount of complexity within reality, designing a system to reconcile the millions of perspectives of it (people perceive reality via perspectives, but typically believe they are seeing reality itself) is no small feat. My intuition of how to go about it is to generally speaking store massive amounts of "facts" (ideas?), and then communicate bundles of those facts in numerous different forms, explicitly stating the ~techniques/perspectives that are being used in the communication, and explicitly stating that what is being communicated is not reality itself, but a carefully and intentionally constructed perspective (slice, subset) of reality.
To my style of thinking, this could be plausibly very impactful - if you combine this with the Gel Mann idea above, I feel like it would make it rather difficult for people to avoid putting two and two together, in turn increasing the popularity of the platform (one would hope).
This amount of complexity can seem a bit daunting, but keep in mind: there is no requirement for perfection, the system only needs to be as good as it needs to be (a level which is unknown, of course).
> Regarding the user base, this is also something essential to take into consideration. If such a selective system ever exists, I still think it would be beneficial for the discussions to be viewable by everyone (without necessarily allowing anybody to post) just to avoid the "gatekeeping" effect and enable everyone to enrich their minds.
This is how I think about it too. Well, some I think would be private (depending on how far you want to take this idea), but the overwhelming majority would be public read-only visibility.
As for users who have write access to the system, I think this is an extremely complex issue (but due to this complexity, it is also filled with opportunity). My intuition is that you'd want to be very restrictive with who gets on (and stays on), and you'd need to have multiple levels of permissions. For people to ascend to higher levels, they would (among other things) first be required to develop the ability to think in certain ways. I find this idea very appealing, because poor thinking skills are a fundamental root cause of everything....so, having a system where quality (near perfect) thinking is not just a goal, but is mandatory....this would be something the world has never seen before.
> Don't you think that for some topics, especially those which have been discussed for centuries, repetition can be useful to prove that the subject being discussed is still relevant in today's world, in spite of all that happened in that timespan?
Most definitely. There are many ideas out there that are so important, I consider it an absolute travesty that we discuss them in the low-dimensional, deceitful ways we do. No wonder things only get better slowly, and mostly only for a subset of the global population - expecting otherwise under the current system is silly.
> I also think that talking continuously about a particular subject may help to raise new solutions, questions or thinking paths that would otherwise never have been discovered. (I think there are some parallels to be made with science here; there are several discoveries that were only found by long-drawn-out research done by intellectual geniuses, and without them, we would probably still not be aware of the theory of relativity to cite the most common example.)
"Talking continuously" (extreme and deliberate pedantry) is a feature, not a bug. But the current way we go about this...disorganized, dishonest/inaccurate, distributed & non-cumulative, etc is absolute madness in my mind. Like, I can't wrap my head around how intelligent people can work in highly organized corporations and roles, seeing and living how things can be designed intelligently....and then look at the way we run ~"the world" and not have any "wtf is going on here?" alarms going off in their head.
> I assume after some time you start to assemble a fairly high dimensional model of reality on these various topics. During this journey, has it ever caught your attention that the articles you read assert that reality is(!) a certain way, but due to your greater depth of knowledge, you know that the article is not actually true?
To be honest, I think there's still quite a long way to go before I can reach this point. I've only started this process a few months ago, and it takes many, many hours to discuss all the ins and outs of every subject. I wish I could spend my days doing this, but unfortunately I also have social obligations such as work and studies :-). Perhaps in a few years from now I'll be able to truly feel this for a variety of subjects, but that's far from being the case right now and the only articles which might make me experience this feeling generally are articles from mainstream media talking about stuff I've known in detail for a long period of time (most particularly video games and computer science); in these particular cases, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect is definitely real. Now, when there is a topic I know absolutely nothing about, I'll still read many news articles and assume that all of them are true to begin with, just so that I can compare data and opinions. Only then will I try to read more specialized works, such as books, in order to see to what extent what I've found corresponds to what whizzes have to say on this subject. Talking about newspaper articles, I also try to read fewer "breaking news" articles, but rather try to take a more distant approach which consists in reading articles several months after events occurred in order to get a clearer view of what has happened and the impact of the event in question. The main drawback is that I'm not necessarily fully aware of what's going on in the world 24/7, but at least I find it generates way less anxiety and enables to take a step back on what's happening.
> My intuition is that you'd want to be very restrictive with who gets on (and stays on), and you'd need to have multiple levels of permissions. For people to ascend to higher levels, they would (among other things) first be required to develop the ability to think in certain ways. I find this idea very appealing, because poor thinking skills are a fundamental root cause of everything....so, having a system where quality (near perfect) thinking is not just a goal, but is mandatory....this would be something the world has never seen before.
Absolutely agreed! You perfectly summarized what I had in mind.
Everything else that you said is very interesting; by the bye, it is the very first time I have such an in-depth discussion with someone on HN and it's really great to see where it can lead and all the ideas it may generate. Thank you!
I assume after some time you start to assemble a fairly high dimensional model of reality on these various topics. During this journey, has it ever caught your attention that the articles you read assert that reality is(!) a certain way, but due to your greater depth of knowledge, you know that the article is not actually true? (essentially: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) It's easy to overlook this because it's basically the norm, it's "just" "how it is", it's "just" standard bias, "everyone does it", etc. But objectively, what is happening is that a false model of reality is continuously pushed into people's minds. Sometimes the falsities are obvious and egregious, and other times they are benign (or at least, seem to be benign). Regardless, the process continues, and hardly anyone realizes that this is how it (the manufacturing of reality) works - people just perceive it as "reading/watching the news".
> I didn't know Kialo (thanks for the discovery), and I truly like the concept even though there are many flaws. The thing I disagree with the most is the pros/cons system, which incites one to have a radical opinion on every subject and prevents from having a nuanced view, something which I find particularly damaging these days as most people will tend to view everything as black or white and just put the gray part in the trash can. Sure, one can assert that a nuanced view is only made of some pros and some cons, but I would find it far more valuable if they were not separated. Still, I think Kialo benefits from great bases, and hopefully it might be used to build something even better.
Agreed, very good point...and this point has many, many siblings. There is a surprising amount of complexity within reality, designing a system to reconcile the millions of perspectives of it (people perceive reality via perspectives, but typically believe they are seeing reality itself) is no small feat. My intuition of how to go about it is to generally speaking store massive amounts of "facts" (ideas?), and then communicate bundles of those facts in numerous different forms, explicitly stating the ~techniques/perspectives that are being used in the communication, and explicitly stating that what is being communicated is not reality itself, but a carefully and intentionally constructed perspective (slice, subset) of reality.
To my style of thinking, this could be plausibly very impactful - if you combine this with the Gel Mann idea above, I feel like it would make it rather difficult for people to avoid putting two and two together, in turn increasing the popularity of the platform (one would hope).
This amount of complexity can seem a bit daunting, but keep in mind: there is no requirement for perfection, the system only needs to be as good as it needs to be (a level which is unknown, of course).
> Regarding the user base, this is also something essential to take into consideration. If such a selective system ever exists, I still think it would be beneficial for the discussions to be viewable by everyone (without necessarily allowing anybody to post) just to avoid the "gatekeeping" effect and enable everyone to enrich their minds.
This is how I think about it too. Well, some I think would be private (depending on how far you want to take this idea), but the overwhelming majority would be public read-only visibility.
As for users who have write access to the system, I think this is an extremely complex issue (but due to this complexity, it is also filled with opportunity). My intuition is that you'd want to be very restrictive with who gets on (and stays on), and you'd need to have multiple levels of permissions. For people to ascend to higher levels, they would (among other things) first be required to develop the ability to think in certain ways. I find this idea very appealing, because poor thinking skills are a fundamental root cause of everything....so, having a system where quality (near perfect) thinking is not just a goal, but is mandatory....this would be something the world has never seen before.
> Don't you think that for some topics, especially those which have been discussed for centuries, repetition can be useful to prove that the subject being discussed is still relevant in today's world, in spite of all that happened in that timespan?
Most definitely. There are many ideas out there that are so important, I consider it an absolute travesty that we discuss them in the low-dimensional, deceitful ways we do. No wonder things only get better slowly, and mostly only for a subset of the global population - expecting otherwise under the current system is silly.
> I also think that talking continuously about a particular subject may help to raise new solutions, questions or thinking paths that would otherwise never have been discovered. (I think there are some parallels to be made with science here; there are several discoveries that were only found by long-drawn-out research done by intellectual geniuses, and without them, we would probably still not be aware of the theory of relativity to cite the most common example.)
"Talking continuously" (extreme and deliberate pedantry) is a feature, not a bug. But the current way we go about this...disorganized, dishonest/inaccurate, distributed & non-cumulative, etc is absolute madness in my mind. Like, I can't wrap my head around how intelligent people can work in highly organized corporations and roles, seeing and living how things can be designed intelligently....and then look at the way we run ~"the world" and not have any "wtf is going on here?" alarms going off in their head.