Hi all,
I wrote this and then went away for a long weekend. I'm glad to see that everyone's enjoying it. After reading all of the comments, I've applied to join the Facebook group mentioned by Curiouskid.
I also agree with the suggestion that it would need to be a model of a personal Baysian Network with an attached decision theory tool to help users make logical choices about what they enter and how the assess probabilities. For example, instead of asking for a probability, it might ask how many times in a lifetime you'd expect to be wrong about something you feel this confident about. (How often are you likely to go to sleep on Tuesday and wake up on a day other than Wednesday? There's probably a lot of people who live their whole lives without that ever happening.)
Moreover, it would be web-based, with the decision theory tool making use of the database of individual networks to help form a view of communal knowledge. (This part would never be perfect, because the size of the sum of the individual networks would be so large that NP-hard considerations come into play.) It would need to be able to show its work in graphic format when one of its assessments is challenged.
I will read up on existing argument mapping tools and the deliberations of the aforementioned Facebook group. If no one else is already doing this, I think we should do it. Anyone have any knowledge on how to go about it?
I think it would be a case of having a period of discussing the problem with a growing wiki page (or something) containing information about the problem to be solved. After that, we could discuss the shape of the solution. Only after that, those with the technical knowledge could discuss the best way of actually implementing the solution. Then we could divide up the work between those with the time and appropriate skills and actually do it.
Sounds like a plan. Really what you want to do is contact everyone who's shown interest in helping you (including myself) in order to collude with them via email and then hold a discussion about how to move on at a scheduled time in an irc channel or somesuch.
Hello to all,
Like the rest of you, I'm an aspiring rationalist. I'm also a software engineer. I design software solutions automatically. It's the first place my mind goes when thinking about a problem.
Today's problem is the fact that our beliefs all rest on beliefs that rest on beliefs. Each one has a <100% probability of being correct. Thus, each belief built on it has an even smaller chance of being correct.
When we discover a belief is false (or less dramatically, revise its probability of being true), it propagates to all other beliefs that are wholly or partially based on it. This is an imperfect process and can take a long time (less in rationalists, but still limited by our speed of thought and inefficiency in recall).
I think that software can help with this. If a dedicated rationalist spent a large amount of time committing each belief of theirs to a database (including a rational assessment of its probability overall and given that all other beliefs that it rests on are true) as well as which other beliefs their beliefs rest on, you would eventually have a picture of your belief network. The software could then alert you to contradictions between your estimate of a belief's probability of being true and its estimate based on the truth estimate of the beliefs that it rests on. It could also find cyclical beliefs and other inconsistencies. Plus, when you update a belief based on new evidence, it can spit out a list of beliefs that should be reconsidered.
Obviously, this would only work if you are brutally honest about what you believe and fairly accurate about your assessments of truth probabilities. But I think this would be an awesome tool.
Does anyone know of an effort to build such a tool? If not, would anyone be interested in helping me design and build such a tool? I've only been reading LessWrong for a little while now, so there's probably a bunch of stuff that I haven't considered in the design of such a tool.
Your's rationally,
Avi