I have an extremely crazy idea - framing political and economic arguments in the form of a 'massively multiplayer' computer-verifiable model.

Human brains are really terrible at keeping track of a lot of information at once and sussing out how subtle interactions between parts of a system lead to the large-scale behavior of the whole system. This is why economists frequently build economic models in the form of computer simulations to try to figure out how various economic policies could affect the real world.

That's all well and good, but economic models built in this way usually have two major downsides:

• They have very limited scope. They basically consist of all the different factors that the authors know about, which, even for the most dedicated model-builders, is a pretty small fraction of reality.

• They carry the author's own biases.

Now the 'standard' resolution of this in economics is: "Reproduce the model and modify it if you think it's flawed." But reproducing models is an extremely time-wasting effort. It doesn't make sense to reproduce a huge model if you just want to make a few modifications.

What I'm proposing is to instead have a monolithic large-scale economic model residing on the internet, written and displayed in a graphical format (nodes and interconnection between nodes) that "anyone can edit" - anyone can add interactions between nodes and others can review these modifications until a 'consensus' emerges over time (and if it doesn't, some level of agreed-upon 'uncertainty' can be introduced into the model as well).

So basically, what I'm proposing is a combination of wiki-style editing freedom and economic models. Imagine being able to insert and play around with factors like the cost of healthcare and the probability that the average person will develop some kind of rare disease, or factors like the influence of tax rate or cost of labor on the decision-making processes of a company. Imagine if instead of endless political debates in various public forums, various sides could just stick in their numbers in the system (numbers that hopefully come from publicly-verifiable research) and let the computer 'battle it out' and give a concrete answer.