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The End of Bullshit at the hands of Critical Rationalism
The public debate is rife with fallacies, half-lies, evasions of counter-arguments, etc. Many of these are easy to spot for a careful and intelligent reader/viewer - particularly one who is acquainted with the most common logical fallacies and cognitive biases. However, most people arguably often fail to spot them (if they didn't, then these fallacies and half-lies wouldn't be as effective as they are). Blatant lies are often (but not always) recognized as such, but these more subtle forms of argumentative cheating (which I shall use as a catch-all phrase from now on) usually aren't (which is why they are more frequent).
The fact that these forms of argumentative cheating are a) very common and b) usually easy to point out suggests that impartial referees who painstakingly pointed out these errors could do a tremendous amount of good for the standards of the public debate. What I am envisioning is a website like factcheck.org but which would not focus primarily on fact-checking (since, like I said, most politicians are already wary of getting caught out with false statements of fact) but rather on subtler forms of argumentative cheating.
Ideally, the site would go through election debates, influential opinion pieces, etc, more or less line by line, pointing out fallacies, biases, evasions, etc. For the reader who wouldn't want to read all this detailed criticism, the site would also give an overall rating of the level of argumentative cheating (say from 0 to 10) in a particular article, televised debate, etc. Politicians and others could also be given an overall cheating rating, which would be a function of their cheating ratings in individual articles and debates. Like any rating system, this system would serve both to give citizens reliable information of which arguments, which articles, and which people, are to be trusted, and to force politicians and other public figures to argue in a more honest fashion. In other words, it would have both have an information-disseminating function and a socializing function.
How would such a website be set up? An obvious suggestion is to run it as a wiki, where anyone could contribute. Of course, this wiki would have to be very heavily moderated - probably more so than Wikipedia - since people are bound to disagree on whether controversial figures' arguments really are fallacious or not. Presumably you will be forced to banish trolls and political activists on a grand scale, but hopefully this wouldn't be an unsurmountable problem.
I'm thinking that the website should be strongly devoted to neutrality or objectivity, as is Wikipedia. To further this end, it is probably better to give the arguer under evaluation the benefit of the doubt in borderline cases. This would be a way of avoiding endless edit wars and ensure objectivity. Also, it's a way of making the contributors to the site concencrate their efforts on the more outrageous cases of cheating (which there are many of in most political debates and articles, in my view).
The hope is that a website like this would make the public debate transparent to an unprecedented degree. Argumentative cheaters thrive because their arguments aren't properly scrutinized. If light is shone on the public debate, it will become clear who cheats and who doesn't, which will give people strong incentives not to cheat. If people respected the site's neutrality, its objectivity and its integrity, and read what it said, it would in effect become impossible for politicians and others to bullshit the way they do today. This could mark the beginning of the realization of an old dream of philosophers: The End of Bullshit at the hands of systematic criticism. Important names in this venerable tradition include David Hume, Rudolf Carnap and the other logical positivists, and not the least, the guy standing statue outside my room, the "critical rationalist" (an apt name for this enterprise) Karl Popper.
Even though politics is an area where bullshit is perhaps especially common, and one where it does an exceptional degree of harm (e.g. vicious political movements such as Nazism are usually steeped in bullshit) it is also common and harmful in many other areas, such as science, religion, advertising. Ideally critical rationalists should go after bullshit in all areas (as far as possible). My hunch is, though, that it would be a good idea to start off with politics, since it's an area that gets lots of attention and where well-written criticism could have an immediate impact.
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A common question here is how the LW community can grow more rapidly. Another is why seemingly rational people choose not to participate.
I've read all of HPMOR and some of the sequences, attended a couple of meetups, am signed up for cryonics, and post here occasionally. But, that's as far as I go. In this post, I try to clearly explain why I don't participate more and why some of my friends don't participate at all and have warned me not to participate further.
Rationality doesn't guarantee correctness. Given some data, rational thinking can get to the facts accurately, i.e. say what "is". But, deciding what to do in the real world requires non-rational value judgments to make any "should" statements. (Or, you could not believe in free will. But most LWers don't live like that.) Additionally, huge errors are possible when reasoning beyond limited data. Many LWers seem to assume that being as rational as possible will solve all their life problems. It usually won't; instead, a better choice is to find more real-world data about outcomes for different life paths, pick a path (quickly, given the time cost of reflecting), and get on with getting things done. When making a trip by car, it's not worth spending 25% of your time planning to shave off 5% of your time driving. In other words, LW tends to conflate rationality and intelligence.
In particular, AI risk is overstated There are a bunch of existential threats (asteroids, nukes, pollution, unknown unknowns, etc.). It's not at all clear if general AI is a significant threat. It's also highly doubtful that the best way to address this threat is writing speculative research papers, because I have found in my work as an engineer that untested theories are usually wrong for unexpected reasons, and it's necessary to build and test prototypes in the real world. My strong suspicion is that the best way to reduce existential risk is to build (non-nanotech) self-replicating robots using existing technology and online ordering of materials, and use the surplus income generated to brute-force research problems, but I don't know enough about manufacturing automation to be sure.
LW has a cult-like social structure. The LW meetups (or, the ones I experienced) are very open to new people. Learning the keywords and some of the cached thoughts for the LW community results in a bunch of new friends and activities to do. However, involvement in LW pulls people away from non-LWers. One way this happens is by encouraging contempt for less-rational Normals. I imagine the rationality "training camps" do this to an even greater extent. LW recruiting (hpmor, meetup locations near major universities) appears to target socially awkward intellectuals (incl. me) who are eager for new friends and a "high-status" organization to be part of, and who may not have many existing social ties locally.
Many LWers are not very rational. A lot of LW is self-help. Self-help movements typically identify common problems, blame them on (X), and sell a long plan that never quite achieves (~X). For the Rationality movement, the problems (sadness! failure! future extinction!) are blamed on a Lack of Rationality, and the long plan of reading the sequences, attending meetups, etc. never achieves the impossible goal of Rationality (impossible because "is" cannot imply "should"). Rationalists tend to have strong value judgments embedded in their opinions, and they don't realize that these judgments are irrational.
LW membership would make me worse off. Though LW membership is an OK choice for many people needing a community (joining a service organization could be an equally good choice), for many others it is less valuable than other activities. I'm struggling to become less socially awkward, more conventionally successful, and more willing to do what I enjoy rather than what I "should" do. LW meetup attendance would work against me in all of these areas. LW members who are conventionally successful (e.g. PhD students at top-10 universities) typically became so before learning about LW, and the LW community may or may not support their continued success (e.g. may encourage them, with only genuine positive intent, to spend a lot of time studying Rationality instead of more specific skills). Ideally, LW/Rationality would help people from average or inferior backgrounds achieve more rapid success than the conventional path of being a good student, going to grad school, and gaining work experience, but LW, though well-intentioned and focused on helping its members, doesn't actually create better outcomes for them.
"Art of Rationality" is an oxymoron. Art follows (subjective) aesthetic principles; rationality follows (objective) evidence.
I desperately want to know the truth, and especially want to beat aging so I can live long enough to find out what is really going on. HPMOR is outstanding (because I don't mind Harry's narcissism) and LW is is fun to read, but that's as far as I want to get involved. Unless, that is, there's someone here who has experience programming vision-guided assembly-line robots who is looking for a side project with world-optimization potential.