I share the puzzlement of others here that after a post where bioterrorism, cryonics and molecular nanotechnology are listed as being serious ideas that need serious consideration - by implication, to the degree that they might significantly impact upon the shape of one's 'web of beliefs' - that the topics of climate change and mass extinction are given such short shrift, and in terms that, from my point of view, only barely pass muster in the context of a community ostensibly dedicated to increasing rationality and overcoming bias.

I find little rationality and enormous bias in phrases like; "... why the extinction of various species that nobody cares about is such a bad thing".

The ecosystem of the planet is the most complex sub-system of the universe of which we are aware - containing, as it does, among many only partially explored sub-systems, a little over 6 billion human brains.

Given that one defining characteristic of complex systems is that they cannot be adequately modelled without the use of computational resources which exceed the resources of the system itself [colloquially understood as the 'law of unintended consequences'], it seems manifestly irrational to be dismissive of the possible consequences of massive intervention in a system upon which all humans rely utterly for existence.

Whether or not one chooses to give credence to the Gaia hypothesis, it is indisputable that the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans are conditioned by the totality of the ecosystem; and that the climate is in turn conditioned largely by these.

Applying probabilistic thinking to the likely impact of bio-terrorism on the one hand, and climate change on the other, we might consider that, um, five people have died as a result of bioterrorism (the work, as it appears, of a single maverick and thus not even firmly to be categorised as terrorism) since the second world war, while climate change has arguably killed tens of thousands already in floods, droughts, and the like, and certainly threatens human habitat as low-lying islands are inundated as sea-levels rise.

Upon these considerations it would appear bizarre to consider expending any energy whatsoever upon bioterrorism before climate change.

This looks very interesting - I will have a more thorough look and report back.

This reminds me of my own experience as a student who loved chemistry. We were told a series of useful untruths about what matter is as we went through the system.

Molecules and atoms were like billiard balls.

No, that was an approximation - atoms are made of nuclei and electrons which can be visualised as little planetary systems.

No, that was an approximation - electrons, protons, neutrons are more usefully considered as probability functions.

I didn't do science at university level, so I never got to the next level, but quantum theory was waiting for me there.

I did start an electronic engineering course, and there we learned another useful half-truth - the equations that describe the behaviour of a transistor. Only they don't. They describe a manageable function which is something like the behaviour of a transistor - the real-world behaviour is non-linear and discontinuous (truly horrible - I didn't finish the course...).

All of these useful untruths are like passwords - they allow us to reliably accomplish things in the world, but they do not give us real power over or understanding of the domain they address. Nevertheless, it would be hard to do without them.

I think that EY's problem with this point of view is a typical one that I find here at LW: a consideration of the rational thinker as loner in heroic mode, who is expected to ignore all contexts (social, environmental, whatever) that are not explicitly stated as part of the problem presentation. On the other hand, these students were in a physics class, and the question is obviously not part of normal conversation.

It's good to have positive responses!

Recommendations: I have a feeling that this will turn out to be relatively trivial - as I see it, it is essentially a parallel problem to the one that google solved, but with a data set many orders of magnitude smaller. The system surveys the relationships between propositions that have been supplied by users (I don't think it need/should infer connections for itself), and determines a relevance score.

Moderators: I am sure you are right, and that this could easily be a fraught area. Ideally, the system would be flexible enough to allow for groups to self-identify and self-manage in a variety of ways - unlike wikipedia, where a single ecosystem is the be-all and end-all, there is space here for a wide range of ecosystems - groups would certainly rise and fall, fail, feud, coalesce; but no propositions will disappear when a group associated with it collapses - the propositions remain for other users to find and work with. The system should be set up as an evolutionary playground, with mechanisms that are rigged to marginally favour groups that coalesce more, flame less.some sort of ranking system would allow neglected propositions/networks to fall to the bottom.

Groups: I believe that as humans are a social species, human communities are essential structures and the necessary (but not sufficient) locus for creative responses to problems (even if the responses are associated with individuals, those individuals will generally be more effective within a supportive community). However, the communities of the past generally used restrictive and non-rational codes as social glue (variously, religion/tribal culture/geographic isolation/economic dependence/political domination etc) People who wish to use their consciousness to improve their lives have often had a hard time in relation to these codes, and at an accelerating pace in the last century, have abandoned traditional communities - leaving these dominated by the happily or cynically non-rational. Secular cities with weak communities, fundamentalist rural areas with strong but misguided communities. I am interested in developing tools and mechanisms which can allow people to form communities on the basis of conscious assent. I am enough of a darwinist not to want to attempt to say what I think those communities should aspire to.

I would use such a tool to attempt to set out my own web of beliefs and interests, in the hope of connecting with like minded individuals. My hope is, that with a large subset of the 'ground rules' clearly communicated and the relationships between them identified, that highly effective development of new/difficult/ill defined areas could be worked on. I would also use such a platform to make proposals like the one we are discussing here. I would expect certain groups to turn up quickly; cults; obsessives and the like - but I fondly hope that these will either remain tiny or will disintegrate or, most likely, find that the structural characteristics of the tool tends to expose inconsistencies in their thinking, and leave of their own accord. I would expect that political groups might follow the same trajectory, albeit more slowly and with less fireworks. I would hope that purposeful individuals with positive and constructive intentions will find it a more congenial arena that wider forums or more narrow blogs.

A concrete example: as a founder of a small school, I attempted to establish the principal policies of the school as a network of 'patterns', ranging from fundamentals (Support the developing child; Learning is part of living; Self-governance; Family involvement is fundamental; Ethical consciousness and action) to intermediates (Relationship with the state) to specifics ( In the absence of a tool like the one proposed, collaboration with other people involved was impractical, and we retreated to the standard solution of sets of prose policies, which no-one ever reads, and which are inaccessible and becoming less relevant to actual practice with every passing week.

As to what groups might accomplish, I can say this very succinctly; they might well succeed in expanding the range of metaphysics available to humanity. By which I mean, expanding the number of ways in which we can usefully communicate about phenomena. As this seems to me to be the only reliable yardstick by which to measure 'progress', I modestly suggest that this might be a Good Thing.

Business Plans: given some sort of 'freemium' model, than yes, users/groups wanting privacy / security would be able to pay for various levels of same, or presumably for implementation of stand-alone installations on their own servers. Open-source software offers successful models for this (Drupal is one example).

"basically, it's an interactive prose design document" - I hope not. The structured and templated nature of the Pattern Language approach has a higher order than prose, and should increase both the information content and the utility of the resulting collection of propositions. The book 'A Pattern Language' , which was published in 1977, and conceived years previously, works exactly like a hypertext document, with directed but essentially free-form navigation the implied mode of use. The requirement that all content is directed towards the resolution of the particular problem/proposition at hand is rather powerful in practice, and the requirement that each proposition should be assigned larger scale propositions which it helps to refine, and needs smaller scale propositions to flesh it out in turn imposes a need for clarity of thought about the outcome of the system as a whole.

Engagement with the project: at this stage, comment and discussion is what is needed.

Thanks for the comments. I will try to address them.

I am less concerned about hosting/maintenance than I am about development costs. If it is not successful, then it won't be large, or need large bandwidth - costs will be low. If it is successful, then some sort of freemium, ad-supported model may be possible. Of course, the territory between these two extremes might be awkward. Joel Spolsky [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky] has taken his Stack_Overflow engine [http://stackoverflow.com/] and gotten VC funding for an attempt to roll it out as a social network platform [http://stackexchange.com/].

All sorts of propositions are acceptable, as I tried to make clear - although I do think that it will be important to seed the site with 'good' models - perhaps some of the 'sequences' here at LW, for instance. It doesn't matter to me if the system is used by a cult who think that John Lennon was the second coming of the Messiah.

On the 'nit-picking' point, there is a characteristic of the model offered by 'A Pattern Language' which might help - the Conclusion section of the proposition is stated deliberately in open terms, rather than attempting to be rigourously prescriptive. So, instead of 'Thou shalt not kill', one might conclude that killing people is almost never justifiable, and offer links to other propositions on, say 'self-defence', and 'assisted suicide'. One need not aim for a structure that would satisfy a formal logic analysis (although there is no reason not to attempt such). My own propositions would be a set which describe my own web of beliefs, in a way that is cloudy enough to admit nuanced interpretation, but clear enough to be useful. I would hope that this would make it possible;1 for others to register interest in them, and 2 for me to accept refinements suggested by others. I think that many of EY's posts conclude in the same way - offering tools and strategies, rather than hard-and-fast rules.

I think you are right about forking. However, I would contrast this with the status quo. I have been trying to locate my own 'community of interest' on the web for over a decade - I believed that the internet would allow like-minded people - particularly ones with minority interests that could be adequately communicated in words - to find each other. Sites like LW are the poor best that I have found. Why poor best? Well, while there is much of interest here, I am already concerned that certain ideas I hold dear may prove to be anathema here. EY set the site up, and it has a clear and strong thrust. It would be foolish/rude/ineffectual to push ideas which are antithetical to that thrust here. So, sites like this are too rigid - forking is not allowed. More general forums are too loose for the concept of forking to even have a meaning. You see, I would be happy to work with even 5 people at a very high level of agreement. I imagine that there would be many sets of groups which would share broad foundations of shared propositions, but grow increasingly fragmented as the propositions began to operate at more detailed levels. Perhaps it will be important to allow associations of groups,

Precisely these sort of considerations are what I hoped for. Even if this remains a thought experiment, I will find it immensely valuable.

The powerful characteristic of Chris. Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' is not immediately obvious - the patterns themselves are not rigourously researched (the authors admit this, and use a rating system to make it clear their own level of confidence in their proposals), and many do not stand the test of time. There are a few which seem to me to be worth paying deep attention to, but I won't go into that here.

The real invention is the idea of a pattern language. What it is. The work of an architect involves dealing at a wide variety of scales, and along the whole gamut from subjectivity to objectivity. It involves crossing and re-crossing between a number of only loosely related sets of systems; all with the aim of producing something acceptable in terms of function, aesthetics, economy and constructional/structural viability. In short, it is a complex task in an irreducibly (this side of any putative singularity) complex environment.

Humans are not good at dealing with complexity - there is well established research on the limits of the human brain in handling more than a few ideas at once. This is why reductionist practices have served us so well. However, reductionist practices are all but useless in complex environments, unless you are happy to ignore aspects of that environment which you can't handle- the error of the logical positivists.

Pattern languages offer a tool for managing our understanding of a complex environment, without self-defeating reduction (the error of Notes on the Synthesis of Form: in order to arrive at his tree-like diagrams of problems, Alexander had to develop an algorithm that decided which of the relationships between parts of the problem which had been identified should be ignored. The approach of 'Notes' involves deliberately ignoring parts of the analysis of the problem).

Each pattern allows for reductive thinking at an appropriate level of perspective, while the explicit links maintained between patterns at larger and smaller scales in a non tree-like 'semi-lattice' help maintain in consciousness and in the design process all the connections which make the situation complex in the first place.

I will admit to being an architect.