Bruce Lewis

This is the script for a video I made about my current full-time project. I think the LW community will understand its value better than the average person I talk to does. Hi, I'm Bruce Lewis. I'm a computer programmer. For a long time, I've been fascinated by how computers can help people process information. Lately I've been thinking about and experimenting with ways that computers help people process lines of reasoning. This video will catch you up on the series of thoughts and experiments that led me to HowTruthful, and tell you why I'm excited about it. This is going to be a long video, but if you're interested in how people arrive at truth, it will be worth it. Ten or 15 years ago I noticed how online discussion forums really don't work well for persuading people of your arguments. Instead of focusing on facts, people get sidetracked, make personal attacks, and go in circles. Very rarely do you see anyone change their mind based on new evidence. This got me thinking about what might be a better format than posts, comments and replies for arguments. I thought about each statement being its own thing, and statements would be linked by whether one statement argues for or against another statement. If you repeat a statement it would use the existing thing rather than making a new one, making it easier to avoid going in circles. And it would encourage staying focused on the topic at hand and not getting sidetracked. I kept this idea in the back of my head, but didn't do anything with it. A few years later, I was baffled by the success of Twitter. Its only distinguishing feature at that time was that you were limited to 140 characters. Everybody complained about this. But I started to think the limit was the secret to its success. Yes, it's a pain that you're limited to 140 characters. You have to work hard to make what you want to say concise enough to fit. But the great thing was that everyone else also had to work hard to be concise. So the idea of forced c