I am interested in the potential of automated reasoning and how this is done in groups. Since LessWrong has done such a good job of promoting and demonstrating feasible rationality, I am asking for insight as to how this could work with 'dialogue' or reasoned debate. I have a general concept in mind about how GitHub could be used and wondered if anyone could share their thoughts on how they see 'version control' been used to help people make better decisions and come to a concensus easier.
If templates could work well for certain topics, replicating and extending functionality would be easier and could become a standard operational perspective when discussing issues and solving problems. I realize I need a unique and novel angle to exploit and initially I want to explore the extent to which programming elements can be used to extend the functionality of adding and approving elements of the discussion. This would also include the evolution of the templates and naturally the topics they can handle for improving scope.
The problem I have, other than demonstrating the specific benefits of choosing GitHub as the mechanism to evolve 'reasoned debate', is that a certain methodology's effectiveness and proven worth to reach consensus would have to be shown for each type of argumentation topic. I am not assuming this would be hard to do and would count towards an initial MVP of the project.
Any feedback or alternative perspectives worth considering and/or potential implementation issues would be highly appreciated. :)
Using version control for law making doesn't change much about citizens ability to suggest changes for laws. What it does do is that it makes it easier to track who proposed a change. If a lobbyist for example sends a congressman a pull request for a law it's a lot easier to understand and track how the law came about. Version control increases transparency and it also has the prospect of making law making more efficient as it's easier to keep track of amendments that way then by mailing Word documents around which is the status quo.
The process of how the law was changed in that instance isn't any different then how you can change the code of an Open Source project. I know of no open source project that's using version control for the discussions about what changes to make and having discussion to find consensus.
Instead of looking at version control it would make more sense to look at software that's actually designed for consensus finding. Various liquid democracy software provides for consensus processes. Taiwan's e-government initiative is also worth checking out.
Here's it's worth noting that judgement and critique is not the necessarily the rational way to come to consensus. If you look at the processes CFAR developed seeking to understand another, identify cruxes and explaining why you hold your position can be a lot better.