We’ve put together a proposal for 4ip to develop the online ThoughtVine: http://www.winterwell.com/temp/thoughtvine/thoughtvine.html

Fingers crossed…

Have you heard of us? we are the thoughtvine, where rational thought and discussion methods meet online argument-maps. We are a project sprung from KenYersel, focusing on the online mapping of arguments and on providing tools to improve it. We want to support informed rational and critical thinking, and have this reflected in the way information is presented and used. Furthermore, this needs to be combined with interfaces that make the interaction fun and informative.

This has important applications to approaching our ideals of democracy. Plato’s Republic highlights a deep limitation of democracy – it is only possible when every person can hear the speaker. While our own experience is that more than a few people having a sensible discussion is hard enough, Plato’s insight into the bottleneck of communication being a key limiting factor is still an important observation. However, the internet has overcome this – everyone can speak at once and we can listen to it all in our own time. So where do we find ourselves? We now find ourselves in an even more problematic situation: we have no idea how to make sense of it all. For instance, discussion forums quickly become full of irrelevant, wrong, confused, emotional, and nonsensical posts. The key issue is no longer to let everyone hear everyone, but to let everyone understand what we know, and to find ways to avoid needing to trudge through to all the uninteresting, irrelevant off-topic, meaningless or incorrect information.

Our dream is then of technology that lets us filter out and remove the information that is now believed to be incorrect. Naively, this sounds dangerous: rewriting history is a way of lieing to ourselves. What we want is a way to let us delve in the history – to recover the path to why we believe what we believe, and at the same time let us move on and show us only the conclusions. This is the technology we are developing.

You like the idea and want to get involved? Great, contact me!