How I see knowledge aggregation

I definitely second all three of these points. That having been said, aside from (a) (which is for sure an important outside-view thing to keep in mind, but also doesn’t directly inform the design and development of such a concept, except insofar as it strengthens the suggestion to do a “lit survey” of prior projects like this), these points seem like they don’t so much suggest not doing the thing, but rather suggest doing it differently, or adding certain features or design elements.

Specifically:

1. There are ways to place such claims in context (simple hyperlinking goes a long way, and excerpting/transclusion of contextual information goes even further). Could this sufficiently “conversationalize” bare claims, without destroying their atomic nature (which lets them be composed in the way this tool does)? Maybe not, maybe yes. It seems worth trying out.

2. If the app turns out to be useless for the general public but useful for existing groups or communities, then that’s certainly a failure of the design intent, but possibly still a success more broadly speaking.

Perhaps these considerations make the concept not worth developing; that seems possible, but not necessarily so.

Well then, the prototype did have some usefulness.

c) Yes, a shared context and precise definitions are definitely needed. Even then, I worry that there exist important debates that for some fundamental reason would not fit the format. Though I don't have examples in mind.

b) Just think of it as rationalist twitter (I'm joking). Alternatively, perhaps there could be some additional tool that would help extract a graph of reasoning from text and conversation.

a) Do you have examples?

I understand the concern, but I'm hoping that as claims about the future are explicit and distinguished from conditional claims, this might not be a problem. That is, if the user has already set P(Trump nominated) = 0.01 and P(Trump president) = 0.009, they will be satisfied with having rejected the claims, and will be able to consider that P(Trump is president | Trump was nominated) = 0.8, in isolation. Also, the conditional P(Trump was nominated | Trump is president) is obviously almost 1, and that should prevent anyone from setting P(Trump is president | Trump was nominated) too low. Also, P(Trump nominated) and P(Trump president) should always have reasonable values on prediction markets, which would set some reasonable bounds on the conditionals.

More generally, I suspect that the Multiple-Stage Fallacy comes from confusing event probabilities with conditional probabilities, and ultimately, I believe that all problems and confusions can be solved with more rigour.

I voted on a claim and it made a claim in the “related claims” list go red. I clicked on the red claim, and… apparently… something with the bounds? This badly needs explanatory text!

Bounds on conditional probabilities are checked and if violated, the claim turns red. There are two inequalities checked. First $P(A\cup B)\le 1$ which translates into $P\left(A|B\right)\ge \frac{P\left(A\right)+P\left(B\right)-1}{P\left(B\right)}$ . And second $P(A\cap B)\le P\left(A\right)$ which translates into $P\left(A|B\right)\le \frac{P\left(A\right)}{P\left(B\right)}$ . Currently the first rule is violated, but only because in the code I wrote "$<$" instead of "$\le$".

The bounds suggest how to correct the conditional probability to solve the incoherence. The condition and the event can also be voted on to solve it, but it's hard to figure out which way they should be changed. On the other hand, maybe there should be no suggestions, and you should sit down and honestly figure out which of the three probabilities is wrong.

Seeing you here, I started wondering what our utility discussion would look like in this format. The claim that continuity can be violated would fit fine, but the full counterargument would be harder to decompose. And the whole other part we never agreed on is even harder (on the other hand, it would be a good thing if demonic threads were impossible to have in the tool).

This post impressed me, I think, because it didn't start out saying there was a prototype. I may have stopped reading at "prototype" if that line came first. There's a huge "blech" factor for me at the idea of giving feedback on yet another partially created bit of software.

Reading the ideas about what the tool would (hopefully) do had me thinking, "this sounds cool, but is anyone ever going to actually make it?"

Then, near the end, the prototype is revealed. I thought, "Wow. Huh. I'm impressed they didn't just talk about an idea that never goes anywhere. They executed. And the prototype seems neat when I play with it."

Well, I'm conflicted. On one hand, you're totally right, but on the other, I'm not that confident that the prototype actually adds much value to the post, aside from clickbait. But then again, I wrote it in part for the engagement, so not using it is silly.

Oh well, let's take a step back and realize that this kind of inability to appeal to readers is exactly the true reason I propose the kind of system as described above.

By the way, did you open the link? Did it work? Feel free to actually vote on claims and create new ones.