A system to collect and refine questions, answers, and reasons.
- 4/10/17 Implementation using Firebase
- 8/25/16 Basic use case (recording questions) completed
- 7/11/16 Initial project publication, including design documents
There are currently just some ideas and preliminary designs and UI mockups (see below).
Many years ago, an idea that started me down the road to the notion of the Reasons project was an idea for a website that one could go to get a concise explication of the case, for and against, a proposition such as "You should vote for Ralph Nader".
On the page for the proposition, you could click "I agree", "I disagree", or "tell me more" for any of the supporting arguments, which themselves would have pages like "Voting is a responsibility of all citizens" or "Beltway experience is necessary for a president to be successful".
This system seemed like a better way to make up my mind than dredging through news articles and books, which can be fun to read at times, but often contain lots of information I don't really need. This makes sense as these sources are designed for a wide audience and generally don't leverage all of the flexibility w.r.t. content that HTML/HTTP offers.
In contrast to those more traditional sources, this hypothetical website could be personalized. By knowing your favored set of propositions (let's just call them beliefs) the site could more smoothly navigate you towards new ideas (even seemingly foreign ones) that you could adopt. Likewise, the system could be used to intentionally browse for ideas that challenge your mindset -- ideas that lie on the boundary between your world view and another -- ideas that require you to challenge some (but not too many) of your beliefs.
- Create a system that promotes positive/true memes1
- Create an efficient means of communicating arguments
- Create a database of arguments from which new insights can be derived
- Create a means of reducing spam (including redundancy) in internet communications, in part by creating a sink for such low-information content
- Develop some sort of tool for formal reasoning
- Help bots and other machines in any way. This system is for people.
See the design page for details.
- Ask/show questions (The most basic use case). A website where you can ask questions and see the list of questions that have been asked including information about who asked the question and when they asked it.
- Ask a Question
- List all Questions
- Answer a question. Navigate to the question detail and select "Add an answer". A form allows entering a statement.
- Provide reasons. Navigate to the statement detail and select "Add an argument in favor/against". A form allows entering a statement.
Please contact Matt Munz if you have any difficulty or to provide feedback (which would be very welcome).