Human Rationality
I look forward to the future. I'd like to do what I can to make it turn out better than it might. I'm looking for others who would like to help.
The goal of this project is to create a tool that can mediate human interaction to improve communication, remove bias, moderate emotion and conform language to make valid statements and to avoid common mistakes as we attempt to win arguments, describe the world to our advantage and generally screw up the process.
In my view, Rationality is not an academic debate subject. I don't care how you define rationality, I'm only concerned with the simple definition of thinking and communicating with logic and making valid statements rather than being driven by our emotions. I'll let the philosophers debate exactly what type of rationality is best or causes fewer mistakes.
This is not a site that would interest most people. It is entirely concerned with an unnatural act. That is, we focus on stepping out of our human animal communication process and step up to a higher level of interaction. It is not going to be easy. And we need help. Software is the tool of choice to help us achieve this higher level communication.
An open source software tool similar to a word processor is the present concept. People can write their side of a story, assist the software to translate it into valid statements and publish a document that contains a perfect picture of the author's viewpoint, goals, values and beliefs concerning the issue under discussion. The software prevents the author from making invalid statements when he/she describes the world.
The document is given to the opposing party to add the other side of the story. Again only valid statements are allowed. The document is published and now contains two opposing viewpoints. But it does not contain statements that make unsupportable claims, absolute statements or value judgements without clearly linking that to your opinion.
The fundamental goal is to make these two animals look at their situation, describe it with I-statements rather than absolute statements that are primarily argument bait.
The time for animal games is over. If we don't step up one level, we are going to be in serious trouble when any angry guy in a garage can create airborne Ebola and express himself as he wishes.
What is a valid statement? It is one that can not be argued with, given that we accept I statements as valid or true. "The sky is blue" is not a valid statement. "I see the sky is blue" or "I believe the sky is blue" are valid because we don't challenge I statements. It is when you assume God like status and claim to know how the universe really is that we have problems. I probably would not argue with your statement that the sky is blue, but I probably would argue with a lot of other statements of that same form. So stop using absolutes. You don't really know what is real, you only have beliefs of what is real. Some stronger than others. And if you feel the need to argue about how you really do 'know' something, I have no patience. This site is about solving problems, not about being "right".
Why accept I statements? We have to accept something or else give up and fight. If a person wants to lie about what they see or believe, then there is little you can do about it. But we are not interested in communicating with liars. We are interested in finding honorable people who honestly disagree with us, and establishing better communications. The premise is that if you understand where someone is coming from, you are more willing to accept that and work with that person than if you see a hostile person who is out to destroy you. How you see that person is highly dependant on what you know about that person and why they behave that way.
I want a lot of this site to be about working out the details, practicing this technique until we can do it by hand before we worry about the software.
Software. It's fine to use common technology for the moment. A software program that runs on a ordinary computer is fine. But the true goal is an AI ( artificial intelligence ) that can interact with real people in a conference room setting and mediate that meeting with a calm demeanor, focused and intelligent questions, and lack of bias that everyone can trust.
That will be possible 15 years from now but we need to build the foundation before we can actually hand the assignment to an AI.
Hence, this site.
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