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Summary
What if an algorithm like Google’s PageRank, paired with a collaborative reasoning platform, could transform how we evaluate and refine ideas? This platform, centered on structured arguments and dynamic rankings, represents the next step in Collective Intelligence (CI). It’s more than a tool
for organizing opinions—it’s a framework for creating clarity, promoting better decisions, and fostering collaboration.
How It Would Work
1. Structuring Arguments
To empower an algorithm to evaluate ideas, the platform organizes discussions into clear, logical components:
• Central Proposition: Each discussion starts with a clearly defined idea at the top of the page.
• Reasons to Agree and Disagree: Arguments for and against the idea are categorized into structured lists.
• Dynamic Sub-Arguments: Supporting and countering sub-reasons branch from these main lists, allowing users to refine or challenge each argument.
2. Transparent Ranking Criteria
The algorithm, ReasonRank evaluates contributions using several metrics:
• Argument Quality: Based on user votes, logical coherence, and evidence credibility.
• Evidence Strength: Books, articles, and expert contributions are scored for relevance and reliability.
• Interaction Effects: Sub-arguments dynamically affect the ranking of main arguments, ensuring the strongest ideas rise to the top.
3. Evidence Classification
• Books and Articles: Contributors can cite books or articles, explaining how they support or refute an idea. Verified reviews, sales data, and user essays strengthen their impact.
• Web Pages: Web links are scored for authority and relevance, and their inclusion requires clear explanations.
• User Engagement: The community validates evidence through votes and commentary, helping refine rankings further.
Why This Approach Matters
The Problem
Today’s discourse is fragmented. Social media, forums, and news sites often amplify echo chambers, making it harder to engage meaningfully with opposing views or identify the strongest arguments.
The Solution
This platform forces engagement with opposing perspectives by:
• Prioritizing Logical Clarity: Users interact with the best reasons from both sides before contributing.
• Reducing Redundancy: Duplicate arguments are merged, and users can collaboratively refine or clarify their points.
Applications
Imagine its potential impact across diverse fields:
• Politics: Enabling policymakers to evaluate competing policies based on well-supported evidence.
• Science: Clarifying debates on controversial topics like climate change or public health strategies.
• Business: Helping companies weigh decisions by evaluating customer feedback or competitor strategies.
Promoting Better Ideas and Behavior
1. Emphasizing Interests Over Positions
The platform borrows from conflict resolution techniques and encourages users to focus on shared and opposing interests rather than entrenched positions.
• Common Interests: Identifying shared goals.
• Opposing Interests: Highlighting areas of divergence to create opportunities for compromise.
2. Encouraging Constructive Engagement
Before submitting a reason to agree, users must evaluate the strongest opposing argument. This ensures that contributions are thoughtful, informed, and constructive.
Building Toward True Collective Intelligence
Transparency and Trust
The platform makes its decision-making process visible:
• Traceable Rankings: Users can explore how each argument or piece of evidence contributes to overall scores.
• Auditable Metrics: Rankings adjust dynamically as new evidence is added, keeping the system current and relevant.
Ethical Implications
Such a powerful tool requires safeguards:
• Avoiding Misuse: Guidelines and transparency prevent manipulation or misuse for propaganda.
• Mitigating Bias: The algorithm incorporates diverse perspectives to reduce systemic biases.
Dynamic Evolution
This CI platform learns and adapts, continually refining its
Monetization Potential
Aligned Advertising
Revenue opportunities include context-specific ads, such as promoting books cited in arguments or tools relevant to a debate topic.
Crowdfunding
Users can fund specific ideas or causes, making the platform a hub for collective action and decision-making.
Future Enhancements
1. Advanced Tools for Argument Analysis
• Fallacy Detection: AI tools to identify logical errors in arguments.
• Semantic Clustering: Grouping similar arguments for streamlined analysis.
2. Real-Time Feedback
Users see instant updates as new evidence or arguments are submitted, creating a responsive and engaging experience.
3. Global Accessibility
With multilingual support, the platform bridges international perspectives, fostering collaboration on global issues.
Conclusion
This Collective Intelligence platform represents a paradigm shift in how humans process ideas and make decisions. Structuring arguments, ranking evidence, and fostering constructive collaboration empowers individuals and organizations to navigate complexity with clarity and confidence. In a world increasingly driven by information, this system ensures that only the most reasoned, evidence-backed ideas rise to the top.
Visual Enhancements
• Flowchart: A diagram illustrating the argument-ranking process, showing how central propositions connect to reasons, sub-reasons, and evidence.
• Ranking Metrics Visualization: This visualization breaks down how arguments are scored, helping users understand the algorithm’s criteria immediately.
Algorithm
http://del.icio.us/myclob/Algorithm
http://del.icio.us/myclob/Algorithm [myclob, Mar 17 2006]
[link]
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I think I'd have to read a book on meteorology to know weather. |
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You know, it's possible to state your case in a single annotation. Also, I've been known to delete user accounts for those who delete other users annotations when those annotations are on topic. |
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Have people anno'd this idea and then had them deleted? Is that why this looks like a schizo's conversation with the voices in his head? |
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to [bristolz] point, the left side of this idea is starting to look like the right side, and for that matter, like your site -- full of your view of the subject. |
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The sound of one hand typing is not much fun, [myclob]. |
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If you want to post ideas, you have to handle people criticizing them. I was deliberately careful to both respect your interest in ideas and annotate to the point -- deleting it does not promote my interest in the discussion. |
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Now there's a non-lame tagline for you: |
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Annotations lasting longer than 4 hours, though rare, require immediate medical attention |
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Negative Annotations, taken seriously and without specific instructions and supervision from site moderators, may cause mild heartburn, bruising of the ego, and in certain rare instances, fatal rectal hemorrhaging. |
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has an idea evern been posted about reflecting Google clickthroughs on HB? A bit of a measure of idea "worldliness" and interest |
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["I thought genetic algorithms worked like this." |
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Loose the attitude and just state the reason you disgree ] |
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I don't think I was disagreeing but you deleted the anno so I can't remember. What I meant was that there needs to be an element of ideas breeding so that the "DNA" of an idea gets mixed with the "DNA" of another to make something better. Also needed is a dash of mutation to stop the population floundering at a local maximum. |
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This idea is unfit for survival. Bone. |
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I think it's time it bred with another. |
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"Good idea promoting algorithm" with "Half Bakers Hall Of Fame" |
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To get
"Half Good Bakers Hall" and "idea promoting algorythm of fame" * |
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[myclob] - the point of annotations is that they are kept
and answered by the author, so that others can see an
actual discussion. The delete function is there to prune
off topic or abusive remarks. |
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I can't be bothered arguing with you if my arguments are
simply going to evaporate. My argument contained several
other points to that which you quoted, but now I cannot
refer to it. Your attitude is defying the entire point of a
site devoted to discussion. |
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I’m very sorry I deleted any of your annotations, I am new at this website, that is the only excuse I can give, and I promise I will not delete any more. |
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zen_tom, "So for example. Counting reasons. How does the algorithm know what is a valid and what is not a valid reason?" |
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It wouldn't have to "know" it would have to guess. You would assume that an idea that is able to inspire hundreds of reasons to agree with it, would be better than ideas that only inspire a couple of reasons to agree with it. I'm not saying every idea with more ideas would be better, just that statistically speaking these ideas might be better. But the number of ideas would not be the only thing. |
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Thanks for being patient with me, I'm new at this. |
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[DenholmRicshaw] Breding ideas? That has to rate high in the list of "Weird Things I've seen on the Halfbakery" |
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re: "The left side of this idea is starting to look like the right side, and for that matter, like your site -- full of your view of the subject." |
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Of course it is. I am trying to organize the right side into reasosn to agree or disagree with the idea. |
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Would you rather have arguments go on forever, and ever in chronological order, or would you rather have someone try and organize the reasons to agree and disagree into some logical order? I thought I was very magnanomous, by including reasons to disagree with my idea, in my main idea. |
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Also, you say that my website is full of my ideas. Well of course it is. But if you spend much time on my website, you will see that I want other people to post their ideas on my website. All they have to do is e-mail me stuff, and I'll post it on my website. As you can see, no one has done that yet. I would love to have more people involved in my website. |
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re: "I think I'd have to read a book on meteorology to know weather" |
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re: "You know, it's possible to state your case in a single annotation. Also, I've been known to delete user accounts for those who delete other users annotations when those annotations are on topic." |
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I didn't think they were "on topic". And the one's that were, I tried organizing into my idea. I was trying something new. If we always do the same things, then the world will never improve. |
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I don't think this website is as good as it will get, I think it is worth our time to try and do new things. |
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Re: "Any attempt to create some automatic process that makes a qualitative measurement is going to fall down wherever a 'judgement' needs to be made." |
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Google does exactly what you said no one can do. They create an "automatic process that makes a qualitative measement" of which web pages are better than others. How is my idea any different? |
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re: "So, for example. Counting reasons. How does the algorithm know what is a valid and what is not a valid reason? " |
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If people were able to evaluate each idea, the algorithm could count the number of 4 star ideas. |
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re: "If you start to vett each comment and argument that is posted for or against an idea, then you start moving away from an algorithm and into the realm of a human-edited website." |
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All web pages are human edited. What are you trying to say? |
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"If you want to maintain a website that uses some index or matrix for assigning a score to an idea then great, but that is all it will ever be, a score. Because it is being edited by a human, it will no longer provide an independent, quantative measure of an idea's worth, but will instead present a point of view biased by subjective opinion." |
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That's not "All it will ever be" and why would you say something like that anyways? Do you enjoy tearing down people's ideas? Can you tell the future? |
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That is not "All it would ever be". I thinkt it would become the #1 site on the internet, because it would have all of the best reasons to agree or disagree with each idea, on the same page. |
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For example, you have lots of pro abortion and anti abortion websites, but what if you took all of the stuff that both sides said, and put it on the same page. What if you organized all of the reasons to agree with each side, and let people vote on the reasosn to agree, and the reasosn with the best score moved to the top. |
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I mean think about it for 1/2 a second. Why would you go to a pro-Bush or an Anti-Bush website, when you could go to a web site that had all of the best reasons to be pro and anti bush on the same page? |
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You could track the popularity of thousands of differnet aspects of an idea. |
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The reason that I bring up an algorithem, is because you would need to find ways of overcoming people who are trying to cheat. |
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There are some house-keeping issues. |
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I don't see what these links haveto do with this idea: |
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www.thirdvoice.com
www.stumbleupon.com |
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Ian, thanks for trying to see how it might work, but I don't think the link works any more. I've been a way for a while, so I missed it. |
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Also, I know what an algorithm is, so unless you are just trying to sound condescending, I don't know if we need the wiki link. Never mind, I'm being defensive. I guess its fine. |
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You go to all this trouble saying that this could never become AI, and then you link to a website where other people are trying to help organize debates so that a computer could figure out which idea is better! So is it a good idea to organize debates into reasons to agree or disagree or isn’t it? How else would an online artificial intelligence think? Wouldn’t it need to organize reasons to agree and disagree? Wouldn’t it need an algorithm to do that? |
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Also you mention magic. Some people look at our brains as magic. A lot of people, not just me, think that our brain is just an algorithm, some memory, and some processing power. |
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How is the internet any different? If you were an online AI, and you wanted to make decisions, wouldn't you want a list of reasons to agree and disagree with each idea? Wouldn't you investigate reasons to agree and disagree with each of those reasons? Wouldn't you want an algorithm that would help you make decisions? We have one, even if we don't get out a list of paper and list all of the reasons to agree or disagree; we still do it in our heads. |
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Two pieces of advice I have found useful: 1) don't make any idea more than two screens long, 2) if you're going to make spelling mistakes, don't make them in the title. Apologies for not reading or voting on your idea. |
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[admin: Fixed the typo in the title, as moderators sometimes do (to allow people who don't misspell the terms in the same way to find things.) Moderators don't fix typos elsewhere; for example, if you misspell "etcetera" as "excreta", as has this author, we'll just leave that completely alone.] |
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Thanks for the post. I wonder how our brains come to conclusions? I thought my “reasons to agree disagree algorithm was a good one” partly because I thought that it explains pretty well how my brain works. |
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To explain, when I here a belief and it often goes into one of these three categories:
1. I agree
2. I disagree
3. I don't know |
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I put the belief into those categories based on reasons that I believe agree or disagree with the idea. However, beliefs are much more complex than our ability to organize all the reasons to agree or disagree with an idea. And so we all over simplify. Or in other words we go back and forth with all the reasons to agree or disagree until we get confused, and at that point we come to a conclusion. |
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I have been thinking about this a lot recently, and I believe we all come to conclusions at different levels of complexity. Of course, we don’t go down every path of reason to agree and disagree every time we make a decision. Some paths ended in clarity, and we feel good about them, and so we don’t question them. Those are the things we believe. However some paths end in confusion. |
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Usually the paths that ended in clarity, you could say, had more reasons to agree than disagree. |
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My idea becomes very complex because it shoots off into so many different directions. I tried explaining it again on my website http://ideastockexchange.com/ under explanation. However I have to pay for this website soon, and maybe it won’t be around much longer. I hope it is still there if you try looking at it. |
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Do you see yourself having clarity when you convince yourself there are few reasons to disagree with an idea? Or at lest few good reasons? And would you define a good reason to disagree with an idea, a reason with lots of reasons to agree with it? |
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I believe artificial intelligence could be created by making an algorithm that counted all the reasons to agree with an idea, and subtracting all the reasons to disagree with that idea. The algorithm could be said to agree if the result was positive, and it would be said to disagree if the result was negative. |
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At first this sounds like it might work, but that it probably wouldn’t come to very good conclusions, because some reasons are better than others. For instance the computer would come to the “wrong” conclusion if there were only a few very good reasons on one side, and a lot of very bad reasons on the other side. |
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In this example, my algorithm would still come to the right conclusion by taking into account the reasons to agree or disagree with the original reasons to agree or disagree. |
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And so, if there really were a few very good reasons on one side, and a lot of bad reasons on the other side, and if the forum allowed you to list reasons to agree or disagree with each of the reasons, then the good reasons should have more reasons to agree with them, and fewer reasons to disagree with them. And the bad reasons would have few reasons to agree with them, and lots of reasons to disagree with them. |
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And so the algorithm would go threw the forum, so that a reasons to disagree with a reasons to disagree, would actually be a reason to agree (just like in multiplication were to negatives multiply to a positive). |
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This is all so very simple, and straightforward, I don’t know why someone hasn’t made this forum and algorithm yet. |
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// This is all so very simple, and straightforward, I don’t know why someone hasn’t made this forum and algorithm yet. // |
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You know any webdesign? Make it yourself. I'd visit. Maybe start on a limited topic, like rating stocks or sports teams. |
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I read this as: 'Algorithm + Discussion Group = AL'
Don't know how my parents met, or who they were, but I'm suddenly consumed with the idea that they were both mathematicians, who bonded over tea and biscuits and a long, frank group chat about Fermat. Sigh. Thanks, myclob.
(Al...) |
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I submitted several postings along these lines several years ago (most of which I deleted). There is actually a growth of inventors and corporation who are currently employing algorithms combined with human querying to advance invention principles (for example John Koza's development of Genetic Programming). |
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re: "You know any webdesign? Make it yourself. I'd visit. Maybe start on a limited topic, like rating stocks or sports teams." |
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Maybe I miss-spoke. The idea is simle. I don't know how to make a web page that: |
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1. Counts the number of reasons given to agree with it. However I don't think it would be too difficult. It is just some database right? A little bit of math? |
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Have a bun for the overwhelming, mind-numbming, in depth idea, and the replies you have done to it :P |
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//Counts the number of reasons given to agree with it. However I don't think it would be too difficult// |
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I think it would be impossible... without pre-supposing some particular world-view, which would inevitably prejudice your final results. |
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... "I can't beleive it's not [Vernon] !" |
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opposingviews.com is a fine example for the futility of certain questions in light of the indeterminancy of language. |
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"Was Jesus an historical figure?" [Yes/No] - What would a 20/80 count on this question tell us? There was a guy running around ca. 0-30 AD, who was called something that we would transliterate to 'Iesu', he built some furniture and was otherwise not very involved? There was someone (called Bob) able to walk on water but otherwise a prick? There was someone teaching love and peace, unable to walk on water but said to have done so, called Giacomo? |
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People voted on this with all of these definitons in mind, and diluted the informational content of the answer to zero, along the way. |
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//This is all so very simple, and straightforward, I don’t know
why someone hasn’t made this forum and algorithm yet.//
I'm middle-aged, so I decided to save time by reading only
the last paragraph of the idea. If something is simple and
straightforward and feasible and worthwhile, it will have
been done. Ergo, this is either infeasible or not worthwhile.
There. That saved 5min of my life. Enough for a ciggie. |
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Only in the halbakery... Though as an idea, not an actual working... thing |
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//How else would an online artificial intelligence think? Wouldn’t it need to organize reasons to agree and disagree? Wouldn’t it need an algorithm to do that?// |
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1) Figure out how to scan a human brain perfectly and mimic on a machine, and then give it superhuman processing powers by linking it to copies of itself, until it figures out how to do a better job. |
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2) Let the field of psychology learn how people make decisions, and use the same heuristics in a machine logic system, then give it access to the internet for referencing. |
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There are a ton of ways. And both of these happen to be infinitely more plausible than this idea, because of the one gigantic flaw it suffers from, which is this: |
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It does not streamline any of the information as information piles up. This is the same reason that the LSA word learning system fails, for insance. It's amazingly quick to learn at FIRST, and it can pass the TOEFL analogies exam, etc., but after awhile, the overhead gets so huge, that adding a single new word to the system requires days of compiling to update. |
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Google has the same problem. They only crawl the internet to update their pagelink index about every 2 or 3 MONTHS, because it hogs so many resources (they have to build the entire matrix for the entire internet all over), it's not viable to do more often. |
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If your site was as popular as you think, it would have way more nuggets to be sorted than there are new webpages in the same amount of time. Comments and even ideas are vastly easier to make. So it could probably only update lets say every 6 months. I.e. your ideas rankings would only refresh twice a year, maybe. |
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Doesn't sound too useful to me in an era where digg conversations, for instance, come and go in a day or two... If you work with humanlike updating heuristics, though, then the matrix doesn't have to be rebuilt to re-index, and everything is very possible again. This is already what all the AI people are pretty much doing, though. |
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