The following material is raw notes for a new social networking site that is intended to change the way the whole world makes decisions.  A sane decision making process should make certain pathological human conditions obsolete.  It should be impossible to make a decision that leads to genocide, or large-scale starvation.  Read on, and please help.

Proposition 1: Most of the problems of the world would be reduced or removed if we all had an agreed-upon set of rules and guidelines for judging the truth of an argument.  For instance, there should be a basic assumption that everybody presenting arguments is doing so honestly, withouth any attempt to mislead, with the intention of arriving at a fair outcome.

Proposition 2: Such a set of rules and guidelines exists. It is called “Critical Thinking,” or, "Rhetoric."  It is embodied in such systems as the rules of parliamentary procedure. Or think of “Robert’s Rules of Order.”  Or think of the rules of a formal debate (not the stuff they try to pass off as debate in our political campaigning process).  There are a number of textbooks on the subject.  There are tons of popular books on the topic.

Proposition 3: We could write a toolset that would allow all literate people to analyze and understand real topics of importance.  Transcribe public statements, and present them with overlays of analysis… SIMPLE analysis.  It could have filters on it too, so you can see what just-anybody has to say, or you can look at just the commentary of people who have passed simple certifications in basic logic and debate, starting with simple tutorials with multiple-choice quizzes.

Proposition 4: Most people would prefer to live in this world. So we should try to create the tools.

We believe that there are good ways to make decisions, based on meaningful discussion.
We believe that good decisions do not happen by accident, or by mob rule, or by marketing.
We believe that all people want to live in a world without fear or suffering.
We believe that current decision-making processes are failing to create the best world possible, or anything close to it.
This place is dedicated to a community of people who want to make better decisions throughout the world.

Samples of content:
Do vaccines cause health problems?
How should large corporations influence how food is raised?
Should we nuke Iran just to avoid future problems?
Should we allow human cloning experiments?
   Just tissue?
      What are we afraid of?
      How do we avoid just those specific problems?
Healthcare Reform
   Malpractice reform
      Make it illegal to sue doctors, hospitals, etc. for malpractice.
      Make it legal to charge a doctor with capital murder and lesser criminal offenses.
      Conviction of a crime automatically revokes license, everywhere.
   Records reform
      Make them all electronic.
      Owned by the patient.
      Copy accessible to any healthcare provider on your case.
      Standardized diagnostic codes (ICD10), simplified and expanded
   Billing reform
      Best practices certification board
      Standardized billing codes
   eWorld Medical
      Integrate views of patients, facilities, professionals, materials, services, etc.
      Standardized interfaces
         Funding providers
         Reporting providers
         Audit providers

Legislative reform
   Sunset clauses
   Earmarks
   Other procedural shenanigans

Capture transcript of CSPAN sessions and speeches, and draw them.

Provide resources for argument training.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
Books

Long-Term goals: end hunger and poverty and preventable disease, establish ethical norms for global society, take advantage of this one chance our species has, this golden moment, do or die.  Get some proper decision-making processes in place before technological civilzation breaks something.

Short term goals: build a discussion manager and display system that is intuitive and useful, get some content up, and get it published.  Get some marketing in place. Locate some grad students to fire it up, in marketing and education.


Community features, to allow blogged and other typical discussion methods.  And to apply labels to other members.  A label is publicly visible, with the label-ee and the labeler both identified.  A label might be:
  Environmentalist
   1. Anti
   2. Non
   3. Neutral
   4. Pro
   5. Over
We decide what the core labels are.  There is a large library predefined.  A form for creating your own by user, with a button to request consideration for the global library.

All content is moderated by an ethics board that keeps content focused on polite discourse.  No insulting or hurtful content will be kept up.  But if it is taken down, it will still be available under certain conditions, to certain users.  All threads of though are kept.  All content becomes the property of the site, including copyrighted material.  In cases like copyright, we will take it down if the owner complains, but keep it in the back room.  We will not share that information, or even information about its existence or nature, with anyone unless compelled to do so by law.

The moderators can suppress certain labels, certain words, or specific instances of such.  Again, info is never tossed, we just log the arguments, and filter access based on that process.

Over time, we develop a self-policing, self-auditing strategy based on the same core ethics.


Ultimate arbiter of moderation and ethical decisions is The Silicon Chip, until such time as a better structure is identified and implemented.

The objective is to build a social networking tool that fosters the free discussion of all topics important to people, with the desired outcome being an optimal, actionable resolution on each topic.  It is also based on some basic givens: 1) We seek resolutions that can be agreed by all to be optimal given the finite nature of resources.  2) We believe it is in the best interests of all people to work together under such a structure.

Social networking tool for decision making
   Members can have private communities
   No anonymous users
   No crawling

Discussions are structured as:
   Sponsor(s), Moderator(s)
   Proposal
   Argument For
   Argument Against
   Voting Structure
      Governmental voting usage
      Timeline snapshots
      Research

Arguments are structured as:
   Conclusion
      Supporting evidence
      Forward actions
   Instances

As members add commentary to any point of an argument, they can also
   Rate the point
   Tag a point as certain evidence types
   Object to a point on grounds of fallacy
   Add link to or from other related arguments or points

Members can have certain attributes:
   Certified identity level
   Certified expertise in relevant areas, or in rhetoric or philosophy etc.
   Registered
   Take ethics pledges, benefit community, no conflict of interest

When viewing an argument
   Filter and weight on member attributes
   Tag branches to keep them displayed
 
There are also expositions that are not arguments.
   The State of the Union Address could be such.
   Congressional hearings on a topic, unrelated to pending legislation, could be such.

We live in a culture that derives pleasure from, and give authority to, slogans that are repeatable and memorable.

MBA-speak like "brand DNA" and "main street" and even "green".  This thought system must change.  It is the root of "rampant consumerism."

Study how we argue and why it does not work.  How the process is hijacked by marketing and politicking, and allowed by a simply un-practiced populace.
   We want to turn it into simple form, dichotomy becomes false
   Thought as a system is larger than that, working in other ways
  argue about what should have been, etc.
     We should analyze what is, where want to be, how to get close, etc.

Need snap-in architecture for authentication, repudiation, other security features, plus research-grade data handling.

Look at BeenVerified.com,
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=34066
http://www.sfu.ca/rst/
http://prelimsandbeyond.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/toulmin/
http://www.virtualsalt.com/rhetoric.htm
www.dougwalton.ca/talks/08Chicago.ppt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Toulmin
http://puffin.creighton.edu/yuan/Logic/Outline/LogicCh1.htm
http://editlib.org/p/32983
http://www.phil.cmu.edu/projects/argument_mapping/
ESSENCE, 2009
Debategraph.org
Araucaria (Reed & Rowe, 2004)
Compendium (Buckingham Shum, et al., 2006)
Rationale (van Gelder, 2007)
SEAS (Lowrance, 2007)


Possible names:
  ThinkWell
  TheThinkWell
  TheThinkingPlace
  ThinkingWell