I have an idea that I've been working on for a while (where "working on" mostly means "musing about frequently but not actually doing anything productive") that I'd like commentary on. It involves a new way to collaboratively organize and contextualize information - it's essentially software which, like Wikipedia's Mediawiki software, can provide a useful structure for arranging many different sets of information in powerful and accessible new ways. And I want to use it, like Wikipedia itself uses MediaWiki, for a particular application of that software that I think could create a new degree of clarity and completeness in our understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,

Rains from the sky a meteoric shower

Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun; but there exists no loom

To weave it into fabric…”

Edna St Vincent Millay

I think we can build a better loom. In less poetic terms, I think we can build a complete map of human knowledge that places every bit of our knowledge in its logical context and assesses it for its strength and lucidity, so that we can reliably see for the first time the totality of what we think we know and why we think we know it.

The Software

The software is a sandbox for collaboratively building branching tree graphs, in which users can create nodes (containing text or other small chunks of information) whose position in the whole graph (i.e., which other nodes they're immediately connected to) is collectively voted on (by every user who has an opinion drawing 'elastic' strings from the node in question to those other nodes they think it should be connected to; the strongest collective cords will pull the nodes closest to the the connections most people think they ought to have). Nodes expressing the same idea in different ways can be stacked on top of each other so that they occupy the same position in the graph, but can be accessed and assessed individually. Here's a shitty sketch of the rough idea.

The point of this is that it allows us to clearly visually illustrate the logical or temporal or taxonomic relationships between items in a knowledge set - leading to a more intuitive understanding of the whole set - and that it allows us to collectively build a map that is significantly more complete than the map that any individual or subset of individuals has. This collective-knowledge-is-more-complete-than-isolated-knowledge effect is one of the obvious advantages that prediction markets are leveraging, but with the drawback that the collected knowledge leveraged in a prediction market is not made explicit, so we can't learn or generalize from it. It would be better to make that information explicit and permanently accessible so that others can learn from and build on it.

The next thing we need after collecting the most complete set of information we can get, is to assess or sort it for each individual bit's exemplification of various qualities. So in this software, each of the boxes containing a contributed bit of information can let users rate it on one or more traits (depending on the set of knowledge being worked on and what understanding users/administrators are wanting to draw out of the set). For instance, the set that I think is most important to us is the set of all inferential knowledge (i.e., the entire structure that starts somewhere around cogito ergo sum, passes through solipsism probably isn't true and the seemingly objective world is probably actually objectively real, and results in all of science and politics (when politics is actually about policy) and every other rationally based belief. For that map, individual data bits are arguments, and the traits we want to evaluate them on are things like their rationality and clarity.