(Is minimum wage a good thing? Should I adopt a paleo or keto or vegan or Shangri-la diet? What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?)
I would point out that the three examples you’ve listed are of three different categories. The first, “Is minimum wage a good thing?” has a significant value component. Do you value whether people have money? How much inefficiency are you willing to trade off in the economy in order to ensure that people have a certain amount of minimum spending power from work? Without knowing your specific values, I cannot answer whether a minimum wage is or is not a good thing.
Your second question, “What kind of diet should I adopt?” has significant dependencies on your physiology. Are you gluten-allergic? Do you have allergies to nuts? Do you have diabetes? Kidney issues? All of these things impact which of the listed diets (if any) is going to be best for you. And this is just from a strictly physiological perspective—it leaves aside issues of preferences (i.e. maybe veganism isn’t really right for you if you really like bacon).
The third question, “What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?” is answered, to a first approximation, by Wikipedia.
I think you’re really asking for three sites. For the first question, there should be a site where people can debate moral values. Ideally, this site would taboo “good” and “bad” altogether, and force people to frame value judgments in the context of the value systems that result in those judgments, allowing others to see the criteria by which those judgments are made.
For the second question, a site that provides guidelines rather than recommendations would be helpful. Ideally this site would present a way for you to submit details about what your medical situation is and what your dietary preferences are and then it would output a decision tree that you could use to arrive at a diet that would work best for you.
Finally, for the third site, it’d be something like Wikipedia (only perhaps with better filtering tools to help weed out out unsourced data).
I’m not sure that it’s possible to put together one site to rule them all because the the they’re doing such different things. We’re going from “there might not even be a ‘right’ answer” to “there is a right answer but it might be different for every person” to “there is a single, externally verifiable objective truth”. How do you handle that range of epistemologies with a single site?
Minimum wage is actually somewhat like diet, since it could be that some places and not others would be better off adopting it, depending on their varied conditions. While values dominate discussions of actions, I think the epistemic questions of what the consequences of those actions are are very important. And “if X, then Y” is a claim of truth.
In the end, I think that both actions and truth-claims rely heavily on both objective truth and on values. Valuing Breitbart or Slate as a reliable source can determine what facts you believe, and it isn’t possible to completely divorce questions of truth from values about sources, about what level of evidence is needed before accepting a claim, and such. I would like to make those more explicit.
I do think the diet thing would be the kind of question that would be hardest to succeed at. I think the Site could handle some degree of “different solutions for different situations”, but the level of variability in medical questions might be beyond it.
I would point out that the three examples you’ve listed are of three different categories. The first, “Is minimum wage a good thing?” has a significant value component. Do you value whether people have money? How much inefficiency are you willing to trade off in the economy in order to ensure that people have a certain amount of minimum spending power from work? Without knowing your specific values, I cannot answer whether a minimum wage is or is not a good thing.
Your second question, “What kind of diet should I adopt?” has significant dependencies on your physiology. Are you gluten-allergic? Do you have allergies to nuts? Do you have diabetes? Kidney issues? All of these things impact which of the listed diets (if any) is going to be best for you. And this is just from a strictly physiological perspective—it leaves aside issues of preferences (i.e. maybe veganism isn’t really right for you if you really like bacon).
The third question, “What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?” is answered, to a first approximation, by Wikipedia.
I think you’re really asking for three sites. For the first question, there should be a site where people can debate moral values. Ideally, this site would taboo “good” and “bad” altogether, and force people to frame value judgments in the context of the value systems that result in those judgments, allowing others to see the criteria by which those judgments are made.
For the second question, a site that provides guidelines rather than recommendations would be helpful. Ideally this site would present a way for you to submit details about what your medical situation is and what your dietary preferences are and then it would output a decision tree that you could use to arrive at a diet that would work best for you.
Finally, for the third site, it’d be something like Wikipedia (only perhaps with better filtering tools to help weed out out unsourced data).
I’m not sure that it’s possible to put together one site to rule them all because the the they’re doing such different things. We’re going from “there might not even be a ‘right’ answer” to “there is a right answer but it might be different for every person” to “there is a single, externally verifiable objective truth”. How do you handle that range of epistemologies with a single site?
Minimum wage is actually somewhat like diet, since it could be that some places and not others would be better off adopting it, depending on their varied conditions. While values dominate discussions of actions, I think the epistemic questions of what the consequences of those actions are are very important. And “if X, then Y” is a claim of truth.
In the end, I think that both actions and truth-claims rely heavily on both objective truth and on values. Valuing Breitbart or Slate as a reliable source can determine what facts you believe, and it isn’t possible to completely divorce questions of truth from values about sources, about what level of evidence is needed before accepting a claim, and such. I would like to make those more explicit.
I do think the diet thing would be the kind of question that would be hardest to succeed at. I think the Site could handle some degree of “different solutions for different situations”, but the level of variability in medical questions might be beyond it.