I think that one incredibly important task is to give impartial and reliable information about the quality of information. Not even scientific peer-review is a sufficiently good procedure. For this reason, the Meta-Research Innovation Centre at Stanford has started a:
“journal watch” to monitor scientific publishers’ work and to shame laggards into better behaviour.
To do these kinds of evaluations you of course need expertise. But other kinds of evaluations require little but intelligence, good judgment, an impartial mindset and persistence. For instance, we crave for better and more impartial evaluations of the validity of statements made by governments, politicians, companies, and other influential organizations. I have a long-term goal of doing something along those lines. I think rationalists could contribute a lot here.
Thanks! Can you give some examples of what you have in mind? There are already some efforts like FactCheck.org. Are there specific areas where you see room for improvement?
Thanks I didn’t know of Factcheck though I know newspapers sometimes do similar things.
I think that partly due to the existence of factcheckers, and partly because it’s so easy to check for yourself whether a certain statement of fact is true, it is far less common that politicians make false statements of fact than that they fool the voters in other ways. For instance, a typical political debate consists of one logical fallacy after the other—strawmen, guilt by association, invalid ad hominems etc. I think that it would not be too hard to provide the voters with a systematic and useful analysis of these fallacies. Hopefully that would shame the politicians into better behaviour.
There are many other arguments one could criticize, though: banks arguments for why people should buy expensive products rather than cheap index funds, bad arguments in the news media, etc. What I think would be important would be too remain cool-headed and impartial. If you aren’t, you’ll just be another political player. What the public debate needs is impartial “referees” who criticize invalid reasoning. Ideally, these referees would be smart and altruistic citizens—much like those working at Wikipedia. One idea would be the construction of a wiki for criticism—Criticopedia or Wikicriticism (perhaps with a Karma system where e.g. presidential speeches would be rated on the basis of argumentative soundness). The ultimate goal would be the End of Bullshit.
Australia has an Australian version of factcheck too. However, it only goes after things which are the communities current expectations, not future expectations. Therefore, it understates risks to future ethical injunctions. For instance, politicians are under little or no official nor social pressure to disclose their stock holdings despite legislating on matters that can be expected to dramatically affect their prices in predictable ways. I, for one, intend to sell my shares before I gain any kind of position where someone would have reason to believe I’d have a conflict on interest. For the sake of easy management, I’ll probably sell all my securities and just let it all sit in 1 long term and 1 immediate use account (+ compulsory accounts like superannuation) in my countries main bank (Commonwealth bank) just to make my life easier and raise credibility.
I think that one incredibly important task is to give impartial and reliable information about the quality of information. Not even scientific peer-review is a sufficiently good procedure. For this reason, the Meta-Research Innovation Centre at Stanford has started a:
To do these kinds of evaluations you of course need expertise. But other kinds of evaluations require little but intelligence, good judgment, an impartial mindset and persistence. For instance, we crave for better and more impartial evaluations of the validity of statements made by governments, politicians, companies, and other influential organizations. I have a long-term goal of doing something along those lines. I think rationalists could contribute a lot here.
Thanks! Can you give some examples of what you have in mind? There are already some efforts like FactCheck.org. Are there specific areas where you see room for improvement?
These too: [factmata.com](https://factmata.com/), [fullfact.org](https://fullfact.org/) (I know the latter a bit and like it a lot). These are for media sector though not academia.
Thanks I didn’t know of Factcheck though I know newspapers sometimes do similar things.
I think that partly due to the existence of factcheckers, and partly because it’s so easy to check for yourself whether a certain statement of fact is true, it is far less common that politicians make false statements of fact than that they fool the voters in other ways. For instance, a typical political debate consists of one logical fallacy after the other—strawmen, guilt by association, invalid ad hominems etc. I think that it would not be too hard to provide the voters with a systematic and useful analysis of these fallacies. Hopefully that would shame the politicians into better behaviour.
There are many other arguments one could criticize, though: banks arguments for why people should buy expensive products rather than cheap index funds, bad arguments in the news media, etc. What I think would be important would be too remain cool-headed and impartial. If you aren’t, you’ll just be another political player. What the public debate needs is impartial “referees” who criticize invalid reasoning. Ideally, these referees would be smart and altruistic citizens—much like those working at Wikipedia. One idea would be the construction of a wiki for criticism—Criticopedia or Wikicriticism (perhaps with a Karma system where e.g. presidential speeches would be rated on the basis of argumentative soundness). The ultimate goal would be the End of Bullshit.
Australia has an Australian version of factcheck too. However, it only goes after things which are the communities current expectations, not future expectations. Therefore, it understates risks to future ethical injunctions. For instance, politicians are under little or no official nor social pressure to disclose their stock holdings despite legislating on matters that can be expected to dramatically affect their prices in predictable ways. I, for one, intend to sell my shares before I gain any kind of position where someone would have reason to believe I’d have a conflict on interest. For the sake of easy management, I’ll probably sell all my securities and just let it all sit in 1 long term and 1 immediate use account (+ compulsory accounts like superannuation) in my countries main bank (Commonwealth bank) just to make my life easier and raise credibility.
Thanks for the further thoughts.