this Website uses Bayesian networks to evaluate claims—RootClaim
I found out this website, RootClaim, about a year and a half ago (a bit after it was founded), much before finding LW. that’s how i found out about Bayesian probability, and i remember getting crazy at the potential of it :)
So i now thought “surly someone posted about it on LW”—i searched, and found nothing. I wonder if there’s a reason or it’s just that somehow no one here heard about it.
Anyway, it uses Bayesian trees (a special case of Bayesian networks), to evaluate different hypothesis.
anyone can sumbit a topic. and then anyone can submit hypothesis, sources, and so on. everything is crowdsourced.
as a tool, it seems to have a lot of potential, and i even saw that Nissim Taleb (Author of the black swan) twitted about it favorably.
main problem is, it seems to be quite inactive, both the community (which is super small), and the website itself. the last update was in December 2017...
I would love to hear what you guys think about it, or the potential of something like it :)
here’s the link again: https://www.rootclaim.com
I also stumbled upon that website and was both impressed with the potential and saddened at the inactivity.
For me the idea connects with the recent success of IBMs’ Debater algorithm, which is able to check facts online, rate the evidence “strength” and has a very general model of the world.
I would very much like to see a similar project aimed at this sort of Bayesian reasoning, where you enter a question and the algorithm tries to give probabilities to possibilities instead of this crowd-sourcing approach.
This sounds pretty similar to Kialo, though I’m not an active participant there: https://www.kialo.com/
i know Kialo, it’s extremely different. Kialo is a debate platform with a nice sorting and ranking system. it doesn’t have any algorithm to find what’s “right”, it just shows “both sides of the argument”.
I don’t think that anybody who learned a bit about cognitive biases or epistemology would build that website in such a way (each side gets an equal representation, even though they’re not epistemically equal. and i remember a study that showed that pros and cons list don’t work to change peoples minds, cause they allow them to very easily fall into confirmation bias.