Hello :)
I’m here fundamentally to get some constructive criticism on how to improve internet discourse. This came about when I was writing a journalistic piece on the recent congressional subcommittee, and trying to get to the bottom of the lab-leak evidence as part of the research.
In short, I’m floating the idea of a crowd-sourced and written, peer-reviewed medium on subjects like conspiracy theories (AKA: revisionist history that’s still political). With a solid framework, gatekeeping could be avoided and real people (not just professional intellectuals) could participate. Thus helping remove the biases (real and imaginary) that exist in typical journalistic and corporate information, and give people a better chance to engage logically and synthesize arguments themselves. I don’t see many tools for people to forward ideas based on the merit of logic in a space that is dominated by sensationalism, at best. Yet discourse about these topics more than anything else fundamentally combats propaganda and misinformation. There’s also the benefit of having a robust literature that could then be rapidly queried using an AI analogous to scispace, something that political and activist information has fallen behind on.
We’ve had peer-reviewed journals for science since the 18th century and it revolutionized knowledge availability. We need a human rights revolution now, and there should be a way to separate the alchemists from the scientists here too.
Since my idea is radically rationalist, I figured I’ll get feedback instead of my usual browsing here. Look for my essay soon. Till then, have ya’ll seen anything like this in practice, even historically? Insights from the academic alt-publishing world? If there’s other essays along similar lines, or discussing how internet discourse works in general please send it my way.
Sam Garcia, California
Thanks so much for these resources, interesting!!
Im not saying my only goal is to combat misinformation, but that logical discourse combats misinformation (as well as hegemonic propaganda) as a matter of course.