Visual Root

http://www.visualroot.com/

Is a cool website...

I think it is very important that we map out how one idea is related to another...

It is very important that when we strengthen or weaken an assumption, that it automatically strengthen or weaken conclusions based on those assumptions...

I am trying to get an open source project going here:

http://code.google.com/p/ideastockexchange/

that outlines the reasons to agree or disagree with each conclusion, and lets you use one conclusion as a reason to agree or disagree with another conclusion... 

Obviously a conclusion could be a good one, but still not support another conclusion... for instance "the grass is green" is a good conclusion but could not be used very well as a belief to "increase funding for the poor". So I would like to count the number of reasons to agree or disagree with each belief, and then count the number of reasons to agree or disagree with each linkage... 

I like counting reasons better than just up or down voting, because is forces you to back up your conclusion... and if you give a bad reason, it should have more reasons to disagree with it...

So my goal is to have the ratio of reasons to agree or disagree for each belief, and linkage... Also, if you are going to give scores to conclusions based on the ratio of reasons to agree vs disagree for their arguments and the ratio of reasons to agree or disagree for linkages between an argument and a conclusion, you would need one more factor... you would need a "unique" factor, so you could identify arguments that are essential saying the same thing, so you don't count those points twice...

It sounds complex, but it only has 3 numbers for each belief: ratio of reasons to agree vs disagree, ratio of reasons to agree or disagree this belief is a valid reason to support another belief... and the ratio of reasons to agree or disagree that this belief is a unique reasons (on the forum) to support another conclusion... If you multiply all these ratios, you should get a pretty good score for each belief, that can then be used to support other belief... As more people join the forum the numbers will change, but the numbers are not the important thing, the structure that we build that links one belief to another, and how these all interact, is what will allow artificial intelligence to understand how the human mind works...