Peter Thiel has argued that aside from advancements in data, our society has seen little progress in the past century. Google's success, valued in hundreds of billions of dollars, stemmed from their innovative use of links as a voting system for website rankings. This suggests that we could apply similar principles to rank ideas directly, rather than merely directing users to external websites. Google's algorithm places trust in websites with more links, but this can be flawed as people often make mistakes.
A more robust algorithm could consider the number of valid arguments supporting a claim, rather than merely counting links to a website. By refining this approach, we could harness the power of big data to improve decision-making. What we need is collective, transparent intelligence, not closed, artificial intelligence.
Imagine a system where we assign scores to various elements, thereby building conclusion validity from evidence validity. These could include:Linkage scores, addressing the relevance of evidence to a conclusion,
- Uniqueness scores, indicating the lack of redundancy,
- Data validity scores, addressing verification,
- Logical validity scores,
- Bias-free scores.
This could provide a solution to life's most pressing challenges. Rational collective thinking necessitates the dissection, evaluation, and scoring of arguments. We can't begin to address our problems without this process.
Transparent, collective cost-benefit analysis is the key to avoiding major catastrophes such as wars, artificial intelligence threats, global warming, extinction events from comets, supernovae, and super-volcanoes.
As it stands, our public policy is declining in intelligence. We're filtering all our decisions through our limited attention spans, compounded by the demands of our full-time jobs. We must embrace the complexity of these issues and start working towards solutions.
