Reasons

We should create a forum that allows people to brainstorms reasons to agree and disagree with important conclusions

Reasons to agree:

1. It would be cool to have reasons to agree and disagree on the same page.


2. Why not? It hasn't been done before. No one has created a forum that has one page per thesis, and allows users to submit reasons to agree and disagree in a structured format.


3. It couldn't be worse than current online discussion boards.

We should create algorithms that promotes good reasons

People evaluating each reason

I imagine people would want to rate an idea, on a scale from 1 to 10, on the following criteria: # Are statistics sited to a verifiable source? # Does the Reason support the conclusion? # Is the reasons clearly stated? # Is the reason stated briefly? # On a scale from 1 to 10 how much do you believe that the argument uses the following logical fallacy:

But you say, "people are biased, we can't trust them to evaluate the logic of an argument when they might have a vested interests". I would concede your point, and walk away from this whole thing, if perfection is the standard by which we measure this sites success. However I am going to evaluate this site, by weather or not it will be better than any other site, and I believe it will be. Also we can encourage people to try to set aside their biases.

Some ways we can encourage people to set aside their bias is to weaken the strength of people's votes who always use a 1 or 10 to evaluate someone else's logic. We should also let people vote if they agree or disagree with an argument or not. If you disagree with a conclusion, and also consistently give low scores to every reason to support the conclusion, then you are not thinking, because every controversial topic has at least some valid reasons to agree and disagree with it.

So if you disagree with a conclusion, you will be asked to evaluate the top reasons to support the conclusion. If you do this in a way that indicates that you are actually considering each reason, then you will be rewarded.

Scoring and evaluating reasons to agree and disagree

A major feature of this project is to design algorithms that give scores to reasons to agree and disagree with a thesis. Once these reasons have a score, they can lend their support to support or oppose many different conclusions.

Homer Simpson said; "Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true. Facts Schmacts".

However facts are not meaningless. Facts are Facts. We don't believe conclusions can be proven, because no one has ever gathered all the reasons to agree and disagree with a particular conclusion and investigated them all. We also don't believe truth can be evaluated because so many people who claim to have truth contradict each other, and seem so stupid. Vilhjalmur Stefansson said, "The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice."

I'm not saying we can find truth, but we can find that some things are more likely to be true than others, based on an investigation of the evidence that people are able to present as reasons to believe that something is true or not.

And so what I am proposing is that we gather all the reasons to agree and disagree with a conclusion, and then set it up so that you click on any of those reasons, and you can see reasons to agree and disagree with it. And this keeps going until you have given each reason a score, and you add up all the scores for the top conclusion.

We all assume that we can all walk around believing contradictory things, and that that s just the way things have to be. It doesn't have to be that way.

How it would work

It will work a lot like the BCS algorithm in that it will use votes from real people and will also take into account data from comparing how ideas perform against each other in a competitive environment.

Reasons to agree and disagree with reasons to agree and disagree(what?)

Much of the score assigned from the algorithm is dependent on how the webpage is laid out, so hang with me:

Every page will have a layout similar to this one:

Many reasons to agree with an conclusion are in and of themselves a new conclusion that needs to be debated. For instance "Obama is a socialist" might be Thesis#1. A reason to support this conclusion (RTA#1) might be "Obama supported the purchase of GM, which is a socialist act".

With this website, you will be able to click on RTA#1, and it will become its own thesis at the top of a page with its own list of reasons to agree and disagree with it.

With this setup you can see that a reason to agree with RTA#1 will ultimately lend support to Thesis#1.

With this format an algorithm could be set up very easily that counts the total number of reasons to agree with it, including reasons to agree with reasons to agree with it, and so on.

You say that this system could be "gamed". I honestly don't think so. Because if you put a bad reason to support an idea, thinking that you are helping by adding the number of reasons to agree, then that idea should have lots of reasons to DISAGREE with it, and those reason should have lots of reasons to agree with them, and so on.

I don't think I can explain it very well, but I have been thinking about this for about 10 years now, and I know it would work great.

Example

"The United States should not engage in Nation Building" is a conclusions, with many reasons to agree and disagree. However it can also be used as an argument that both Bush and Clinton used the military incorrectly. The belief will have a strength when it stands by itself. But it will have a different strength when used as an argument to support another conclusion. For instance in this case, perhaps the score given to the belief that we should not be involved in nation building gets a 79 out of 100. This score would then be multiplied by the score assigned to the belief that this is a valid reason to agree that Bush or Clinton misused the military. Obviously over time the percentage of people who believed that this applied to Clinton and Bush would very. Formal logicians have a specific format for this type of argument. They say there is one premise: we should not participate in nation building. The other premise is George Bush participated in nation building. If you participate in nation-building, you are misusing the military. Therefore George Bush misused the military.

Formal logic is required to make this site work, however I am not going to present the forum so as to say to our users that they have to use formal logic. The purpose of this website is to take the way that people argue naturally, organize it, quantify it, and evaluate it.

We should use the internet to brainstorm reasons to agree and disagree with important conclusions

Reasons to agree:

1. The search for truth involves a lot of information. If computers have good algorithms they can be very good at processing information. Putting data into columns as reasons to agree or disagree with a conclusion takes a very important step in processing data.


2. Truth is important enough that we should work very hard to try and find it.


3. It is important that citizens come to informed conclusions.

Thesis #1

Reasons to AGREE with Thesis #1 (RTAW#1)

Reasons to DISAGREE with Thesis #1(RTDW#1)

We need to have reasons to agree and disagree with Obama on the same page. We also need to have a post for each issue (that doesn't change topics), and then brainstorms all the reasons to agree and disagree with Obama, with the best reasons at the top of their respective list.

Steven Write said; "A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking .” And it is true. People make decisions becaus they only heard part of the story, and they never examined all the reasons to agree and disagree. That is why I want to use the power of the internet to brainstorm all the reasons to agree and disagree with Obama.

If we separate our reasons to agree and disagree, and classify the reasons we could do some pretty cool stuff with computer software.

For instance we could create a computer algorithm that gives points to Obama's belief based on the number or reasons to agree with him. Then each reason can become its own post, with reasons to agree and disagree with it.

Every issue should have it's own comprehensive list of reasons to agree or disagree.

This would allow us to perform a Google duel between all the items that agree and disagree, which could represent the overall strength of the idea.

We could let people rate the reasons to agree or disagree, were the overall score of the reasons that agree contribute to the idea, and the overall score of the reasons that disagree take away from the score of the main idea.

We could assign a score to each reason based on the number of reasons that agree with it. The overall score of the reasons in the "reasons to agree" category would contribute to the overall score of the main idea.

This will allow us to talk to our ancestors, and include all the smart things that they said, about issues that we still face today. As we start thinking about this, we can see why a web site like the history channel may want to adopt it. What does Abraham Lincoln have to say about issues we are facing today?

Like Abraham Lincoln said, it is not so important that we pray that God is on ourside, but that we are on God's side. The same thing about the truth. We shoudn't work to try to prove that the truth is on our side, but that we are on the truth's side. If we have a truth promoting forum, then it is safe to investigate both sides of an issue. We have nothing to fear from those who would disagree with us, as long as we are on the side of truth, and we have a format that alows for rational debate. Using lists of reasons to agree or disagree is a very good way of thouroughly investigating an issue, without letting either side hi-jack the discusion, by changing the topic, talking too long. Each side should bring their best arguments, and list them on a page. If we are not in a shouting mach, or competing for a limited amount of time, why not thoroughly investigate an idea? We don't need to silence the other side, we just need to prove that they are wrong.

Usually, one point won't convince someone they are wrong. Everyone needs to feel that they got all of their reasons out on the table. We are not discounting people's beliefs, we are responding to them.

Obama is wrong on the cap and trade auction system.

Reasons to agree:

1. Romney has said, "Governor Mark Sanford is right. Unfortunately, some in the Republican Party are embracing the radical environmental ideas of the liberal left. As governor, I found that thoughtful environmentalism need not be anti-growth and anti-jobs. But Kyoto-style sweeping mandates, imposed unilaterally in the United States, would kill jobs, depress growth and shift manufacturing to the dirtiest developing nations."
2. Its called global warming, but cap and trade only punishes the US, if China and India don't join. We should not put our businesses on an un-even playing field unless other countries go along.
3. Cap in trade does not work very well in Europe.
4. It would be better to directly invest in clean technology, instead of punishing old technology.
5. We should first do a cost benefit analysis of global warming, before we do anything harsh. Lets say we spend 5 trillion dollars every 10 years fighting global warming, but we only stop the planet from changing 1 100th of a degree. Is that success? What if it was 10 or 100 trillion dollars every 10 years? No one is even asking any of these questions. We are just going down the road blindly. Perhaps more lives could be saved with the trillions of dollars this will cost us, if we invested in other things. Who knows, if rising sea levels are the big problems, with that much money we could pump extra water to death valley, and bring some life to a lifeless area. There is still some aspect of the religious cult to the whole carbon-phobia phenomenon that wants to treat the earth like an environmental sanctuary instead of a garden.
6. Cap and trade would require a lot of regulation, new agencies, tons of overhead.
7. Emission taxes which they argue are a simple and economically efficient means of achieving the same objective. The fact that Obama approves of the cap and trade auction system shows that he is easily caught up in hype (as well as generating hype) and doesn't look at the facts.
8. Permit prices may be unstable and therefore unpredictable
9. Cap and trade systems tend to pass the quota rent to business
10. Cap and trade systems could become the basis for international trade in the quota rent resulting in very large transfers across frontiers
11. Cap and trade systems are seen to generate more corruption than a tax system
12. The administration and legal costs of cap and trade systems are higher than with a tax
13. A cap and trade system is seen to be impractical at level of individual household emissions

 

Reasons to disagree

1. We should use the markets to promote good behavior and punish bad behavior.
2. The transfer of wealth from polluters to non-polluters provides incentives for polluting firms to change.

 

Obama is wrong on the new deal.

Background: In economic affairs, in April 2005, he defended the New Deal social welfare policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt (more)

Reasons to agree:

1. Central planning never works as well as individual decisions.
2. The new deal did some good things, but in the long run, it did more damage. The new deal created the welfare state, entitlements, and the retirment of the nany state that will emplode violently with the retirment of the baby-boomers.
3. Individual people make stupid decisions. The government can try to promote good decisions. But government is run by people, and baby-kissing, phonies who buy elections by telling you what you want to hear, and taking your property and giving it to your neighbor, makes worse decisions than just letting people decide what they want to do with their own money.

Books that agree:

1. New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America (Hardcover) by Burton W., Jr. Folsom

Obama is wrong on the vouchers

Obama is wrong on the vouchers.

Reasons to agree

1. During an October 2004 debate, Obama stated that he opposed education vouchers for use at private schools because he believes they would undermine public schools. (Keyes, Obama disagree sharply, The Chicago Tribune, October 27, 2004. Archived at the www-news.uchicago.edu website. Retrieved on January 31, 2008).
2. Obama says vouchers would "would undermine public schools". This is stupid. Schools get a certain amount of money per kid. If schools have less kids, it is only right that they would get less money.

Obama is wrong on government health care

Obama is wrong on government health care.

Reasons to agree:

1. Obama said; "I am absolutely determined that by the end of the first term of the next president, we should have universal health care in this country."


2. Why would we want the people who ran the Katrina responce effort, and who run the US Postal service to run healthcare?

Obama is wrong on embryonic stem cell research

Obama is wrong on embryonic stem cell research.

Reasons to agree:

1. Obama supports embryonic stem cell research and was a co-sponsor of the 2005 Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. (Statement of Support for Stem Cell Research, Barack Obama, U.S. Senator for Illinois). The government should not take money from people, and use it on things they consider to be murder.

Webpages that agree:

1. http://www.moralaccountability.com/obama

Obama is wrong on abortion.

Reasons to agree:

1. Obama had a 100 percent rating from the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council for his support of abortion rights, family planning services and health insurance coverage for female contraceptives.
2. Obama voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive.
3. Obama was wrong to have voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act
4. Obama is wrong on embryonic stem cell research
5. Obama voted NO on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions. That was bad.
6. It is pretty messed up for Obama to have voted NO on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.
7. Abortion is wrong.

Reasons to disagree:

1. OBAMA: If it sounds incredible that I would vote to withhold lifesaving treatment from an infant, that’s because it’s not true. There was a bill that said you have to provide lifesaving treatment. The fact is that there was already a law on the books in Illinois that required providing lifesaving treatment, which is why not only myself but pro-choice Republicans and Democrats voted against it. With respect to partial-birth abortion, I am completely supportive of a ban on late-term abortions, as long as there’s an exception for the mother’s health and life, and this bill did not contain that exception
2. Obama is right to reach across the isle for common ground on abortion.
3. People don't care what Obama believes. Issues don't matter with Obama. People like Obama because he is different. but Change for change sake does not solve problems.

One vote that especially riled abortion opponents involved restrictions on a type of abortion where the fetus sometimes survives, occasionally for hours. The restrictions, which never became law, included requiring the presence of a second doctor to care for the fetus.

Abortion opponents see Obama's vote on medical care for aborted fetuses as a refusal to protect the helpless. Some have even accused him of supporting infanticide.

Obama — who joined several other Democrats in voting "present" in 2001 and "no" the next year — argued the legislation was worded in a way that unconstitutionally threatened a woman's right to abortion by defining the fetus as a child.

"It would essentially bar abortions because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this was a child then this would be an anti-abortion statute,"Obama said in the Senate's debate in March 2001.

Obama is wrong on guns.

Obama is wrong on guns

Reasons to agree Obama supported a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns (Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization 1996 candidate questionnaire). So Obama thinks that only criminals should have hand guns, because laws are not going to stop them. Obama voted against a 2004 measure allowing a self-defense exception for people charged with violating local weapons bans by using a gun in their home (Obama Record May Be Gold Mine For Critics CBS News). So you should get in trouple if you protect yourself with a gun, in your own house? So I guess we should all buy base-ball bates, if you live in a bad neighborhood and want to protect yourself. People would bring guns to my school all the time. I lived in Idaho. It was no big deal. People left their gun in their gun rack in their pick-up-truck, and went shooting for pheasants after school. An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. Robert A. Heinlein Reasons to disagree: There is little a president could do about guns. We lived through Bill Clinton, we could live through Obama. Having a black president that went to Harvard might inspire enough criminals to go away from a life of crime, it might make up for the loss of safety due to his gun policy. Interest of those who agree: Hunting as recreation Hunting as food Preservation of perceived "manhood". Preservation of a way of life. They went hunting with their fathers. Self defense Interest of those who disagree: Reduction of gun violence.

Obama is right on NASA

President Obama is right on NASA.

Reasons to agree

1. Obama wants to cut spending on NASA. Specifically he would like to delay the Constellation program for five years. His willingness to make such arguments is good news. We went to the Moon and got nothing but bragging rights. If we want bragging rights over other countries, we should stop getting our asses kicked in Math and Science. At one time it was inspirational to go to the moon for some reason. Those days are passed. We need to be smarter with our money.

Probable interest of those who agree:

1. They agree with the argument, outside of any interest or alterior motivation (30%)
   
   


2. Democratic party groupism (40%)


3. Liberal guilt.


4. Political laziness & issue crossover.


5. Money (for NASA. AKA: pork)

Probable interest of those who disagree:

1. Republican Party Affiliation (40%)


2. They disagree with the argument, outside of any interest or alterior motivation (30%)
   
   


3. Racism (5%)


4. Political laziness & issue crossover.


5. The desire to prioritize, and put for things that we need now.


6. The desire to live within our means. It is crazy to go to the moon when you are in debt. That is like buying a BMW when you don't have a home.