It takes a village?

Reasons to disagree

1. People who say, "It takes a village" really want power. They don't think you should be allowed to run your life the way you want to, and so they want to get groups together, and then they want to lead that group's decisions. They people to make decisions as cities, towns, and governments, not individuals and families, because if we let individuals and families make decisions, they don't get to be involved, but they can get their hands into government.

Books as reasons to agree or disagree with beliefs

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

• Thomas Carlyle

Ideas

 

We should allow users suggest books as reasons to agree or disagree with an idea. Now start thinking ahead what an algorithm could do, if someone says that a book agrees with their beliefs. Data is readily available from Amazon or E-bay or the New York Times best selling list of how well a book has sold.

 

So there would be three fields. One place where you submit the item that agrees or disagrees with the original idea. The second field would let you classify the object. Is it a book, awebsite, or simply a logical argument. The third field would be a place where the user explains why he thinks the book supports the conclusion that he/she has come to. Of course, people would be allowed to vote weather or not the book actually does support the side that the original user said that it would.

 

This is where the algorithm could get very sophisticated. Would you want to give more credibility to those who said they had actually read the book? Would you want to give even more credibility to those who had bought the book, as more proof that they actually read the book. Or how about people that used the website mediachest and could prove that they have the book, by the fact that they have let others use the book. What about people who wrote an essay on the book on the website. If Google was doing this, they could provide a place for users to write essays on books, similar to how Amazon lets users write essays. Perhaps they could not let people copy and paste essays into the form. It would only allow people to type their essays directly, to prevent stealing of essays. Perhaps people could vote on weather the book-essays were good or not similar to how Amazon lets users rate reviews, as to weather the review was "helpful" or not.

 

So, as an example, you could submit a best selling book as a reason to agree with an idea, and then right a thoroughly convincing explanation of why this book agrees with the idea, and an essay that proves that you understand the main points of the book.

 

If Google really wants to organize the worlds information, they must do this. We have plenty of books, we have plenty of content on the internet. We need ways of organizing this information into what it all means, and how all this information should affect us. The only good way information can affect us, is for it to help us make better decisions. In order for us to make better decisions, we must know all of the reasons to agree or disagree with a particular course of action. In order to do this, we should not start at ground zero, with only our own thoughts in our head. We should bring together all of the great thinkers from the ages from every corner of the planet, and organize all of their great thoughts, so that we can make the right decisions.

 

As you can see, this algorithm could be very simple, but it could also offer programmers hundreds of years of challenges to make it more sophisticated. I believe this is a strength of the idea, because it allows for continual improvement.

 

Examples

 

Books that agree that schools need to be reformed.

1. De-schooling Society, by Ivan Illitch

Interest

Please help me brainstorm the most probable interest of those who agree or disagree with Romney on each issue. Just leave what you think motivates each side in the comment section, and I will add it to the list. Also, tell me the percentage of those who agree with Romneyyou think are motivated by each motivation. I will try to put the most likely motivation towards the top of the list.

The book Getting to Yes, tells us that we need to focus on interest instead of positions. To understand why someone believes something we must understand their interest. What are their values? Different interest or values lead to different positions.

Of course it is best when the author of an idea submits their interest. However others users of the website could submit and then vote on the most likely motivations of each side.

We need to also classify interest as opposing interest or mutual interest. 

Businesses interest might include low taxes and good infrastructure.

Reasons

We need to have reasons to agree and disagree with Romney 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 Romney, 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 Romney.

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 Romney's beliefs 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.

Solar Panel and Wind Turbine Idea

When wealthy people die, much of their money gets taxed. It is called
the estate tax, by those who like the tax and the death tax by those
who want to make the tax sound morbid. In nations that have the estate
tax, rich people who spend their money on solar panels or wind
turbines could avoid it, with all the money that they use for that
equipment.

This would stimulate the market for this equipment. Billions of
dollars would get invested in this wind turbines and solar panels. And
we wouldn't be going around the estate tax really, because when you
die you are not transferring money, or houses. You give your kids a
pile of solar panels or wind turbines. The "value" of these items do
not get taxed.

So instead of Paris Hilton getting access to offshore bank accounts
when her father dies, she would get millions of dollars of solar
equipment that her dad bought in 2010, that helped stimulate the
economy, and that she can use to produce clean energy.

Obama is right about evolution

 Q: If one of your daughters asked you, "Daddy, did God really create the world in 6 days?" What would you say?

A: What I believe is that God created the universe, and that the 6 days in the Bible may not be 6 days as we understand it. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth, that is fundamentally true. Now whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible, that I don't presume to know. But one last point--I do believe in evolution. I don't think that is incompatible with Christian faith. Just as I don't think science generally is incompatible with Christian faith. There are those who suggest that if you have a scientific bent of mind, then somehow you should reject religion. And I fundamentally disagree with that. In fact, the more I learn about the world, the more I know about science, the more I'm amazed about the mystery of this planet and this universe. And it strengthens my faith as opposed to weakens it.

Source: 2008 Democratic Compassion Forum at Messiah College Apr 13, 2008

Obama is right about anti-intellectualism

Reasons to agree:

1. People hate smart kids.
2. Americans are way over-fascinated with calling smart people nerds, and geeks. This is not done so much in other cultures.

Background: "I try to avoid an either/or approach to solving the problems of this country. There are questions of individual responsibility and questions of societal responsibility to be dealt with. The best example is an education. I'm going to insist that we've got decent funding, enough teachers, and computers in the classroom, but unless you turn off the television set and get over a certain anti-intellectualism that I think pervades some low-income communities, our children are not going to achieve." ~ Meet The Press, NBC News Jul 25, 2004