This would centralize the information in one spot (that you can redirect people to in future debates and works).
I have tried many centralizing or organizing things. Here’s an example of one which has gotten almost no response or interest: Philosophy Outline: Reason & Morality · Elliot Temple
Anyway, I have plenty more things I could try. I have plenty to say. And I know there’s plenty of room for improvement in my stuff including regarding organization. I will keep posting things at EA for now. Even if I stop, I’ll keep posting at my own sites. Even if no one listens, it doesn’t matter so much; I like figuring out and writing about these things; it’s my favorite activity.
An unrelated note: I liked your post on the damage big companies were doing on your forum.
FYI, it’s hard for me to know what post you mean without a link or title because I have thousands of posts, and I often have multiple posts about the same topic.
I don’t really understand why you think the damage they do is not compatible with capitalism - I don’t see anything in the definition of capitalism that would preclude such an outcome.
The definition of capitalism involves a free market where the initiation of force (including fraud) is prohibited. Today, fraud is pretty widespread at large companies. Also, many versions of capitalism allow the government to use force, but they do not allow the government to meddle in the economy and give advantages to some companies over others which are derived from the government’s use of force (so some companies are, indirectly via the government, using force against competitors). Those are just two examples (of many).
(I may not reply further about capitalism or anything political, but I thought that would be short and maybe helpful.)
so you can’t distinguish between people who have something to hide and people who would be ok with the concept if they had heard about it.
You can tell them about the debate policy concept and see how they react. You can also look at whether they respond to criticisms of their work. You can also make a tree of the field and look at whether that expert is contributing important nodes to it or not.
I don’t see such a practice becoming mainstream for the next few decades.
I think it could become important, widespread and influential in a few years if it had a few thousand initial supporters. I think getting even 100 initial supporters is the biggest obstacle, then turning that into a bigger group is second. Then once you have a bigger group that can be vocal enough in online discussions, they can get noticed by popular intellectuals and bring up debate policies to them and get responses of some kinds. Then you just need one famous guy to like the idea and it can get a lot more attention and it will then be possible to say “X has a debate policy; why don’t you?” And I can imagine tons of fans bringing that up in comment sections persistently for many of the popular online intellectuals. It’s easy to imagine fans of e.g. Jordan Peterson bugging him about it endlessly until he does it.
I think the reason that doesn’t happen is that most people don’t actually seem to want it, like it or care, so getting to even 100 supporters of the idea is very hard. The issue IMO is the masses resisting, rejecting or not caring about the idea (of the few who see it, most dislike or ignore it), including at EA, for reasons I don’t understand well enough.
For instance, let’s take someone like Nate Hagens. How would you go to judge his reliability?
I glanced at the table of contents and saw mention of Malthus. That’s a topic I know about, so I could read that section and be in a pretty good position to evaluate it or catch errors. Finding a section where I have expertise and checking that is a useful technique.
There’s a fairly common thing where people read the newspaper talking about their field and they are like “wow it’s so bad. this is so amateurish and full of obvious errors”. Then they read the newspaper on any other topic and believe the quality is decent. It isn’t. You should expect the correctness of the parts you know less about to probably be similar to the part you know a lot about.
At a glance at the Malthus section, the book seems to be on the same side as Malthus, which I disagree with. So a specific thing I’d look for is whether the book brings up and tries to address some of the arguments on my side that I regard as important. If it ignores the side of the debate I favor, and doesn’t have any criticisms of anything I believe, that’d be bad. I did a text search for “Godwin” and there are no results. (Godwin is a classical liberal political philosopher from the same time period as Malthus who I like a lot. He wrote a book about why Malthus was wrong.) There are also no results for “Burke” and no mention of Adam Smith (nor turgot, bastiat, condorcet, mises, rothbard, hayek). I see it as a potentially bad sign to look at old thinkers/writers only to bring up one who is on your side without talking about other ideas from the time period including disagreements and competing viewpoints. It can indicate bias to cherry pick one past thinker to bring up.
That’s inconclusive. Maybe it gives fair summaries of rival viewpoints and criticizes them; I didn’t look enough to actually know. I don’t want to spend more time and energy on this right now (also I dislike the format and would want to download a copy of the book to read it more). I think it gives you some idea about ways to approach this – methods – even though I didn’t actually do much. Also, in my experience, the majority of books like this will fail at fact checking at least once if you check five random cites, so that would be worth checking if you care about whether the facts in the book are trustworthy.