this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
224 points (97.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43939 readers
423 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I would like to see something that is less focussed on social media and more on building something together like Wikipedia. One thing that comes to mind would be mapping out all political statements along with arguments and evidence to support or falsify them and the relationships between them (e.g. "if you believe x is a big problem in society and you believe y is the perfect form of government then you must believe y solves x").
A lot of our political discussions seem quite repetitive and go in circles because each argument is presented in a very shallow way. Something to counteract that would be welcome and I think it could work quite well in a federated way since people with different political views would probably want to contribute the supporting and that falsifying sides for each statement.
That would go to shit immediately. The sheer level of moderation that would be required to prevent that from being abused and corrupted would be insane, and then that kind of moderation would in turn invalidate the whole project because the moderation itself would have its own biases.
But it especially wouldn't work in a federated space. Are you suggesting that people can just open their own instance of that? If there are multiple different instances for this kind of thing, that's even more abusable.
Part of the reason Wikipedia works is it is centralized, relatively neutral, and you need sources on facts. It's run by people that adhere to a strict standard, and everyone that contributes is required to adhere to that exact same standard.
What would be the scholarly criteria for the sort of thing that you're talking about? What is the standard? And how do you enforce that standard in a federated space?
Because if it's anything like how federation works around Lemmy, there can be no standard. Instances are going to do whatever they like based on the biases of each admin, which undermines the entire concept.
You're trying to apply objectivity to a very subjective area. I'm not saying it's impossible, and you should by all means try it, but maybe it would be a good idea to try something that has a better chance, first, such as this:
How about an open platform for scientific review and tracking? Like, whenever a new discovery or advance is announced, that site would cut through the hype, report on peer review, feasibility, flaws in methodology, the ways in which it's practical and impractical, how close we are to actual usage (state of clinical trials, demonstrated practical applications, etc.)
And it would keep being updated, somewhat like Wikipedia, as more research occurs. It needs a more robust system of review to avoid the problems that Wikipedia has, and I don't have the solution for that, but I believe there's got to be a way to do it that's resistant to manipulation.
Basically a living survey paper. Examine.com does a very good job of this for a very small set of the scientific literature. The problem is that it takes a lot of work to do, few people are qualified to do it, and out of those few, even fewer will have the time to make such contributions.
I like this idea
You might like a website called Kialo. It's a tool for structured public debates
Thank you, that's a great platform I did not think existed.
You might like a website called Kialo. It's a tool for structured public debates