[ExI] Canonizer 2.0

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at gmail.com
Sat Dec 22 20:27:02 UTC 2018


Hi Bill,



Thanks for the continued feedback and questions.  That really helps!  I’m
realizing we are completely failing at communicating about the Canonizer
use model.  In traditional systems, you do, indeed, need vetting.  But
Canonizer is completely different.



Canonizer’s use model us more like Wikipedia, where the crowd does the
vetting.  Wikipedia works great if everyone agrees, but if someone
disagrees, currently, you end up with polarizing edit wars.  With
Canonizer, when disagreement shows up in Wikipedia, instead of an edit war,
you just say: OK, we’ve discovered disagreement, so let’s move the
disagreeable part over to canonizer – where both competing camps can be
represented in multiple camps, concisely and quantitatively – everyone
getting what they want in a win win way.



Canonizer.com is for theoretical fields where there is not yet a scientific
census.  Consciousness is a good example field.  Currently, in this field,
everyone writes a book or article.  First, they classify the field into the
way they perceive the various competing camps, then they point out the
flaws they think they see in these camps.  However, they often get this
wrong, their ideological religions polarize things, and the criticisms
usually are just talking past each other.



They present their own theory, in their own language (different than
everyone else’s language) and from their own unique religious (including
atheism) point of view.  Since every expert has their own book, in their
own language, from their own point of view – it gives the perception that
nobody agrees on anything.  Because everyone is using different ambiguous
language, nobody can communicate.  Nobody talks about what people agree
on.  And everyone ends up focusing on minor disagreements – completely
missing any consensus that may exist.



With canonizer, the first person starts the competition by creating their
own camp on the topic.  Then when a competing camp comes along, you build
as much consensus as possible (canonizing the best terminology and so on
through continued negotiation) and build a supper camp on what people can
agree on (usually the most important doctrines where most people do agree,
like “approachable via science”).  Everyone is highly motivated to find
some terminology to agree on, because forking the camp reduces the
consensus and influence of your camp.  More and more competing camps can
show up, pointing out different yet to be falsified theories.  Obviously,
the more diversity the better, as you want to capture and test for all
theoretical possibilities.



The focus is always on falsifiability.  Everyone is encouraged to come up
with and describe experiments that could validate their camp (or falsify
it).  We ask everyone: “What would falsify your theory, and force you into
a competing theory?  With this theoretical information, the
experimentalists can then perform the experiments being described that
people agree would falsify their camp.


Good arguments also work.  You can measure the quality of a new argument,
by how many people it converts - these can rise to the top and be focused
on.  Ultimately, the experiments are done till there is one remaining camp
that can’t be falsified.  We’ve already seen one camp on at Canonizer.com
be falsified, by data coming from the large hadron collider.  Being able to
track things like this makes it better than a very dramatic sporting
competition, with definite leaders and losers in the competition as more
camps are falsified.



Unlike a traditional survey, At canonizer.com getting everyone into the
same camp (or at least as few camps as possible – what communicating
concisely and quantitatively means and how you measure progress) is the
ultimate goal.  Once you get everyone into the same single camp, by
experimentally falsifying all the others, you know, rigorously and
definitively, you have finally achieved a “scientific consensus”.  Then,
you can throw it back to Wikipedia, since everyone now agrees.  Then you
move onto the next yet to be resolved scientific controversy, where you
start the competition over – continuing the amplification of the wisdom of
the crowd process, significantly accelerating the scientific process, and
knowing, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone wants.



Does that help?





On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:47 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Next, we want to use it for things like global warming.  I can’t wait to
> see what kind of consensus people can really find on supposedly important
> topics like that.
> Now my question is:  who are the people?  National surveys?  Surveys of
> the intelligentsia?  Vetting other surveys done by, say, National Science
> Foundation or some other like Roper?  If you are going to actually perform
> surveys, then you need psychometricians/social psychologists so avoid
> asking question in a biased way, or in such a way as to get biased answers,
> and to survey people in a statistically appropriate way.
>
>  We want to find, build consensus around, measure it rigorously, what
> people agree on  with room for any different points of view.
>
> On the topic of consciousness citing people like Dennett, you are likely
> to find high reliability - same answers next year.  On topics like global
> warming, you are likely to find variations, sometimes wide, in what people
> think today and last year and next year.
>
> I guess some of my concerns are about: are you going to vet other data for
> rigor, or are you going to produce raw data and who is going to vet yours?
>
> bill w
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 2:22 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> William,
>>
>> You seem to be thinking of this as a traditional survey.  It is not!
>> When David Chalmers herd about our survey, he had the same concerns you
>> did.  The egghead stole my idea, but thought he could do it better, so he
>> did it the traditional way:
>>
>> https://philpapers.org/surveys/
>>
>> That was a disaster, and it just falsely reinforced the belief everyone
>> had that there was no consensus, whatsoever in this field.
>>
>> Traditional surveys are about what people disagree on.  We want to find,
>> build consensus arround, measure it rigorously, what people agree on  with
>> room for any different points of view.  A very different task.
>>
>> Brent
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 12:31 PM William Flynn Wallace <
>> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> to brent alsop\
>>>
>>> I went to the website and still don't quite know what you are up to.  If
>>> it is any kind of surveying, questionnaires, etc.,  I want to know who you
>>> have and what are their qualifications.  Designing these things takes
>>> experts.  I am a social psychologist and know very well that you can sway
>>> opinions wildly and inaccurately by the designs - the wording of the
>>> questions, etc..
>>> bill w
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 12:34 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Cool!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Brent where the heck have you been man?  Seems like a long time since
>>>> we heard from ya.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> spike
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On
>>>> Behalf Of *Brent Allsop
>>>> *Sent:* Friday, December 21, 2018 8:56 AM
>>>> *To:* ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>>>> *Cc:* Jim Bennett <jim at bennettgrouputah.com>
>>>> *Subject:* [ExI] Canonizer 2.0
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi fellow extropians,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> For those who haven't heard, now that we have a little Ether money,
>>>> we've launched Canonizer 2.0.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> My Partner Jim Bennett just put together this video:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://vimeo.com/307590745
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If anyone is interested in "investing"  (legally, we need to call it
>>>> donating, at least for now - till we do our canonizer security token
>>>> offering.) to help move things forward, let me know.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Brent Allsop
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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