Claim-Refactoring Service

Pondering a claim-refactoring UI. You'd highlight a sentence, as in hypothes.is (annotation systems), and ask "what does this really mean?"

For "Climate change is an existential threat" people could offer re-phrasings like "There's a more than 50% change that there will be 0 humans alive in 20 years."

And people could vote on which of the re-phrasings (a) minimize semantic noise, and (b) reasonably capture the original phrase's meaning/intent. That latter part might not be possible, and should be dropped as design goal.

• could AI/ML do the former, as in Brin's Earth?
• probably need a WebOfTrust to filter out the crazy Others - more to the point, there won't be one single Truth.

And then, of the highest-scoring (for minimum noise) re-phrasings, users could vote on the Accuracy of the statement. That's not binary or even a spectrum, see the categories at Nature of Truth.

Nov'2024 thoughts

• claims can be refactored many ways
• there is no One Right Way
• therefore the process is (a) social/communal, and (b) time-bound
• almost every disagreement includes many predictions (see below)

Users could attach sources to their votes.

Those sources might have statements needing re-phrasing... :)

Statements that are predictions should make good quality Bets. (Idea Futures)

• update: this might be the best place to start, because it puts skin in the game, and provides monetization... Downside is this only supports predictions about the future, not descriptions of the present/past....
• and/or/yes/and.... maybe web3 makes it easy to turn everything into a bet, chasing out bullshit and bad-faith? (see thinking in bets framing at bottom)
• do you still need an oracle either way?

Statements which are conditional predictions could only be settled if the precursor condition became true. (Futarchy)

Chains of logic of rephrasings A/B/C/D could also be evaluated: (A & B & C) -> D?

• Why? Because the "atomic" claims are usually "data points" supporting a larger claim
• So we need a WebOfTruth to balance the weights.
  • cf WebOfPriority at (2020-12-22) Graph-driven SoftwareForge
  • counter: is this just Decision Rationalizing?
• IBIS/Intertwingler?

Though, since we'd probably be talking about the Real World, which is a Complex System, these might be impossible to "resolve". (Diagram of Effects)

One benefit to this idea is that well-factored claims can be pointed/linked to, and given more weight-votes (convergence), vs the infinite variety of noise.

cf (2017-03-13) Udell Teaching Students To Marshal Evidence And Evaluate Claims, (2012-12-03) Journalism Service Lists Outlines And Data (Journalism), Disputation Arena, Schroeder Degrees Of Freedom, e-prime

Afterthought this framing could also be useful not just for journalism and public policy, but also

• product management
• self-improvement
• because both could use the operationalism of thinking in bets