(Recovered from the Fandom wiki's dump file, with a few edits. Still need to sort out a lot of it, but you can read it to get a better idea of the wiki's philosophy.)
Hello! I'm FireyDeath4.
I made this wiki so we could have a centralised, accessible source where we could aggregate, compare and evaluate arguments and stances on all kinds of topics, and come together to discover the truth for ourselves.
The Arguments Wiki is a collaborative resource that compiles topics, debates, stances, arguments, counterarguments, insights, evidence and questions in many domains, such as philosophy, religion, politics, ethics, science, mathematics and more, and formally evaluates them using evidence, logic, first principles and a lot of cross-referencing. On this wiki, all perspectives are addressed, all significant arguments and counterarguments (in terms of both popularity and quality) are displayed together, and anyone can contribute (- unless they're unable to access the site). Even fallacious arguments, conspiracies, pseudoscientific proposals, hoaxes and rationalisations about topics attached to mental issues like denial or addiction (e.g. gambling) will be shown, especially common ones, as they will give explanations, and help set an example for people so they can understand the erroneousness of those arguments.
At the moment, I'm the only one working on this wiki. I need more people to help, so I'm trying to establish some foundations, but I find a lot of it overwhelming. Many pages, including this one, are a disorganised mess. I also include a lot of parts where I talk and ramble about things personally, which I'll probably move to blog posts, comments, fora and/or Discord conversations once the pages start taking form.
As this wiki is necessarily going to cover controversial topics, many of which people have deeply integrated into their personal identities and ideologies, it's important to be civil and treat people with respect, or at least basic decency. Even if you think that everyone who has a different viewpoint or doesn't subscribe to your religion or political/philosophical stance is a sinful fascist idiot heretic, you have to remember that they're trying to figure things out and have to sort through dozens and dozens of perspectives. They don't have the conviction you do, and conviction has been associated with the Dunning-Kruger effect, a statistic in psychology that shows that people with less intelligence or proficiency in a particular field tend to believe that they're more intelligent/proficient than they actually are, and vice versa, because of a lack of perspective and understanding of their limitations.
What's more, people are unlikely to listen to you if it doesn't seem like you care for their wellbeing; in fact, conversely, people tend to eat up what you say with a spoon if you act like you really care about them and say things that seem to strongly corroborate with their beliefs. When you appear to deliver your arguments in a threatening way, even if you say something politely that starkly goes against their beliefs, the argument turns into less of a debate and more of an unproductive barney. People have to be sure you have their best interests in mind, or at least care about discerning the truth, before they start taking what you say into consideration.
I aim to make this wiki become a commonly-known, mainstream collaborative source for anyone who wants to learn about arguments and contentious topics of interest, or offer their own perspectives, insights and evidence, eventually aspiring to put it on par with Wikipedia in terms of engagement. People should not have to consult a plethora of resources or engage in instantiated debates that are numerous, niche, biased, erroneous or subject to overstanding and oversights, but not revision and verification. This wiki will reference debates and resources, but ultimately it should be well-grounded in empirical information and justifications.
An important aspect of the wiki would be the inclusivity, solidarity and depersonalisation it fosters. Of course, many specific popular or niche arguments would have their attributions to certain people, but it is a wiki presenting the statements in an organised format, not a single person or group, so it's less about the profound or preposterous ideas of a particular person, and more about the ideas themselves, as part of a collective conceptual landscape, forcing people to engage with the arguments and ideas themselves in a non-conversational manner, without reference to an ethos-based precedent of previous ideas, opinions and demeanours to judge the ideas based on, instead of focusing on debate dynamics and using ad-hominem attacks, other personalised arguments and other fallacies, and without free-form conversations and interactions cluttering up the communication of core ideas. Although this wiki is evaluative, it aims to unite everyone under the single desire to express truth, and represent every side of an argument and give all of them a continual chance to argue their case, holding to the possibility that even the most accepted pieces of knowledge could be defeated and proven wrong, as the existing opponents may already believe.
If this wiki becomes successful, it might move to it's own standalone website, but for now, it is being established on Fandom due to the platform's popularity.
A little while before I started it, I came across a page about rebuttals to a particular stance. But it didn't list the rebuttals directly. Instead, it was a very long page filled with lots and lots of links to external resources about the topic.
Immediately, I began to feel very exhausted. I tend to accumulate thousands of tabs in my browser, and I've poured hours and hours into writing arguments and counterarguments to random people on the internet about it in the past. Currently, I'm in the middle of arguments with several people about things, which I haven't addressed in probably years because I have so many things to do. I have ADHD, dozens and dozens of unfinished comments and posts, hundreds of personal projects I'm working on - all of which I only tend to do the newest (or most significant) of because I constantly come up with new ones and prefer to do lots and lots of new things rather than tackle all the old things I started a long time ago - and tens of thousands of unwatched videos and tabs I haven't finished business with.
On top of that, I'd already thought about starting a list of arguments and counterarguments about a particular topic. I needed a single place where I could put them all together. But I knew that if I started yet another document on my computer, it would probably just get buried and lost. I might even end up starting a new one, completely forgetting that I made one in the first place. As someone who can't keep up with time exponentially accelerating on a daily basis, this completely seems unlike any sort of an ideal use of time.
When people try to gain insight about their beliefs, they tend to look for viewpoints and material that confirm or expand on what they already believe. This is a (hopefully) well-known manifestation of confirmation bias, where people tend to only seek out evidence that confirms their pre-existing beliefs. Most people start from the idea that their beliefs are correct, rather than the idea that they should be critical about them and strive to reach the closest thing to the truth as they can, because re-examining entire schemata and worldviews is very unproductive for people trying to survive against natural threats in the wilderness. And a significant problem is that people are often so aimless and uninsightful that they attach themselves to their beliefs and ideologies, resulting in an abstract codependency and making themselves vulnerable and defensive toward attacks on those beliefs and ideologies.
Also, there tend to be thousands and thousands, if not millions of articles discussing a particular subject. Nobody is going to click on every single one of them, only to eventually find that most of all the pages have redundant content awith the remaining few providing one new insight, or that they're constantly providing so many new insights that they can barely cram any of them in, and that they've been sitting there for like 17 years and still have a few thousand articles left to go, and that they've forgotten about 99.99999% of the material they've seen and heard. If they find any inconsistencies or fallacies in any of the material they've seen, their voices won't go far when they end up commenting on the page or having to discuss what they've just heard in their own private message boards. And commenters tend to get easily buried and overlooked.
Other wikis and encyclopaediae, such as Wikipedia, are more focused on reporting information neutrally rather than trying to find the truth and getting caught up in bias with editors trying to endorse their personal viewpoints instead of formally assess what everyone is saying.
This is not helpful when we want to start working together, as one population, to find out and share what the truth is.
People don't tend to think fundamentally...
(WIP)
NOTE: Content in this section might be very unorganised and rambly. I probably typed some of the paragraphs all out at once without filtering them or anything. You can read this if you want more of an insightful understanding of the nature of debates and how this wiki would help, though.
I noticed that people often debate and convey arguments in a fashion strikingly akin to AI image generation. The focus is all on intuition, which leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding and fallacies, rather than agreement of definitions and epistemologies followed by rigorous logical examination of the arguments and evidence.
When a professional artist decides to draw a picture, there is a systematic process they use to compose the artwork. First, they determine the subject of the artwork, determine the visual scope of the artwork, draw a rough sketch, use perspective to create a plan of the landscape, draw the proportions of the objects, draw their overall shapes and sketch out the details of the picture. This is the first pass. Next, they draw clearer outlines over the sketch in order to create a preliminary line drawing, which is the second pass. Then the colours of the objects and the light sources are chosen, and the drawing is coloured in and shaded, taking light dynamics into account. Finally, the drawing is refined and the errors are corrected. Throughout the process, they get creative input and bearing on things like style and detail.
Conversely, an AI image generator takes a very big dataset of images with descriptions, trains it's neural network (which is an enormous static function) to get a feel for what the images look like and what kind of trends certain substrings have, starts with a canvas of colourful noise and generates the whole image at once, incrementally modifying the pixels to suit the prompt over many iterations. Then it stops when it looks realistic enough. AI image generation also has a systematic process, but the focus is all on intuitive realistic semblance, and none on formalised composition. A quick examination of a detailed AI-generated image shortly reveals how much it doesn't understand anything systematic about the world, like text (though it's pretty good with orthography) and anatomy (you've surely seen AI-generated hands before).
Most arguments are very much like the latter. A quick examination of most arguments shortly reveals how much the conversers haven't given any thought to the most fundamental definitions and motivations for the topic, which quickly leads to misrepresentations and fallacies. Some of the most prevalent examples of this are topics like spirituality, free-will, morality and belonging.* From what I understand, our intuitive understanding of spirituality is based on the notion that we're conscious because specifically we have souls and that there's stuff we somehow know exists beyond the empirical scope of science (like if chakras existed, we probably should've discovered them and created a detailed analysis of their empirical properties already). Our intuitive understanding of free-will is "the autonomy that makes us different from rocks and robots", and we take it for granted so much that we get defensive when it's like "are we really that different?" because if we don't, we get existential and psychological dread from the idea that we're not really in control, which is somehow a corollary to the notion that we're fully governed by external aspects of reality like physics and unpredictable randomness - not to mention, it threatens our ego and sense of self-worth as part of the world's dominant species. Our intuitive understanding of morality is "what is right and wrong to do", which is "what is good and evil to do", which is "a list of actions we should and shouldn't do", which is "a list of actions we ought to do and not do", the basis of which is a matter of serious, heated and aimless contention. It doesn't help that people use entirely different definitions for the concept of morality, ranging from analytic divine command theory to synthetic determination of what affects creatures acting in self-interest and their wellbeing, and what causes different emotional responses, which creates a serious disconnect between people who try and discuss it - yet the concept is utterly loaded with pathos and insinuations that come with the arguments. And our intuitive understanding of belonging is completely based on normalisation and prejudice, a destructive psychological inclination, unless it's in a formal context. You should shortly be able to understand how silly that is.
*I talked about belonging because one of the few pages I worked on while the wiki was up on Fandom was about pineapple on pizza. Yes, there would even be funny topics like that on there. Lol
In fact, when people don't put in the effort to optimise their debates, I see them as akin to model collapse. It isn't long before people lose the plot, and no coherent understanding is produced. At least with the Arguments Wiki, people will have some high-quality training data with which to help themselves base their argumentative practices on - something to guide them to make the most out of their debates.
Although many games have been solved and/or dominated by AI, we still play them for the sake of the experience of us flawed human beings doing so. Debates are much like these games. At best, dynamic human debates are recreational and experimental. When we want to make progress in forming our understandings of different concepts, however, we need to take a collaborative problem-solving approach, and this wiki aims to facilitate exactly that.
The ideal role of a debate, when it comes to an issue of public significance, should be to have a discussion that provides opportunities for each party to generate strong insights, so that those insights can be put on the Arguments Wiki, evaluated and established. Debates should not be a be-all and end-all dispute through which people decisively settle issues unless each party is civil, debating in good faith, well-versed in things like critical thought, biases and rationality, and not debating about something significant enough to warrant dissertation on the wiki. Debates are dynamic and constantly subject to human biases, oversights, misinterpretations and malicious derailment. Following from the AI art analogy, debates should be used to create inspiration, not masterpieces. Significant and highly-nuanced topics are like big projects that require a dedicated team to produce, and it's unlikely that a single person would be specialised in everything. And even if they were - like MindShift - reaching other people in the first place is a completely separate matter, which this wiki also aims to overcome by becoming mainstream. People trying to tackle those projects all by themselves will probably perform poorly or hit roadblocks in areas they don't have experience or understanding of.
This wiki aims to solve these issues by formalising and rigorously assessing the presented arguments and stances, presenting all of the branching perspectives of different topics and getting people used to the process of formally conducting and assessing them. If we're going to be good artists, and we're going to make serious artworks instead of PilotRedSun works, then we ought to learn how to draw.
(Don't neglect to notice how here, the oughtness has a basis that positively contributes to a pragmatic goal.)
Look, I don't know how to start, so I'm just going to write a list of qualities that should distinguish this wiki from existing services: