Reasons Why The Argument Wiki Needs To Exist

I will probably add even more things in the future. But it impressed ChatGPT for now, and hopefully you

Justifications

• Rationalism: People keep making decisions that result in bad or inefficient outcomes because they're basing them on faulty world-models, not knowing how things really or most-likely are and accurately predicting what the potential consequences are like.
• Defusal: There are a lot of powerful entities causing a lot of harm based on delusional and dangerous ideas, principles and beliefs, and they (along with their complicit victims) need to be confronted with a thorough list of errors of their ways as soon as they can to prevent further damage.
• Solidarity: The wiki aims to unite people of every stance under the singular principle of valuing truth, and systematically converging toward it by finding and following the evidence, reconstituting tribalism to focus on the common enemy as the delusion, misalignment and misunderstanding that alienates everyone from each other. Since no seriously-taken side is based on the notion of itself being false, the wiki is, in some sense, able to take every side at once, putting everyone on the same side.
• Perspective: The wiki will ensure that it's users are exposed to all of the significant stances and points, including obscure, challenging, surprising, unpopular and uncomfortable ones, eliminating naïveté and confirmation bias that would otherwise prevent them from trying to look for them in the first place.
• Development: The establishment of the wiki will allow everyone to finally save their actual-reality-game and make sustainable collective progress in cutting off the debate-hydrae's heads, rather than having to start all over again every time they debate a random person, always getting nowhere and eventually dismissing groups of people who seem to share the same trite and misguided ideas.
• Centralisation: People don't make progress because they keep creating more and more isolated echo-chambers and resources that isolate them from other perspectives and frameworks in turn, and eventually gather dust. The wiki will be a shared space inviting them to come together, dampen every echo and earnestly engage with it's sheer mass of up-to-date content.
• Maturation: The wiki's establishment will compel humanity to move past debates and self-published resources, focus on collaborative problem-solving and tap into the intelligence of the collective hive-mind, rather than focusing on individually found or chosen peers who could be biased, mistaken or unconversable.
• Inspiration: As the wiki becomes famous, people will start adopting it's format in other wikis, sites and resources, enabling them to collectively evaluate more niche topics more thoroughly.

Properties

• Diversity: People can use the wiki to gain insight on any topic of public significance involving arguments, ranging from philosophy, religion, politics, ethics, science and mathematics to conspiracies, cults, pseudoscience, hoaxes, rationalisations about topics attached to mental issues like denial or addiction (e.g. gambling) and even concepts people just want to understand better.
• Aggregation: All popular and strong arguments and counter-arguments for a topic will exist together on the relevant pages, so people can refer to the wiki to get a relatively comprehensive understanding instead of having to scour through thousands of scattered resources such as articles, videos and comment-sections with bloated, arbitrary and redundant as well as outdated and erroneous information.
• Openness: Even when ideas are considered as definitively confirmed or debunked, more arguments and perspectives can still be added to reinforce or challenge the consensus, and even have the potential to put them back under consideration, or overturn the consensus, revealing that it was wrong all along. (This is fully expected, considering how there are ongoing oppositions with each side thinking the matter is settled.)
• Rigour: All terms will have a unique and specific definition (with derivative terms being created for different interpretations of nebulous concepts such as morality), logical fallacies will be noted, and everything will be fundamentally connected through cross-reference.
• Fundamentality: All of the information on the wiki will have stratal and interconnected substantiation that can ultimately be traced back to a combination of evidential exhibits and first-principles in science, mathematics, epistemology, logic and philosophy.
• Evaluation: In addition to addressing each argument with rigour, each topic will clinically establish summaries based on the overall findings of solved and ongoing debates, the correctness/plausibility of each stance, and the known and unknown information.

Collectivism

• Revision: Unlike self-published sources, which usually only have one or few versions created by one or few people, as well as dynamic conversational debates, the wiki's nature enables it to cover for individual weakness and self-optimise in ways like correcting errors, updating information, adding unforeseen nuances/caveats and phrasing things in a more intuitive, compelling and rigorous way.
• Integration: People with deep expertise in many different fields can address and contribute to any topics where it's relevant, including those that such people usually aren't involved in.
• Depersonalisation: Although significant proponents will be referenced, the wiki's nature will isolate arguments and evidence from the reputation, credibility and overall mentality of those happening to hold to them, fostering a collective that sorts through a multitude of various ideas on the basis of the ideas by themselves.
• Focus: The wiki's formality, depersonalisation, organisation and rigour will disable the potential for social and conversational clutter, distractions and derailments like tête-à-tête persuasion, influence, manipulation, ad-hominem attacks, emotional responses and departure. (Except when people decide to temporarily vandalise the pages)
• Involvement: Anyone will be able to contribute and have the potential to make significant progress in any number of domains, no matter how big or small.
• Acknowledgement: The organisation and centralisation of the wiki will ensure that people will be able to provide significant perspectives without them being overlooked, lost and forgotten, like in a big or obscure comment-section.
• Inclusivity: The wiki will be impartial to every side and let the ideas contend with each other by themselves, since all of them purport to be truth, and every argument will be displayed in their most compelling, intuitive and rigorous form, even if they're clearly wrong.

Accessibility

• Nexus: It should be as obvious, popular and useful to use as Wikipedia for anyone who wants to learn about or contribute to topics and their arguments.
• Organisation: Every argument will be presented in a headed tree/list or equivalent structure and organised by merit, validity and strength rather than ranking or popularity.
• Contrast: Different types of arguments (e.g. strong and weak evidence, anecdotal evidence, scientific research, logical arguments, intuitive arguments) and stances will be differentiated by colour or some other form of highlighting. For example, bullet shape and colour would indicate the type of argument, text colour would indicate the stance it supports and shadow colour would indicate the stance it attacks.
• Briefing: The wiki will automatically show tooltips for it's definitions of specific words and phrases when you hover over them, as well as further explanation in modal pop-ups when you click on them.
• Priming: There will be supplementary pages that explain phenomena and strategies related to critical and uncritical thought in more detail, including cognitive biases, manipulation, logical fallacies, media literacy and scientific methodology.

Back to Arguments Wiki context pages