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                                             March 30, 2018
   
   ID_OF_REASON

Henry Farrel wrote:
                                                       [link]
  "This doesn't mean that reason is useless--          
  if harnessed through appropriate social
  means, it can be extremely valuable in
  figuring out the truth."

So then: how do we connect human beings together so
that we get smarter as a whole?

  "The fact that we are much better at poking holes
  in other people’s rationales than in our own means
  that groups that harness this capacity can reach
  better judgments than individuals."

Right, that's an angle.  We have existing institutions
that set-up adversarial situations (court-room trials,     [link]
formal debates) where two factions committed to a cause
pit their arguments against each other. 

So how about a web site that specializes in organized
competition between different intellectual tribes?
Members can vote to pick representatives from lists of
Famous Smart People, crowd-funding is used to try to
raise the necessary funds to pay them to engage in
debate-- a panel of judges declares a winner, but the
debate format would require them to make testable
predictions so in the long run a different judgment of
"who won?" might emerge.  There'd also be the usual
furniture for public comments, and more importantly a
system to summarize and fact-check arguments.
   

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