Great to hear!

What do you mean by bringing to Maryland? I’m currently working on a general purpose, hosted version of ConsiderIt. I can keep you in the loop when it’s ready, if you want.

I’m also happy to discuss your research at some point in the future when you’d like feedback. Just send me an email.

Thanks for this very valuable feedback.

The value proposition is basically large crowds communicating concisely and quantitatively, about what they think value, want, and so on. When you think about it, most of the problems in society, on the internet, and so on, the problems you are working to solve, and so on, are only a problem because of our complete inability for large crowds to communicate concisely and quantitatively.

An example being the issue of global warming. Many people claim there is a ‘scientific consensus’, but many people also doubt such claims. If you had the ability to rigorously measure for scientific consensus, then nobody could doubt the rigorous numbers, if the really did exist.

Typically, in any crowd, there are a set of moral experts that know much better than everyone else. However, since these experts are in the minority, the noisy crowd usually drowns them out, resulting in a kind of mistaken crowd insanity. Controversial theoretical fields such as theories of consciousness are particularly prone to this. Most all moral reasoning fields suffer from this. The value proposition is for experts to use this tool to help communicate to the rest of society, and amplify the wisdom of the entire crowd.

This system allows these moral or scientific experts, to collaboratively speak in a unified voice, using consistent language, so they can be heard above the very noisy and mistaken crowd. The consensus building canonization process amplifies the moral and scientific expertise and wisdom of the crowd, and raises everyone up to beyond the level of the experts.

The goal is the opposite of ‘wanting people to go off into separate “camps”’, it is to build as much consensus as possible. Whenever you split into camps, you lose consensus, and influence on the system, so we leverage this fact to reward people to build as much consensus as possible.

Normally, when there is consensus, the conversation completely stops. In today’s world, you aren’t expected to publish the same paper, or send the same post, if you agree with someone! That’s the problem. Inevitably, there is some lesser important issue, where you can find some disagreement, and this is where everyone wastes all their time responding and counter publishing, in eternal, yes, no, yes, no assertions. Canonizer.com enables people to find the most important issues, where there is the most agreement, and the focus and consensus and ability to communicate such to the rest of the crowd, stays at that level, while pushing the lesser important issues out of the way, into supporting/competing sub camps.

Communicating all this to everyone, especially the majority of the crowd, that can only think hierarchically, and is only interested in what they think, or what their leader thinks, never wanting to listen to, even wanting to sensor and destroy everything else, is the biggest problem.

Thank you so much for the very valuable feedback. Perhaps you might be interested in helping us rework some of this too much text stuff a bit? We are working in a crowd sourced model, much like Wikipedia. The difference is, we offer ‘shares’ of canonizer.com for any time spent contributing to the value of the system, improving the browsing methods, and so on. (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/4 for more info and disclaimers.) We are always looking for partners interested in taking anything like this, or what you are working on, to the next level that could radically improve the morality of the world and make gazillions of $$ while doing so.

Brent Allsop

PS: I am never anonymous.

The call to action is a bit unclear on the homepage (lots of text).
The value proposition should be made clearer; in the Living Voters Guide, we wanted to nudge people toward engaging arguments and people that represented diverse perspectives, so our design emphasizes representing pros and cons for different issues in the same place. In canonizer, you seem to want people to go off into separate “camps” in order to express their views amongst like-minded others. If that is the value proposition, you might consider making it more prominent.
What are some of the proposed use cases for canonizer? Is it to be deployed for some specific debate? In a region? Or is it a one-stop, ever open website for expressing opinions on anything? If its the latter, you’ll probably want a better method of browsing.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

Very interesting set of tools, ideas, and work.

I wondered what you thought about what we are starting with canonizer.com in accomplishing some of your goals like living voters guide.

Brent Allsop