Electronic Democracy

We aim to establish a political party that utilizes open websites, such as Wikipedia, to achieve the following goals:

1. Organize and present reasons in support of or opposition to each government policy.
2. Rank the highest-scoring reasons at the top of each list, based on their performance in supporting or opposing the policy.
3. Generate scores for each conclusion based on the performance of the reasons.
4. Include different types of costs and benefits in the reasons, such as financial, time, freedom, security, autonomy, risk, and health.
5. Promote candidates who pledge to use open and transparent forums to evaluate the feasibility of each government policy.

How

Each proposal would have columns for reasons to agree and disagree. The reasons could include:

Cost or benefits (categorized by factors such as money, lives, man-hours, freedom, health, etc.) Logical arguments (if-then proposals, causal or strengthening arguments) Scientific studies (categorized by the number of participants, level of randomization, use of double or triple blind, placebo control, and clinical environment). Books, movies, songs, videos, sayings, or speeches that contain arguments or data supporting or weakening the conclusion. Each argument would have its own score, but once an argument is used to support another argument, it would have a "linkage score" and a "unique score."

For example, the belief that Nazis were committing genocide during WWII would have its own score. However, it could also be used as evidence to strengthen the conclusion of war with Germany if combined with the belief that "we should violently oppose those committing genocide."

Arguments can be found in various forms of media such as books, movies, poems, and songs. Sometimes, it takes an entire piece of media to discuss a particular topic thoroughly. Therefore, it would be helpful to brainstorm a list of the best media that supports or opposes different conclusions.

To measure how much a particular piece of media strengthens or weakens supporting different conclusions, we should evaluate the pro/con arguments presented in each media. For instance, we can analyze if the Wealth of Nations and Communist Manifesto are discussing the same topics from different angles, and whether or not they have valid arguments that have not been disproven. This would determine the linkage or alignment or the direction in which the book is pulling.

Another dimension we should evaluate is to what degree the media's arguments are valid. We could copy and paste arguments from the book and evaluate each argument's validity separately, then average the media's typical score.

Similar to an object moving in space, an argument has directions, validity, and popularity. While popularity is less important, it is still essential to understand what media is currently being used to convince the most people.

Therefore, in addition to understanding the direction a book is pointing the reader and the validity of the arguments presented, we also need to know how many copies the book has sold and other ways of measuring its influence.