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The decisions we make as a society have the potential to produce enormous benefit or terrible suffering. Given the complexity of the world we live in, often it is challenging to know which decisions are the right ones to make. Have you ever wondered what would happen if we could put our heads together to address the issues that affect our lives? The internet has recently made it possible for many of us to participate in such an experiment, so this site was created in order to find out. Together we know more than any one of us. It's impossible for one person to consider everything that can go into and come out of a decision on his/her own. Because the site allows anyone to contribute to mapping out possible issues, beliefs, actions and outcomes (called nodes), we can make sure that collectively we don't miss anything important. But it's not enough just to map all the possible nodes and their relationships. We also need to decide what we collectively care about (or don't care about) along with which actions for a given issue will most likely produce which outcomes. So people can score the nodes as well as the relationships between them. This process allows for completeness, but at the same time the nodes we are most concerned about will naturally rise to the top. This prevents major considerations from getting drowned out by the noise, allowing us focus our energies on them. What we are basically doing is collectively mapping the terrain of current and potential realities in order to better shape our future. While the constantly evolving web of reality will always be far too complex and unpredictable to map perfectly, we should be able to come close-enough that it is still a beneficial exercise. The statistician George Box once said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Hopefully this approach to modeling decisions will prove to be useful to humanity, or at least facilitate some interesting conversations. |