> Pity you're downvoted here, as you're raising some good points.
I'm beginning to believe the slightest hint of negativity encourages downvotes irrespective of whether the context is appropriate or not.
> Cults and their own belief systems is a whole 'nother fascinating area. Have you written on your own experiences on this?
A little. Getting out of a cult you're born into is an experience like no other. Many people become zealots of another sort, a different religion or a secular kind. The nearest experience most people will have is finding that somebody they loved has betrayed them.
It's a funny thing you know, I had great anxiety about leaving, but when I left I felt a peculiar joy I cannot adequately describe here.
> I'm looking for a few good questions: https://redd.it/1v052g
I think I was reading your subreddit before last year. How is it going? Have you defined a terminal goal for the question-making or is it a philosophical work in progress?
> I think we're pursuing a lot of the wrong questions, and the answers to the wrong questions are simply meaningless.
I don't think there's a faster way to get diminishing returns than to ask the wrong question. I have suspected for a long time that many things we ask governments to do are mutually contradictory. The effective policy then, is not a government policy of direction and action, but to allow us to join the dots to see that our efforts are in vain.
I envisage a real time system available in each home (optional!) which makes requests and takes requests from householders. Think of a StackExchange, only for the government and citizens to be able to interrelate frictionlessly. A newsfeed of items that actually effect you personally would be terrific by itself.
Simple questions, like "How do I buy land and what regulations do I need to know about" and we already appear to be in the domain of experts. That isn't right. You shouldn't have to wade through a library of content on some obscure website hardly anybody visits.
> Assessing narrative means some way of scoring a narrative. That's an interesting problem in itself.
I think a narrative assessment looking for internal consistency would be an enormous improvement. However; there is a troll/prankster on reddit called vargas who posts these internally consistent but increasingly weird stories. It's the same thing that fools Facebook's trending feature into posting fake stories. That would mean to get somewhere you'd need to store a compare and contrast model of some sort.
> On your "Matrix" example: I'm convinced that one of the key fundamentals of an accurate model of the universe (e.g., a true or useful narrative) is that your different perceptions all tend to correspond. It's when you're getting different messages in different places, or from different sources, that you've got a problem.
That would make a good heuristic for increasing our confidence. You could achieve scaling by invoking human computation such as a kind of capcha that give users little 'stories', and ask them whether they are consistent. I am confident that will work because if your proposition can be shorn of context (events happening to mythical people in mythical lands) people think logically for the most part.
> But there's a huge realm in which a fairly accurate understanding is possible.
Take the Podesta Emails recently. Somebody was asking whether they were real or not. You should be able to verify whether they are real or a work of fiction with such a system. Since lies get harder to cover for the more they multiply, my guess is that this 'verifier' would work.