Unlocking The Cage- A Flowchart Conversation Project by Larken Rose

[Culain]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zaskaHHnos

 

This is quite an ambitious project with a lot of potential that I'm seeing.

 

The goal is to present a type of interactive Socratic dialogue to guide users into discovering the inherent contradictions within their own thinking without giving any direct answers/solutions.

[RuralRon]

The complexity increases rapidly based on the number of questions asked, if the flowchart has to take into account contradictions of Q99 with question Q78, assuming of course that Q99 & Q78 are related. How many permutations like that would be required?

 

The scope of the questions would need to be rather large it seems, to address the wide range of personal perspectives on statism.

 

Larken has been into this subject for a long time, so perhaps he as derived some "essential" questions that focus on the fallacies of statism and believes the number of variables, although large, can be managed to produce an effective process.

 

Quite an interesting and ambitious project. He should first focus on the flowchart, and secondarily the presentation issues which only serve to keep people's interest but otherwise don't contribute to the goal of the process. That's not to say the presentation has no influence on the effectiveness, only that it isn't the primary embodiment / heart of the algorithm. 

[Bulbasaur]

Funny, I had basically the same idea about two days ago. I envisioned more of a web application of multiple choice or agree/disagree questions than a video-conversation, but to the same end; walking users through their views on a series of morality concepts, with some branching based on answers given, and then at the end pointing out any contradictions between mutually exclusive answers and prompting users to choose only one to stand by. As the video mentions, adhering to statism relies on internal contradictions; using Socratic methods to lead people to think about them in terms of self-selected statements (and challenge them choose one or the other in order to proceed) seems like a great way to circumvent the defensiveness that springs up when simply processing someone else's statements.

 

I think this need not be as difficult as he's suggesting, though. Something like 30 well-crafted questions presented to the user is probably sufficient, say covering 10 main concepts with 3 questions pertaining to each. Too many questions risks exceeding people's attention span. If each topic has its own self-contained flowchart, then it would avoid the enormity of 30+ levels of multiple branching.

 

This could be promoted as something like the Myers-Briggs personality test; people seem to like questionnaires that purport to tell them something about themselves, and it would be important for avoiding the defensiveness that they don't go in seeing it as a challenge to their beliefs.

[BenJ]

 

 

This could be promoted as something like the Myers-Briggs personality test; people seem to like questionnaires that purport to tell them something about themselves, and it would be important for avoiding the defensiveness that they don't go in seeing it as a challenge to their beliefs.

 

Exactly what I was thinking - promote it as a way to hone your political ideas, or see where you fall in the political spectrum, etc.  Not too obvious while not too deceptive.