Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's dream come true

Resolving conflicts and differences of opinion can be challenging, especially when it involves important issues or people in our lives. Traditional debates often fail to address the real needs and concerns. Conversations can easily go off track or become personal attacks. Instead of avoiding these challenges by surrounding ourselves with like-minded individuals, we can use AI to help distill common concerns and find common ground. Formal logic offers a more structured approach to arguments, but it has been complex and inaccessible. However, with advances in digital technology, we can now create an online platform where humans and AI collaborate to identify assumptions and evaluate arguments. Users can post their beliefs and reasons, and the platform allows for nuanced analysis and scoring of arguments. By combining formal logic with technology, we can have more objective and reasoned decision-making in various aspects of life. If you're like me, you know how tough it can be to resolve differences of opinion and conflict, especially when they involve essential issues or significant people in our lives, such as family. The problem of unresolved or addressed conflict isn't limited to personal relationships. It extends to the broader community and even nations. We often cannot fix our interpersonal problems, get what we need, or work with others to resolve conflict. And traditional debates and discussions often fall short. The words we say may avoid our real needs or concerns. We may get distracted trying to win, or if we've been hurt, we may be distracted trying to hurt the other person back. There's all sorts of ways conversations can fail. We can be dishonest with ourselves or with others. Even if we are open, honest, and trying our best, we get hungry. We're tired. Our emotional state might blow up, and it might be the last straw for a country or for a person. A poor choice of words can blow up in your face and make us lose trust. Once control has been lost, you're no longer dealing with someone who's trying to fix the problem. They're moving on. These discussions can quickly dissolve into personal attacks and distractions, often fueled by unresolved emotions. You look at how politics are discussed, and it's really depressing. It's tempting to sidestep these concerns and challenges in our busy lives by deciding just to simply surround ourselves with like-minded individuals or to try to find like-minded individuals. However, this approach has its limits. Eventually, you run out of relationships to exit. And, to some degree, on this planet, we're all stuck with each other. Some are suggesting extreme solutions like national divorce or civil war, but we're stuck with each other. Either in our relationships, we should be stuck with each other. There's a Huey Lewis song, I'm so glad to be stuck with you. But really, we need to resolve conflict. Every relationship requires it. Fortunately, there's wisdom in the saying, there's nothing new under the sun. If billions of people began articulating their interests, needs, and perspectives, aided by AI, we could efficiently distill the common concerns of individuals in similar situations. Whether it's a family striving to divide chores and enjoy quality time, or cities aiming to balance budgets and maintain essential services, our challenges are often universal. We often want a lot of the same things. Also, the math of belief in debates often doesn't work. For example, a typical argument might, I mean, usually goes something like this. You introduce an initial point, let's call it point A, something you wanted to say and you've been thinking about, and you go ahead and say it. Someone responds with a counter-argument against A, which we'll call D-A, disagree with A. That's their belief, that's something that they've said. You counter their argument, D-A, with your own point. We could call it B-D-A, you're disagreeing with their topic. Then they could counter, and, you know, with each exchange, the conversation drifts further and further from the original point. It's no surprise you might feel unheard. If both people keep responding to each other, the difference between the things that you want to say or the things that you could say and the things that you actually say are going to be vast. And after just talking for like five minutes, you could have easily introduced 30 different topics. You have dozens more points you wanted to discuss, but the potential topics for discussions expand exponentially with each new statement. The issue isn't, you know, your lack of intelligence or your partner's lack of intelligence. The flaw lies in the structure of debate itself. And so the conversation often strays from the initial topic in traditional time-based debates. Even the most patient and intelligent participants can't address the many potential valid points that could, you know, strengthen or weaken their original arguments. Primarily due to time constraints, like I said, but even if you have a life, you can't go into everything. And so we're all deeply alone inside our own heads, not saying the things that we feel we want to say because we can't say them and there's no time and to some degree people don't want to hear it all and you wouldn't even want to hear it all. But it can be difficult. Debates are further truncated to fit our limited attention spans or even to fit in commercial breaks if you pay attention to any issues or watch the news and feel sorry for you. This results in fragmented, repetitive discussions and a lack of depth. Instead of ever having a good conversation, you end up having a conversation over and over and over again. Even if debates were exhaustive and you got to say all the things that you could say or thought about saying, what would you have at the end? Would you have a scoring system that kept track of which points were valid? You know, do you have a good idea of which points you feel were the strongest? How you would rank each one? Even if the debates were exhaustive, they would still need a scoring system for comprehensive evaluation. Consequently, the discourse devolves into a disorganized array of points, begging for systematic assessment and aggregation or totalization, some sort of summation. To the rescue is something called formal logic. It offers a more structured and objective approach to arguments. However, its complexity has made it less accessible for practical everyday decision-making. There's a guy named Gottfield Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz invented calculus in the 1600s separate from Newton. He also had something he called a universal calculus of reasoning known as Ratiofinitor. The system aimed to have mechanically determined the validity of arguments, reducing human error and subjectivity. He ended up laying the work for modern formal logic and computational theory, but he thought he would solve the problem of debates or conflict. Unfortunately, it didn't really work because in his formal logic, you have assumptions, and that assumption has an assumption, and that assumption has an assumption, but he had a plan for just going through and ranking them and figuring out and calculating and giving things scores, but no one has time for that until today with the Internet. Thanks to advances in digital technology, we can now realize Leibniz's dream. We can create an online platform where humans and AI collaborate to identify the assumptions behind any given conclusion, framing them as pro-arguments. I'm sure in school you remember there were pros and cons, supporting and weakening arguments. So counter-arguments would also be included in the con-arguments. So this is going to get boring, but I hope that you will stay with me because it's worth it, and I think it will solve all of our problems. Users can post a belief and a reason to support or oppose it. These reasons serve as foundational assumptions, which can then be further divided into sub-assumptions, each with its own pros and cons. So you have arguments at the top, and then each of those arguments have reasons to agree or disagree with them. The platform allows users to accept or reject individual arguments and to conduct a nuanced cost-benefit analysis, enabling them to balance various interests or priorities. Or users, instead of accepting or rejecting each argument and going through and flagging which ones they accept and reject, you could give your own score on a scale of 1 to 10, or 0 to 100%. You could say how much you accept or reject, or on a scale of 1 to 10. There are many different ways of doing it. But, you know, your way of having an argument could be you sit down and you compare yourself to the average person or the average person in your situation, and you can map out what you need, what you want, and show that other people are like you and also have the same needs and wants. We can have a score for each conclusion based on the strength of the assumptions, the relative strength of the supporting and opposing assumptions. It's just a scientific method. But things need to be more than just true. They also have to be relevant to the issue being discussed. The sky is blue may not be relevant to the thing you're trying to debate right now, and so proving that it's true is just a waste if it's not relevant. Also important, people can win an argument but make a essentially pointless point that doesn't matter in the long run, so you need to have separate scores for whether or not something is important in addition to being true or relevant to the issue at hand. Anyways, with these simple little teeny things that probably feel obvious, we can fix the world if we just did the obvious simple things to try to remove bias and be objective and try to rank our conclusions. Like Leibniz once, this guy, I didn't explain him very well, he invented logic to try to solve the world, but we can finally actually use it. This system offers a structured, efficient, evidence-based approach to debate and decision making. It accommodates the continuous inclusion of new evidence and viewpoints, making it a dynamic asset for rational discourse. By marrying formal logic with contemporary technology, we can pave the way for more objective and reasoned decision making across various aspects of life.