| HN Mirror

You're right about the formatting, oops. There are supposed to be three paragraphs there, but I'm not familiar with HN's formatting, and I didn't think about it after I posted it.

I would say that Wikipedia became popular, and eventually earned itself a high place in search results, because it is easy to use, yes, but mostly because it provided a place/format for useful information that couldn't be accessed anywhere else as easily. It doesn't mean much to say, "Oh, my site will be easy to use too!" - that's just an unsubstantiated claim at this point. But I don't think that's a hard target to hit.

On the other point (providing a place for useful information that can't be easily gotten elsewhere), once you have a clear idea of what the site does, it's immediately apparent that the information it provides is extremely useful, and that there's nowhere else to get it.

I'll try to give a couple more concrete examples: in politics, how often does it appear to be the case that people understand why their opponents believe the things they do? How many people can give a genuinely strong argument for the opposing view, vs. how many people are unable to give a plausible argument for the other side and tend to assume that their opponents think what they do simply because they're stupid/selfish/malicious/etc.? Our political process is highly polarized, and there is almost no reasonable, informed political debate, certainly not anywhere that is prominent and accessible, and this is extremely detrimental to the project of trying to run a well-functioning democracy. Wikipedia made it not possible for reasonable people to be trivially wrong about matters of fact, by making it simple to find out what is right. We need to do the same thing for arguments, by making it simple to look up what is strong and coherent.

In science, suppose you're a biochemistry grad student trying to get a handle on everything we think we know about the biochemistry of dementia. Currently this means reading tons of uncorrelated papers scattered across dozens of journals, and attempting to assemble in your own head a logical structure that ties all of them together, sussing out and keeping track of thousands of relevant bits of data about who knew what when, who references who, how strong each paper's individual arguments are, which points undermine which others, which ones strengthen which other ones (and how much), what are the strongest known approaches, where the open questions are, etc. Every expert in a given topic has in their head their own ad hoc version of this logical structure, and all of them vary from each other. We will gain immensely by combining all of those implicit maps into one explicit map, that will be more complete than any individual's, improvable, allow quantified collective judgments on uncertain points (a la prediction markets), and which will be vastly simpler to acquire for new would-be experts.

Do those examples make the site's function any clearer for you?