Tree Structure

It is critical to have some way to show as much agreement as possible, where it is most important, and where there is the most agreement.

The agreement structure must be easily comprehensible to normal people without exerting to much mental effort. Various possible types of networks, or set indicators that we know of are all way to complex for the average person to easily get their mind around. A tree structure with inheritance, while not perfect, is at least somewhat simple and obvious and possible for people to easily relate to in most cases. It also has the following powerful, unifying benefits.

Often time's beliefs are very extreme and polarizing, as in the example of this topic on Public Sex Education:

http://canonizer.com/topic/69

When this topic first started, at first glance, one might have doubted that people in the different camps would agree on much of anything about sex education. But on closer analysis it becomes obvious that there is a critical issue that the two extreme camps do agree on after all. This is education. Both camps believe that education was important. One just considers it important that education be done in a private and individual bases, while the other camp believes it to be OK to be in public groups such as in a typical public co-educational class room with teachers.

A tree structure is very powerful for such situations. A common agreement or super camp can be created represented what they agree on - that education is important. The two competing sub camps can be created under this agreement camp. One that education be on a private bases, the other that it can be public. With this structure, the parent agreement camp inherits all the support of all members of both competing sub camps.

In this example, Education is the much more important issue, and where there is much more agreement. It is these types of issues that should be located higher in any POV structure than less important issues where there is less agreement. When this type of agreement discovery is encouraged and powerfully represented, this can allow such things as organization leaders using this information to institute policies that work best for everyone. In this example it might be mandatory for everyone to receive some type of education, while allowing individuals to select which type of education they received.

Tree structures can be used to represent independent multi dimensional POV spaces simply by creating similarly repeated structures beneath the most important issues. In the representational vs qualia example described in the agreement statement, it might be initially determined to place the qualia issue at the root of a camp structure above the representational issue. With this there would be two major branches from the root - one for qualophiles, and one for qualophobes. Then each branch could have similarly duplicated competing branches for those that are representational and those that are not. At the lower level there are the same 4 camps representing each of the 4 locations within the 2 dimensional belief space.

If, after things develop, and more people join this structure, it is discovered that there are far more total representationalists, both in the main qualiophile and qualophobe branches, it would be recommended to invert the structure to better represent where there is more agreement. With this structure, there would be the representationalists at the root, with another weaker branch for the non representationalists. Each of these camps could be more equally divided between qualophiles and qualophobes properly representing that there is less agreement at this level.

When many people come to a complex topic they have strong beliefs about, they often have a feeling that they would like to pick and choose lots of issues represented in lots of different competing camps. In such cases the first goal is to eliminate all camps that have anything you disagree with, since when you join a camp, it indicates you agree with everything in that camp, and also everything in all parent camps, up to and including the agreement statement.

The agreement statement and the title of a topic are intended to be as agreeable and independent of any POV as possible. If a new person comes along that disagrees with something in an agreement statement, everyone should work to move such information lower in the structure to be as accommodating as possible.

Once this is done, if it still isn't obvious which camp you'd like to join, one should simply select the camp containing the most important issues they personally would like to most support. Then you can create and add to your camp statements representing the issues you share with others in other competing branch structures.

Of course if there is no camp that you agree 100% with, then you can always start a new branch below the agreement statement and start recruiting others to grow your own branch structure. The degree to which others convert to, and move their sub camp structures to a new camp indicates how much agreement there is about the quality of the camp.

The primary goals as such POV structures develop is to keep the number of camps at a minimum for as long as possible. Then as diversity develops as more people join, continually work on merging any camps, or parts of camps possible. Continue to migrate the more important, actionable items towards the agreement statement at the top. The more agreement there is on any one issue, the closer to the agreement statement the issue should end up.

Of course the ideal ultimate, is when there is universal consensus by everyone on any issue. Whenever complete agreement is achieved on any issue, perhaps because of new demonstrable scientific proof, this issue can finally be moved to the top level agreement statement where everyone finally unanimously supports the idea. Where this is not possible, the goal is to have the minimum possible competing camps and sub camps with the most possible support, while still adequately representing all points of view no matter how minority the view.