# How I got so excited about HowTruthful

*This is the script for a* [*video*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqoJAyihJ_c) *I made about my current full-time project. I think the LW community will understand its value better than the average person I talk to does.*

Hi, I'm Bruce Lewis. I'm a computer programmer. For a long time, I've been fascinated by how computers can help people process information. Lately I've been thinking about and experimenting with ways that computers help people process lines of reasoning. This video will catch you up on the series of thoughts and experiments that led me to HowTruthful, and tell you why I'm excited about it. This is going to be a long video, but if you're interested in how people arrive at truth, it will be worth it.

Ten or 15 years ago I noticed how online discussion forums really don't work well for persuading people of your arguments. Instead of focusing on facts, people get sidetracked, make personal attacks, and go in circles. Very rarely do you see anyone change their mind based on new evidence.

This got me thinking about what might be a better format than posts, comments and replies for arguments. I thought about each statement being its own thing, and statements would be linked by whether one statement argues for or against another statement. If you repeat a statement it would use the existing thing rather than making a new one, making it easier to avoid going in circles. And it would encourage staying focused on the topic at hand and not getting sidetracked.

I kept this idea in the back of my head, but didn't do anything with it.

A few years later, I was baffled by the success of Twitter. Its only distinguishing feature at that time was that you were limited to 140 characters. Everybody complained about this. But I started to think the limit was the secret to its success. Yes, it's a pain that you're limited to 140 characters. You have to work hard to make what you want to say concise enough to fit. But the great thing was that everyone else also had to work hard to be concise.

So the idea of forced conciseness stirred around in the back of my mind and started to mix with my other idea about a format for arguments that would help people stay focused. And then a third idea joined them, for making it quick and easy for people when they're ready to change their mind.

In 2018, when political discussion in my country was getting very polarized, these three ideas came to the front of my mind and I started working seriously on them. Or, I should say, working on them as seriously as I could in my spare time while holding an unrelated day job. I did get a working version onto a domain I bought, howtruthful.com, but it didn't get traction.

Then this year, in January, I got an email from my employer saying that they were reducing their workforce, and my role was impacted. My employment was to end 9 months later on October 27. I went through a sequence of responses to this. First I had a sinking feeling, and it seemed unreal. Then later, after I looked at the severance package and bonus for staying the whole 9 months to the exit date, I thought it was all great. I would have enough money to work full time for months on projects that I think are valuable, like HowTruthful. Then, a few months later, I had nagging doubts. Maybe I should find a transfer position and not leave my employer.

There were a lot of considerations in this big career decision, and I set up appointments with 3 different volunteer career coaches who had experience with entrepreneurship. I met with the first one and explained my dilemma, but didn't say anything about HowTruthful. He listened intently, then said, "This is not something I can decide for you. Here's what I suggest you do. Get a piece of paper. Write down all the pros and all the cons of staying here, and see if the decision becomes obvious."

I couldn't help laughing out loud. Then I told him that the project I was considering working on full-time was one for organizing pros and cons. But I took his advice, and the results are [right here](https://en.howtruthful.com/o/i_should_stay_with_my_employer/29f76168a4a697c41ff49c685f5e426e).

This is an opinion page on HowTruthful. An opinion has three parts: the main statement up at the top, a truthfulness rating, which is the colored circles numbered one through five, and then evidence, both pro and con. For those who haven't seen HowTruthful before I'll explain each of the three parts.

First, the main statement. It's not a question. It's a sentence stated with certainty. As you change your mind about how truthful the main statement is, you don't change the sentence. You only change the truthfulness rating. This is how formal debates work. And even for an issue that you're deciding by yourself, changing the truthfulness rating is faster than editing a sentence to reflect how truthful you think the fact is.

And that brings us to the truthfulness rating. This is your opinion, not the computer's. Like the statement and the evidence, this is by humans, for humans. It's a simple five-point scale. One is false, three is debatable, five is true, and there are just two in-between ratings.

You might be asking, where do you draw the line between each rating? My suggestion, not in any way enforced, is to use this scale in a way that's practical to act upon, not according to any percent probability. For example, the two statements "If I go out today with no umbrella I won't get wet" and "If I drive today with no seatbelt I won't get hurt" could have the same percent probability, but you'd rate one false and the other true based on their practical applications.

OK, so finally there's the evidence. Anything one might say to argue for the main statement goes under Pro. Anything one might say to argue against it goes under Con. Just like the main statement, these each have their own truthfulness rating that can be changed quickly without having to edit the sentence. For example, this first argument for staying at my employer wasn't always rated false. If instead of changing it to false I had to edit it to say "there's no transfer position..." that would have made it an argument against the main statement and I would have had to move it to the other section.

Now when I say "just like the main statement" I really mean it. Because just like with the main statement, there can be sub-arguments for each of the pros and cons. That's what the numbers in parentheses mean. For example, there's one con argument for this first one. If we click through, now we're treating the thing we clicked on as the main statement. And you can keep going down as deep as the argument calls for.

I realize this is very different from other web sites. It's unfamiliar and takes getting used to. But look at the clarity and focus that results once you put it all together. There are so many considerations underneath this decision, but now they're organized under 5 main arguments. I can get the big picture a lot faster.

Everything I've shown you so far is available to use now, and is free. Of course, to be sustainable this has to make money. And I don't think advertising really fits on a site where people are trying to ascertain truth. I'll show you the paid part. I'm going to click the pencil up here to edit my opinion, then expand the editing options here, and change this from private to public. So keeping your opinions to yourself is free, sharing them with the world is the paid version. By charging 10 dollars per year (that's right, year, not month), about the cost of a paperback book, I can make it costly for people to create accounts they know will be shut down for violating the terms of service, while keeping it cheap for people who want to sincerely seek truth. I'm looking for five people in the next week who are also excited about this idea and are willing to invest $10 in addition to their time to help me figure out where to take it from here. But even if you're not one of those, give it a spin in the free functionality and let me know what you think. Just visit howtruthful.com and click the "+ Opinion" button in the lower left. You don't need to log in.