It wouldn't just be up-votes or down votes... Each bill would have a place to post reasons to agree and disagree. Each reason could branch out with its own page with reasons to agree and disagree. For each belief you would count the number of reasons to agree or disagree. The same for each argument. If an argument had more reasons to disagree than to agree, then it would have a negative score, and it wouldn't lend any credibility to the bill that was before congress. The algorithm would sum all the reasons to agree with it. For instance a reason to agree with a reason to agree would lend support. I think reasons that are twice removed would get 1/2 of vote towards the overall bill, but I'm not sure... we could tinker with that. A reason that is 3 times removed from the overall bill would lend 1/3 a vote, and so on... Sure giving a thumbs up or down could be somewhat calculated, but so would more concrete ways of evaluating an idea, such as "bad logic" or "bad data" or whatever...

Politicians cannot coordinate a complex, rapidly advancing technological society very well. Scientific and statistical approaches can be used to produce better result than our current system, because we now have the ability to leverage crowd sourced data to allow reason to guide our decision making. We don’t want to replace politicians with scientists and engineers, but have scientist, computer programmers, and engineers build debate forums so that the most logical course of actions are clear to the general public.

The most methodical way of making a personal choice is to take a piece of paper, write the choice at the top of the page, fold it in half, and right all the pros in one column, and all the cons in another column. But then what? An idiot could count all the pros and all the cons, and go with whichever side had the longest list. However, obviously, some of the reasons might be “better” than some of the other reasons. For instance when deciding whether or not to marry a girl, depending on what you value most people would think that a personality is more important than hair color. A very anal retentive person could give each “pro” and each “con” a score on a scale from 1 to 10, and then go with the side that has the highest score.

However very few of us put that much thought into our personal lives. In fact Steven Wright said “a conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.” Anyone who has ever thought long and hard about an important decision can understand this quote, most of us think about something for a little while, perhaps discuss it with friends or family, and then we go with our gut feeling. Very few of us have ever done a formal cost-benefit analysis in deciding even the most important of our life decisions. Going from our gut feeling might work well for running our lives, but it is no way for our politicians in congress and the white house to run our country. When the politicians get tired of thinking, or more often speaking, they might think they are too busy to do a formal cost benefit analysis, and just decide to flip a coin. However with 6 billion people on our planet, it would not take very long to outline reasons to agree and disagree with each law.

Homer Simipson said, "Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true. Facts schmacts". This statement is true in today’s society that has access to more facts than ever. We don’t need more access to information and facts, we need to do better at putting facts into a cost benifiet decision making context. Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, Ayn Rand statement that "No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge" is self evident. It doesn’t matter if we found a truth, if it we try to implement this truth, and break more powerful truths.

The best way I can think to organize our concepts into decision making trees that ensure coexistence with other truths would be to list a proposed action, and allow people to brainstorm reasons to agree and disagree into separate columns.