What?

This site provides a home for several related projects meant to encourage improvements in public knowledge and civic engagement. To that end, you will find: 1) a range of materials highlighting gaps in the ways we tend to explain ourselves and others when dealing with societal issues, 2) iterative attempts to demonstrate relatively straightforward ways to improve communication, and 3) a commitment to surfacing the strongest arguments by relentlessly asking, "why?"

Expect a lot of:

• Invitations to elaborate

• Follow-ups to follow-ups

• Suggestions that policy preferences often masquerade as ethical principles

• Discussions of "pertinent criteria" and "necessary or sufficient"

• Annotations

• Statistics about responsiveness, coherence, and clarity

• Version control and archives

• Steel Men, Outsider tests, and other tools of the critical thinking trade

This is not:

• An endorsement of any political party or the party system itself

• An effort to build a personal brand or seek public office

• Leading up to a podcast

• Tolerant of ad hominems, whataboutism, and the myriad other ills of public dialogue

• A place where it will ever make any sense to paywall content

v0.10