While not everything can be reduced to incontrovertible math-like proofs, I think we -- data scientists, statisticians, software engineers -- could build a world with a lot fewer legitimate arguments.
Imagine a Wikipedia of science, logic, and reasoning. Instead of summarizing consensus, you instead build a vast database of primary facts, data, and then on top of it formalize your assumptions and arguments so that it is plain to see how conclusions follow -- or don't -- from the bare facts and reasonable assumptions. You could build almost math-like proofs, with all arguments and counterarguments categorized and catalogued.
You could build a verifiable consensus. Given two different schools of thought, for instance, two different schools of economics, you could reduce each to the set of assumptions or faulty logic that distinguishes them. Some economists believe one thing to be true, some another, and they argue with one another and some people are convinced and some people aren't. Where does the difference arise? Is there a faulty chain of reasoning underlying one (or both!) of them, or is there a difference in the assumptions each group makes? If so, is one of these assumptions unfounded, or can it be tested and verified so that the assumptions that go into each school can be reconciled along with the conclusions that follow from them?
I think we have an opportunity, not to be smarter or more informed than the experts in their different fields, but to have each argument once, online, crowd-sourced, rather than having the same arguments crop up again and again and again between individual experts arguing with each other. We can bring organization and permanence.
I think you are in a blind alley. Yes, there is a singular epistemological error underlying every flavor of mathematical, scientistic economics. There is no actual "equilibrium point" where some say and there's no "coefficient of human volition" that we can calculate decisions like we could calculate the path of an atom.
After about 100 years of trying economics this way, there is still nothing close to a model that has reliable predictive power as we would expect with other natural sciences using the hypothetico-deductive method. I advocate instead the axiomatic-deductive method of the Austrian School. If you like, here is more on why what you want to do doesn't work from von Mises: http://mises.org/daily/3540
Imagine a Wikipedia of science, logic, and reasoning. Instead of summarizing consensus, you instead build a vast database of primary facts, data, and then on top of it formalize your assumptions and arguments so that it is plain to see how conclusions follow -- or don't -- from the bare facts and reasonable assumptions. You could build almost math-like proofs, with all arguments and counterarguments categorized and catalogued.
You could build a verifiable consensus. Given two different schools of thought, for instance, two different schools of economics, you could reduce each to the set of assumptions or faulty logic that distinguishes them. Some economists believe one thing to be true, some another, and they argue with one another and some people are convinced and some people aren't. Where does the difference arise? Is there a faulty chain of reasoning underlying one (or both!) of them, or is there a difference in the assumptions each group makes? If so, is one of these assumptions unfounded, or can it be tested and verified so that the assumptions that go into each school can be reconciled along with the conclusions that follow from them?
I think we have an opportunity, not to be smarter or more informed than the experts in their different fields, but to have each argument once, online, crowd-sourced, rather than having the same arguments crop up again and again and again between individual experts arguing with each other. We can bring organization and permanence.