About

Introduction #

Metarational is a tool for better understanding our world. You can think of it as an interactive map of the world’s researchers, builders, journalists, public intellectuals, artists, activists and their ideas and works.

Metarational is currently in private preview – an alpha-quality release meant to spark ideas and discussion. Because we are not confident in the quality of the data and experience, and the product currently falls far short of its vision, please do not link to metarational.com at this time. This private preview includes an index of people, including their online identities, works, relationships, and neighborhoods. Data is aggregated and merged from a variety of sources, including OpenAlex, Wikipedia, Twitter, and the Web. Global entity scorings, useful for search and relevance throughout the site, are computed using well-known graph algorithms using the most objective starting point possible: the social network of liberal science.

Key Limitations #

  • Topic Search: Topic search is generally unusable. People search works okay.
  • Academic Coverage: A very small fraction of academic researchers are in the index. Only the top 200,000 by PageRank are included.
  • Duplicated People: Many entities are unresolved, leaving many duplicate people and organizations, which leads people to be ranked substantially lower than they should be.
  • Lack of Diversity of Opinion: More explicit features to break you out of groupthought are under way.
  • Stale Data: Full indexes are only recomputed every few weeks.

A Personal Note #

I created Metarational because I wanted a tool to improve my depth, breadth, and diversity of knowledge and felt the world needs the same. It was inspired by liberal, pluralist, and rationalist thinkers combined with my experience as an engineer, entrepreneur, and citizen in an advanced liberal civilization that’s in need of reform and revitalization. The world needs more and better ideas to sustain and accelerate sustainable progress, and I hope Metarational can be a tool that helps people propel us forward. If you have ideas that would make Metarational more useful to you, drop me a note at john@metarational.com (please include your Metarational URL if you have one). If you’d like to work on Metarational professionally, I’m hiring contract engineers, designers, and social network analysis experts. – John Beatty.

Ideas, Inspirations, and Goals #

Metarational is inspired by broad range and thinkers and ideas.

Jonathan Rauch has been highly inspirational and motivational through his excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge:

If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.

Liberal science is the greatest of all social networks.

Outsourcing reality to a social network is humankind’s greatest innovation.

Individuals talking to each other, no matter how big the network, are just people gabbing. Even truth-seeking individuals who cherish rigor and accuracy are likely to go unheard amid the din. The reality-based network’s institutional nodes-its filtering and pumping stations-are what give the system its positive epistemic valence. The techno-utopians of the information revolution assumed that knowledge would spontaneously emerge from unmediated interactions across a sprawling peer-to peer network, with predictably disappointing results. Without the places where professionals like experts and editors and peer reviewers organize conversations and compare propositions and assess competence and provide accountability everywhere from scientific journals to Wikipedia pages-there is no marketplace of ideas; there are only cults warring and splintering and individuals running around making noise.

The name ‘Metarational’ was inspired by Tyler Cowen (no endorsement implied), who explains the concept of “meta-rationality”:

A person is being meta-rational when he or she understands how smart or well-informed he or she is in a given topic area. Meta-rationality is very hard to come by in my view, so people typically do not defer to the views of experts when they ought to. Sometimes the expert might be wrong, but if you’re just playing the odds, the expert is probably right. So people are far too confident about too many things they shouldn’t be so confident about. Meta-rational people, who are essentially impossible to find, with the margin, we can be a bit more meta-rational. They know to whom they should defer or how to find out the right answer. (source)

In a populist era disenchanted by expertise and elites (often through faults of the elites, and often through new technology used for personal gain or towards illiberal ends), our goal is to reform and revitalize expert knowledge and have it become more trustworthy and trusted (in that order).

Julia Galef has been enlightening on the whys and hows of truth-seeking in her wonderfully warm, down-to-earth book, The Scout Mindset:

Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. If you find out you were wrong about something, great—you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.

Carl Bergstrom’s work on elite bullshit artistry is informative. See his book Calling Bullshit. One goal of Metarational is to become a world-class bullshit detector. Hard problem.

Going back in time, Charles Sanders Peirce has been influential for his work on epistimology, most notably the idea of fallibilism. Karl Popper extended those ideas in the direction of the evolutionary processes of knowledge formation.

E.O. Wilson’s Consilience is a beautiful argument for the unity of knowledge drives ideas of diversifying ideas to drive the evolutionary process of knowledge forward.

More recently, Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin have some of the most interesting and creative ideas in economics, mechanism design for public goods production, and digital democracy. Their work tries to make the world a more fair and equitable place while also advancing freedom, dynamism, and progress. A most laudable set of goals.

Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized is a look at negative feedback loops leading to division. I take it as a call to build systems that reverse those negative feedback loops and lead toward more productive pluralism. Ezra Klein has extremely high betweenness centrality in the graph and a large following, and is thus one of a handful of people that can lead depolarization efforts in America.

Jacob T. Levy’s Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom is an excellent exposition on the irresolvable tensions between pluralism and rationalism, an underrated topic of study.

Finally, Wikipedia is the ultimate model for what humans can accomplish online in assembling knowledge. There are many lessons to learn and apply to building new epistemic communities and institutions.

What’s Next? #

Many of the ideas from these thinkers are on the drawing board for Metarational. The unified graph of people and institutions is the first critical piece of infrastructure, which is useful in its own right but isn’t the goal. Next will come a set of tools and products and community that is able to sort, filter, and rank information in various ways to maximize epistemic rigor and diversity of viewpoint. Over time, I hope this infrastructure enables more and better knowledge and preserves our freedom as a better option to outright censorship and noble lies.

Getting Started #

Limitations #

Before starting, please note several major limitations:

  • Only the top 200,000 academics (out of >100M academic authors) are included in the index at this time
  • There are many errors and omissions in the data generally
  • Algorithms and data collection practices have not been thoroughly audited for accuracy, bias, and fairness
  • Many entities still need resolving (e.g. the person exists 2 or 3 times but their identities aren’t linked to a single entity)

Things to Try #

What the data means #

At the heart of Metarational is a weighted, direct graph between “entities” (people or organizations). An edge in the graph comes represents a citations (e.g. academic paper citation, a retweet, a mention, or a link to a blog). The weight of an edge indicates how strong a connection is relative to the strongest connection. For example: if person A cites person B 10 times and person C 2 times, the A->B edge will be 1.0 and the A->C edge will be 0.2. Edges are considered to be either positive (indicated by green), negative (red), neutral (grey), or unknown (also grey) in “epistemic valence”, which indicates the approximate feeling from one person to another regarding their epistemic status. While people often say “retweets are not endorsements”, it usually at least means “worthy of consideration”, which we consider epistemically positive. We have various heuristics and algorithms to be relatively sure of positive-valence edges, but we also take community feedback. Neighborhoods are clusters that are automatically detected in the directed graph of positive-valence edges.

The Right Way and The Wrong Way to Use Metarational #

Metarational can be used both productively and counter-productively.

The Right Way:

  • Scout Mindset
  • A belief that “almost no one is completely wrong” and “no one is completely right”
  • A healthy dose of both pluralism (many perspectives and interests; let’s find common ground and compromise) and rationalism (there exists objective truth)
  • Finding new ideas and people to collaborate with
  • Finding commonality in interests, goals, and ideas between different communities
  • Researching someone to better understand where they’re coming from

The Wrong Way:

  • Soldier Mindset using Metarational as a Culture War Battle Map
  • Cancel Fodder Generator through finding unsavory links and adjacencies. Remember that good ideas are often only good in moderation and nearly anything taken to pathological extremes becomes bad, or even evil.

Data Sources #

Metarational builds its index from a variety of data sources, including:

  • The Web
  • Twitter
  • Wikidata (a sister project to Wikipedia)
  • DBpedia
  • OpenAlex (a new open source index of nearly all academic papers and their authors and citations)

More data sources are under considation.

Special Thanks #

We offer our thanks to all contributors, volunteers, builders, and funders of Wikipedia, Wikidata, DBpedia, and OpenAlex, without which Metarational would simply not be possible. We also thank Twitter for creating a platform with relatively open developer platform and APIs.

We make a special callout for OpenAlex, funded by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin through Arcadia, one of whose goals is expanding Open Access.

Under the Hood #

Coming soon.