Often with small collections we use a numbering system. E.g. folders with 01, 02 to 012 or level 1 to 5 for a career. But when such a collection
grows it becomes unmangeable. There is the intermediate phase where the goals is to have 01, 05, 10 to at least have some room between numbers
but in the end this always fail. The same goes for comments in code : step 1, step 2 , step 3. But when time goes on an business processses change
this will change and soon the numbering system no longer makes sense. Never use his, also not when using the words "but in this limited scope".
Booleans are even worse. See following idea.
Using numbers for indicating a complexer choice is a bad idea. See following ideas
In the real society booleans are used in many places. For instance in a referendum in a democracy: either yes or no. But the driver of a
democracy is that voices are heard (even if nothing is done with these voices). So most votes are yes but and no but... with thousands
of additional ideas or viewpoints and in some cases no idea why yes or no.
So all these mechanisms are a bad pattern and should be replaced with better mechanisms. I have some ideas on better mechanisms.
See following ideas
A democracy is about being heard. That was the driver. After 1815 when Napoleon ended the Holy Roman Empire that lasted from 800 as
follow-up to the Roman Empire we still had rulers-that-decide-everything. But due to many revolts and internal struggles e.g.
Belgium split off from Netherlands, Poland against Russia, Ireland against England and smaller movevements in this direction during
that century the parlements got more influence with only reason: to be heard. That idea expanded to society where first non rich
males could vote, followed by non-origin males and finally also women in 1922 in NL. That was followed by turbulences in this
change in perception of "1 person decides everything, simple" to "many persons decide everything, complex". That was followed by
a lot of wars all in this direction. All of these wars were "we are not heard" based. Around the 90's we got a little tool, a
global network with a fairly simplistic UI and more or less no process for users at all and no guidance on how to use it.
In theory you would expect in the 90's that world peace would now be possible since there is now a tool by which everyone can be
heard but the opposite happened. It caused more discussions, more bubbles and a very clear picture that not many people are
aware that they live in a an environment with more or less the choice to have 1 person or group determine everything and otherwise war
OR have everyone participate and not have war.
There are challenges to achieve a better environment for instance: some people have no clue what they are talking about, others
believe in fairies and want to use this reality vision to guide a society through times, which would be desastrous.
In a democracy there are opinions: (P) there is the personal opinion, (G) there is the group opinion and (S) there is the opinion
of what the society should do with it considering all the groups that live in there with total different options.
When watching thousands of discussions in different countries it seems that it flies in all kinds of directions. It would be much
clearer if someone could mark something if it is his own opinion or the opinion of a group.
In that way an opinion of 1 person (P) could grow, with enough support to the opinion of a group (G). And in that way that group,
e.g. a political party or a football club could publish their list of points with reference to the original source. If these
sources are enough supported they show for other groups the track back possibility of opinions.
Later on these could end up in the lists of a society (S) where then also we could track back to the origin following in time
the reasons behind it and the support for it.
In this way political parties can share ideas or see where they branched off using version management
In this way when during time something with initial support of 76 percent drops to 49% can be replaced and it means no law
or statement is forever and will dynamically change during time
There is more to this idea
When you start on the Internet you will have 1 folder with 10 bookmarks. Some people like my wife have these same 10 bookmarks for
years and never ever visit any other site. Some people, like myself have since the 90's grown to hundreds of thousands of
bookmarks.
When something grows from 10 to hundreds of thousands then in the first place a mechanism is needed around categorization,
e.g. the usage of sets, taxonomy, folksonomy, hierarchy, tags, categories, definitions, references, the history of , the
communities around, and so on. Lots of meta stuff
This is what children do in school. They first learn 1+1 and slowly grow and grow until some years later in university
as professor they are more or less solid on every page in wikipedia on every math topic.
They grew in their brains from 1 set to a complex network of sets.
Problem: for some reason there is no software helping people to do this. There are millions of little tools such as mindmaps,
onenote, visualization software, visio, statistic software but not a tool to grow with the knowledge of persons.
(skipping a bit because that is not the point) When such a tool exists it will have the feature at the end to link
to other taxonomies e.g. the wikipedia category on a topic or the udc category. In this way someone who grows in knowledge
will slowly encounter the big world and will find automatigally the knowledge that is already there and the perceptions in
his brain that are faulty. This will help to have everyone understand the big world and not to stay in their own closed
bubbles full with misconceptions and things that are completely untrue
This will help 1 person (P) opinion to grow to group (G) opinion and have one person understand better the why
and the knowledge behind it. This is now completely absent and therefore millions of people in the world who believe (P)
total nonsense
Another benefit is that you make in your bookmark collection a topic "vacuum cleaner" and have really no clue that you
will auto-get the links to the main sites, the history of , tips around it, understanding it for if you are a vacuum cleaner
designer or engineer, communities about it and so on
The benefit is that decisions on our future e.g. in a democracy system are better supported: participants auto-grow
their knowledge on topics
Around the internet comments can be added. It is important to think about why there are comments. What in general is the benefit
for humankind. Lineair comments are bad. They give a long list of people all repeating the same thing over and over again and
even if there is one interesting opinion between it, it can not be found. Many not=so=smart people come in, past the same
comment as thousand before and leave. Then there are hiearchical comments which are one step better, because they at least
give hierachy of people replying on one topic. But this still gives the problem that people will post over and over again
the same thing. So there are now hierarchical comments with most popular votes on top. That is a better direction.
But still leaves a lot of problems: for people in a certain bubble e.g. within one of the thousands of political convictions
or one of the thousands of beliefs typical within one community answers or remarks that are popular WITHIN that group (G)
get voted to the top. While on a society level they would be voted to below. That leaves within that group a perception
and it causes that problem that real good remarks are "the real truth" is not even in the top 1000 most popular answers.
The resolution to this is to link to external taxonomies and to indicate if something is a personal opinion, a group
opinion or society opinion (and which one). Because it makes a lot of sense to know that if 36 people vote for "vacuum cleaners
are secret angels" that they are all a member of the "vacuum cleaner is god" facebook group.
I think with polls this is the same. A mechanism whereby can be voted on every possible topic it is needed to asses how much
someone knows about a topic otherwise the outcome of the polls is nonsense or means no other than "most people have no clue that".
So referenda can only be succesfully implemented where there is first a tool which grows with people to help expland their
knowledge and asses their knowledge. You would hire for a math position if someone actually did some math on school. Otherwise
you can hire him but the outcome will be desastrous.
The reason why democracy does not work optimal is that people only engage it when they have once in the four years a vote. Then...they
go to an environment where they buy products and services from companies where they did not have any vote in. They work in companies
where they get training on "how to deal with management" with mostly no democracy at all.
So the idea is far from people. The idea that you can create environments where there is listened to everyone.
So we created this during the 1800's but other than government it is not there.
And even there where it is : the voting process, it is not there. Because you vote on 1 out of X persons. And you do not vote
on a specific idea or well described proposition. So you effectively vote on someone where you have no idea of what will follow
It would help if all internet comments by default would give the option to CITE refences. There are millions of forums where
on every question people will thousands of time again answer the same question with the same lines and often "i think that"
instead of "already known: reference". That would shortut millions of discussions automagically (and let people learn instead
of freeing their mind by typing what THEY think instead of LISTENING/READING what is already known. The internet should be
a source to read and learn something not to push personal opinions based on no knowledge and no willingness to either
gather more knowledge or discuss existing knowledge.