Language and Presentation Style                                                                Version 1.4 March 2012

 

Assertive Declarations of Conclusions

I am focusing around the conclusions we can reach, based on reason and the evidence.

I’m doing this is a “top down” way, so, hopefully, it is easier to see the point I’m trying to make.

Some people will think that stating the conclusion ahead of the evidence indicates that the conclusion is being asserted dogmatically, and we then go looking for supporting evidence.  This is not at all what I am doing. 

We can first look at the evidence: going to school and university, learning about science and history and so on, reading lots of books, discussing the issues with lots of people, listening to lots of lectures and presentations.  We can then reach conclusions based on that evidence. 

If we are to document all this, to persuade others to reach the same conclusions, then we need to list all the relevant evidence.  This is a huge exercise, because humans have gathered heaps of evidence, and we need to assemble what’s relevant.  I’ve started, and it looks like it will be an ongoing task.

But many are familiar with this evidence, and won’t want to wade through stuff they already know.

Others may have come to the same conclusions buy don’t care about my detailed evidence for them.

It’s also easy to get lost, and not know what point is being made.

So I’m presenting the “conclusions” before the reasons and the evidence, because:

1. It enables those who already agree with some of the conclusions to skip the details;
2. It makes it obvious what point is being discussed.
3. It forces the conclusions to be structured.

Structured Conclusions

It’s hard to summarise all of human knowledge (that’s worth having) in a few sentences. 

I’ve tried to do it in 8 very long sentences, with heaps of phrases, summarising what I see as the essential learnings of Philosophy, Science, History, Religion, Art, Personal Practice and Politics.  I’ve called this the “Diamond” level.  It reminds me of my “diamond” credit card (which is apparently better than a platinum, gold, silver or bronze card, so the credit company tells me).

But each of these areas can be broken down into separate topics.  I’ve summarised these as 42 one liners (not funny one-liners, but hopefully stating the essence of our knowledge).  I’ve called this the “Platinum” level.  These may be useful hints or reminders, or they may be useless,  We’ll see.

We can of course add an unlimited amount of additional detail to each of these 42 one liners.  I expanded them out to 4 lines each, and called these the “Gold” level.

The conclusions that support the “Gold” level summaries are stated at the “Silver” level.

The conclusions that support the “Silver” level summaries are stated at the “Bronze” level.

I don’t want to fuss about this too much.  It’s just a way of working out what’s really important, at the highest level, then working what supports those high level conclusions, then working your way down to the real evidence based level that is the day to day substance of science and history and all the other endeavours.

Different levels of summary are shown indifferent colours.

·        42 statements that break down these 7 parts into more detail, that are:

 

Languages

I am developing this in English, then plan to translate the pages into other languages. 

I’m hope planning to creating these translations is not just an ego trip.  It would be silly to try to define “global beliefs” and only get feedback from the English speakers.  I especially invite non-English speaking people to provide comments, because being restricted to the English literature, I will have missed out on many other perspectives.    Let me know what you think.

I am using Babelfish for the translations.  The machine translations are the best I can do at the moment – I don’t have any funding to manually translate or even manually check the machine translations.  Let me know if you can help with translations.

 

Terminology and Phrasing

I’m trying to use simple words and simple phrasing for these pages.  I am also assuming many readers don’t have much background knowledge of many of the subjects.  I’m doing this so that it can be understood (for example) by a high school student looking for answers.  Many people don’t have the background knowledge because they have not had the time, or the resources, or enough years in their life, to learn it all.

I’m also trying to outline the results of modern research, in, for example, cosmology, biochemistry, neuroscience, economic development, biblical studies, bioethics and political studies.  So even though it is (hopefully) simply stated, it is (hopefully) not simplistic. 

 

Technical Construction

I am developing the original pages as Microsoft Word documents, so that I can perhaps later assemble these into a book.  Then I convert each document into a web page, and add the required header and footer graphics and links.

 

Main Points and Details

In many books on philosophy and science it’s hard to work out what is the main point.  I’m trying to state the main point clearly up front, then state the reasons to believe it.  Some people don’t want to work through all the details – they might already know the details; they might be boring; the details might be too difficult.  So I’m trying to arrange it so that you can skip the next level of detail if you want to. 

So as well as the main text, I am adding additional information in coloured boxes, so that you can skip these parts if you wish.  Each type of extra information has its own type of box.  Below I’ve shown what each type of box will be, which is followed by an example of each type.

 

 

 

Examples of these boxes