Worldwide Omniforum

Ding ding ding ding.

what you are looking for probably exists as an irc.

Depends entirely on what you see and do. Or monkey-sees/does.
IRC is terrible for organizing information, especially on the scale I'm talking about. Chatrooms tend to me more useful for steering the culture of a given host site than anything else. We wouldn't need to rely on a chat to cultivate the necessary dynamic since it's part-and-parcel of the whole purpose of the forum.

>I'm looking for a forum
You should make the forum yourself. It could be just like "massively collaborative mathematics" (1), except with topics in news, politics and economics.
>I expect it would be some kind of obscure invite-only place, but it might just as easily be open to the public and impossible to Google.
It doesn't need to be. Publicity through Google can be a good thing so long as there is an application process like you describe.

Also, don't listen to the sagers: econometrics and game theory are related to Science & Math.

1: gowers.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-massively-collaborative-mathematics-possible/

I like the way you think, except for this:
>actual policy makers

Nothing wrong with a little game theory/statistical modeling, but the idea isn't to rely on policy makers for anything. The fact is, I feel that the world adapts too slowly, and I can't be the only one who feels there's a better way. But it does require information, which requires an intensely lucid mind, and seeing past all the claptrap that's already out there to pretend to meet this goal does benefit immensely from having a community to discuss it with. On its own, these feelings can lead to bitterness and becoming jaded, but if there were a communal outlet it could become a highly constructive thing.

>support like research projects
That is absolutely a part of it. Trying to become advocates for every new idea would just make us futurists, so if we can instead push things forward so the people who are actually working on creating these things can do so more effectively, that serves our interests as well as theirs.

My own idea for the application process would be to write an essay about why you think the world is not ideal, and why you think you can help push things in a more constructive direction. We'd have to fiddle with the phrasing a bit, since we don't want to create an unconscious bias towards people who are more willing to toot their own horn. I wouldn't even necessarily see a need to use invites or moderation, just names/identities, so people who don't make an introduction essay will be ignored by the community. Social ostracization is far more effective at getting people to give up than fiddling with IP addresses and emails is.
>don't listen to
That's never a valid answer though. You have to understand why people are like this or you're not really solving any problem. In this case I did sort of snub Veeky Forums's core userbase as not being on this level already, and it's not unrealistic to expect some level of hostility because of it. Nobody wants to entertain an asshole.

This is some Bourbaki secret group/psychohistory level shit. I like it. Are you mainly politically or scientifically motivated?

Ran up against the character limit in my last post, but thanks for the lead. I'll look into it probably later today.

As far as making it myself, I'm not sure there's enough utility for it. If there's nobody the world over (who can readily be found to be relevant) who's interested in this other than me, that is, if there's not enough movement to sustain the boot trajectory, I don't think it's actually worth mine or anyone else's time. As I said in the OP on /wsr/, it needs to be at least as large as /x/ or it can't be useful. The "leave if it's not fun" meme on Veeky Forums is correct in the sense that the entire internet is composed of voluntary activity. The moment you introduce a power structure (for banning), you begin the process of slowly degenerating people's willingness to bother contributing. Top-down culture management never works, so the place needs to be large enough to sustain its memetic immune system to be resistant to raids and other derail-class cybernetic phenomena.

Yes, that's definitely relevant. I felt the Bureau of Memetic warfare had potential, but if all it has is potential, then it's just contributing to the infinite dilution problem that 8ch*n already suffers from.

To answer your question, neither. I feel like both science and politics move too slowly. It's not that I expect them to go faster; I realize the only way they can actually go faster is if there's more resources to go around. Government, I don't want it to go faster. I want it to back up and streamline itself for what it can actually accomplish rather than trying to pander to unreasonable ideals that we cannot, at this time, achieve, on a technological level. Technology itself stopped evolving as soon as we had PDAs. It's become more refined and efficient, but not more useful.

I'll admit I've often fantasied about being a consultant on a number of diverse scientific and other research projects, but no matter how much I can do, it's still a gamble for everyone else.

...

Alright, so I've looked into it.

The basic problem with collaborative problem solving is one of communication; a sufficiently equipped database—or even a more intuitive or interactive WolframAlpha-like site—would allow someone to rapidly iterate through brainstorming exercises and weed out false approaches easily. It's not that the people involved in the process are special in the sense that their creative uniqueness moves the network forward, but in that they all allow you to prune the tree of your branching creative process more than your natural pace of thinking does. This serves to help you learn faster, but you learning is not always the answer.

Mathematics, at least as far as that author has described it, does not, in general, benefit from communal brainstorming. Each step in the reasoning process is built on all the steps before it, and a thousand novices or experts will fare no better than a mere handful of experts. This is especially problematic in mathematics, where the operating thought process that allows one to make a breakthrough involves a total gestalt understanding; that is, nobody can complete the picture without subsuming the entire body of crowdsourced knowledge.

This is not to say that it can't work or that it would not be fun for the people participating; it very well can and would be. I'm only saying that it can never be more optimal at arriving at advancing solutions than personal research is.

Have you researched Agoras/Tau? There's at least one person trying to solve this problem of scaling human collaboration.