What is OneSlate?
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OneSlate starts by simultaneously addressing three problems:
1. Confirmation bias (you tend to think that what you already think is right)
2. Working memory limitations (your can only really think about 3-7 things simultaneously)
3. It is hard to know what you do not know (you are unaware of the set of information which 
you have not encountered yet)

These neurological conditions have presumably been helpful over the last tens of
thousands of years.  But now we have advanced to the degree that it can be useful, fun,
profitable, sane, and generally beneficial for us to overcome them.

Some people (like Charlie Munger and Paul Graham, or most of a TED audience, for example)
are pretty good at maintaining an open mind and being aware of these issues to keep them
in check.  This is the stuff studied by philosophy nerds at Oxford's Singularity Institute
study, too.

So, back to OneSlate.  It is one of those "big idea" concepts, which handily encompasses 
the following pet topics from the last few years:
-Knowledge transfer (e.g., education)
-News / journalism
-Decision making (maximally beneficial decisions for everybody)
-Filtering the internet's large datasets
-Transparent government / argument visualization (EU's WAVE Project, not to be confused with
Google Wave)

Whoa, that's a lot! How does it all tie together?

Providing a framework that optimizes these tasks in an engaging way which efficiently
mitigates bias while maintaining a high throughput is not trivial, but the solution turns out
to be surprising simple.  (Billions of computers and people do help, of course, but OneSlate
is also rather useful for an individual or a small team. The public information share is where
it's at, but this is the Knowledge Economy we are talking about and private data is useful 
to its owners, too.)

But only dorks enjoy (what is presumed to be) adhering to rationality, you say? People like 
their irrational biases!?

Given the choice, people enjoy a higher quality of life even more.  And OneSlate is one way 
to achieve that goal. (Also, you can addictively be even *more* sure that you are taking
everything into account via OneSlate, so there's a higher level argument somewhere, and that
is where the loops seem to begin).

With your OneSlate Guru Percentage, you can track how much about a topic you have already 
reviewed.  You can even colorize which bits of information you agree and disagree with. Source
information and citations are one click away.  No more reading the same story 7 times.

And even though information is arranged by argument under a hypothesis, there multiple submits
or sources for the same claim still contain a view that can be sorted by chronology. There is 
a huge incentive for content/news/info providers to be first on the scene--more traffic,
notoriety, rewards, etc. for them.

How do you navigate this maze of logically arranged, filterable, piecemeal-absorbable, zoom-out-
and-see-what-you-really-think, colorized/shaded information?

On the mobile device of your choice, of course.  At first you'll just need a web browser
and a data connection. (A friendly API is on the to-do list.  Trying to stay in the present
here.)

More advanced interfaces are for academics and corporate users, whose communication pathways have
just opened up.  The disjunction between useful knowledge development and place of funding
and application is eroded.  Prior personal relationships not necessary--finding experts for
companies and finding resources/growth opportunities for researchers becomes super easy.

For example, a PhD thesis broken down on OneSlate is useful for both the author and the
industry, in complementary ways.  Beyond the boring stuff, OneSlate could be very useful for
people with strong opinions who want to enact change. Mainly, though, it's all about
open-mindedness and aided self-investigation.

Schedule: Private Alpha 5/1/2011, public beta ~6 wks later

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danwolff@gmail.com
oneslate.com