credo - A personal belief management framework

Motivation

credo is meant to set a standard for what it means to have a "belief". credo is a cognitive tool to allow people to evaluate and develop their own core value system. credo is a rigorous practice rooted in decades of process automation research that will challenge you to set a higher bar for what it is you hold to be true.

Core Principles

credo is a cognitive framwork based in Agile software development practices that can be used to document, validate, and modify beliefs over time. It is intended as a mechanism for "getting to the truth" of a situation rather than as a way to "be right".

The fundamental assumptions of credo are:

In order for something to be a fact, there must be evidence to support it.
People's beliefs should be respected even when we disagree with them.
You might be wrong.

Framework

At the highest level credo recognizes two concepts:

topic
belief

A topic is a high level description, or tag, that may be associated with a belief. A single topic may have many beliefs.

credo defines between three classes of belief:

feeling
opinion
stance

All beliefs require the following characteristics

A topic
A belief type
A title
A summary

`feeling`

A feeling is the rawest form of a belief. Feelings will be part of a persons value system, but will lack ready evidence to support it. . A feeling has the following characteristics:

3 associated caveats

`opinion`

Opinions are a refined class of belief. They are different from a feeling in that there are sources that one can cite to support the opinion.

In the context of credo, a valid opinion must contain:

Three independent sources supporting the belief (digital copies that can be added to source)

`stance`

A stance is the most developed form of belief, and also has the highest standard of qualification.

A stance has the following requirements:

Three independent sources supporting the belief (digital copies that can be added to source)
Three independent sources opposing the belief (digital copies that can be added to source)
A summary of each source supporting the belief.
A summary of each source opposing the belief.
A synthesis of the supporting and opposing evidence that forms the basis of the stance

Examples

- topic: Immigration
  belief: feeling
  title: Immigration is a net positive for the United States
  summary: I believe diversity is good for communities, work environments, and for countries as a whole. Diversity fosters differences of thought, introduces new ideas, and requires people to challenge their preconeptions.  Immigration is a fundamental mechanism of national diversification, and because of it should be encouraged and responsibly managed
  caveats:
    - I'm referring to legal immigration
    - I don't really know about the epirical effects of diversity on communities
    - Immigration and "diversity" are not necessarily equivalent. Indeed, the US is probably an excellent example of this.  There are definitely communities that experience lots of immigration but little actual diversity. 
  

- topic: Immigration
  belief: opinion
  title: The cost of enforcing aggresive deportation policies is greater than the total tax burded imposed by illegal immigrants.
  summary: John Oliver went through a lengthy breakdown of Donald trump's proposals to build a wall along the mexican border and demonstrated the proposal to be impractical, infeasible, and ineffectual.
  source:
    - Department of Homeland Security Deportation Budgets <pdf, link, dates>
    - John Oliver Episode Number, Season, Date of Air.
    - Study Referenced by John Oliver during Episode

Usage

The credo framework itself is encapsulated in the examples and documentation provided. Implementations of credo may vary and evolve over time, but the initial usage is intended to be via version control.

Using version control to manage your credo has the following advantages:

Open source and transparent
Inherently flexible. Beliefs change over time. Using the Pull request paradigm you can accept arguments for differing viewpoints on beliefs you hold.
Versionable
Self documenting

Updates to your credo should be done using conventional changelog format and should be limited in scope to a single belief per pull request.

caseydailey / credo