This repository contains every fact used by MyTake.org. When you search or browse the timeline, you are searching and browing the files in this git repository.
The platonic form of fact is Fact: a True Thing That Happened. A Fact never needs to be corrected, because it is True. For example, when the preamble to the United States Constitution was written by our Founding Fathers, they chose its first three words to be
We the people
and that is a Fact.
Well, except there's a typo. If you look at an image of the original, you will clearly see that that the "p" in "people" ought to be capitalized.
We the People
Oops. Turns out that "We the people" is just a fact, and "We the People" is The Fact.
Because MyTake.org is built by humans and not God, we'll have to settle for facts instead of Facts. But that doesn't mean we will accept a known flaw. Whenever someone finds a way to bring a fact closer to its Fact, we will make that change. If we realize that we mistakenly published "We the people", we will update it to "We the People". This process of finding typos is pretty straightforward for text documents.
But things like transcripts have a subjective aspect. Was that an "er" or an "erm"? Should "er" and "um" even be in the transcript? If someone makes the sounds "ten or fifteen per, uh, percent", should we write it like that (which is what we try to do for now), or should we write "10% or 15%"? The Fact of the sounds is "ten or fifteen per, uh, percent", and the Fact of the meaning is "10% or 15%". We endeavor to take subjectivity out of the foundation wherever possible, but there are limits. The transcripts will change over time, even though the videos they are based on don't. And actually the videos they are based on might even change too, but only if we are able to find a higher-quality recording of the same event from the same angle (some of the old debates are on scratchy VHS, and it would be closer to The Fact if the video quality were better).
If you read every single magazine at your doctor's office, you will find that there is not a single page in any of those magazines which is a ransom note. But if you hand those magazines to a criminal, they can clip out and rearrange the letters to make a ransom note. Did National Geographic demand a ransom, or was it the person who did the clipping?
Each day, there are an infinity of things that happen. When you turn on the news or read an editorial, someone else is deciding which of those infinity things to show you. How did they decide? If they tell you, can you check that they were honest? Not just honest about whether their facts are true, but about how they chose which facts to show you.
The easiest way to check for honesty is completeness. When you buy eggs, there is a hole for each egg. You can see right away if one of them is missing. If you're getting information from someone, it should be easy to tell if they have stolen something true from you.
But there is a big loophole - size! One scam you could run is to sell a "dozen" eggs, but in a carton which only has ten holes. "See, they're all there!" you would say. I'm not sure if I would immediately notice the difference between ten and twelve, but if I took a moment I could count it out. But if you sold me a truck full of ten thousand eggs and said "see, all twelve thousand eggs are there!", I would believe you, and I would probably never find out that I had been scammed.
In the entire history of the United States, there have been twelve presidential elections with televised debates. Check for yourself, and then check MyTake.org. See, twelve, all right in their slots, every four years. Each year, there were between two and four debates. Pick any random year, check for yourself, then check MyTake.org.
When you search MyTake.org for "gun", it doesn't pick out the gaffes, nor does it hide them. It's just a dumb machine (which you can look at and run on your own computer), and it shows you everything.
Don't let someone else pick what you see.
Cutting letters from a cooking magazine into a ransom note? That's Bias. The ransomer isn't making an honest summary of grandma's meatloaf recipe which just turns out to demand money - it's been purposefully distorted to tell the message the ransomer wants, with no respect for grandma's intent.
One could easily cut up the presidential debates with Bias, but MyTake.org prevents that by always showing you the full context, not only for that year but for the entire history of televised American debate. But just because it solves Bias, it doesn't mean we've solved bias.
There are many important questions that don't get asked in the debates. Important voices that don't get to speak. Lies that go uncorrected.
bias.
The only way to remove bias is to see everything, literally everything, from every angle. And then you could know the Truth. But only God can do that, so we've got to settle for keeping Bias out of our lives, and do what we can to see as many True things as we can. The debates might not correct a lie, but they do record it.
So our foundation is reaching for Truth, by picking a few never-changing Facts (the Constitution, its Amendments, and the Presidential Debates), but our representation of them will change. Every version of every document we ever publish will always be available, and you can see for yourself every change we have ever made. The technology which guarantees the integrity of this history is called git, which is a little bit like the bitcoin blockchain.
MyTake.org lets you bookmark pieces of these documents, and also publish essays which build arguments from these documents.
If you link to "We the people", when we realize our mistake, we will automatically update the link to "We the People" in the future. If we had a terrible mistake, like "Us the Folks", and you linked to that, then we would change your links to say "Oops, we at MyTake.org made a mistake. This linked to 'Us the Folks', but it turned out the Constitution really starts with 'We the People', so here is what the original link was, here is what it should have been, and here is how we made our mistake: ..."
Yes, please do!