By Mike Sutton.
Rarely should we make predictions about what will and will not shape the future of mankind, because society is a chaotic system with so many known unknowns and unknown unknowns that something as likely as not changes the course of what happens next. But sometimes, just sometimes, something comes along that instinctively seems to be just what is needed and so could become something very big indeed.
The Rebutter logo
It is common knowledge that on the internet the things of most value are given away for free. Perhaps the greatest example of this fact is that the internet itself and the World Wide Web are free services and products. I think the next big thing to come along has arrived and its called RbutR, ahh but ahh, or Rebutter for long, and thankfully it’s a totally free webpage rebuttal service that could set multimedia academia ablaze in a firestorm of evidence based content linked criticism where the popularity of opposing viewpoints are measured and in fact determined by world-wide open access vote.
I’ve just installed RbutR on my laptop and rebutted my first webpage on Crime Opportunity Theory’s notion that opportunity makes the thief. This easy to use rebuttal service provides subscribers to rbutr with an icon that appears on their Google toolbar, so that anyone with that icon will see how many times any page they access has been rebutted and who rebutted it and on what grounds – with a link to the page that makes the rebuttal argument. It works like a dream, no infuriating geeknosense glitches at all.
Here is what the creators of Rebuttals write about this compellingly simple and free service:
How Does it Work?
Rebuttals are added to rbutr by users like you, using a free web browser plugin. Once registered , anyone is free to connect any webpage to any other webpage at any time and indicate that one is a rebuttal of the other. The rebuttals in the system are then free to be voted on by other members so that articles containing weaker arguments will be pushed down or removed entirely, while quality rebuttals containing stronger arguments will be pushed up to the top where they will receive the most attention.
Visit these sites to learn more.
It’s going to be big, I’d bet on that, but the known unknown is: just how useful will it be in advancing knowledge progression and promoting the dissemination of proven fallacies, busted myths, bad science, pseudoscholarship and other dysologies? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, I’ve been using it to rebut some supermyths with links to my myth busting work here on BestThinking.
Let rebuttal and counter rebuttal begin and may verity win.
