Intro

This tool will help you master the Socratic method.

Debating on certain beliefs often leads to aggressive conversations where nobody changes their mind. Asking Socratic questions is a non confrontational method that helps break through dogmatism and impart the gift of doubt. This often results in drops of confidence in the belief.

The toolkit

This repo includes:

1. A simple bot that will ask you Socratic questions on your belief Live Demo
2. A conversation editor, to help the bot ask new/better questions. Live Demo

The bot

The bot can help in multiple ways:

1. Have people use it an examine their own beliefs.
2. Teaching the Socratic method much better. Coming up with interesting questions is tricky and like in a game of chess one must consider on the spot all the possible responses of the other player. Online resources just show a couple of examples but if the other part replies something different one is at a loss. This app like a good chess book shows you how to solve many variants of a same game
3. As a reference or as a prompter that suggests you a good question to help your conversation going.
4. Any other thing I had not thought of, but that you think it could be fun/interesting, let me know! :)

The included database will help you examing your beliefs.

The conversations editor

Writing all the possible paths in a regular document works when the number of questions is small, when it grows it gets very complicated. The editor helps to have a birds eye view of the whole conversation and quickly find weak spots or inconsistencies. It is meant to be used by people that have some experience with the Socratic method.

The editor can be used in many ways:

1. To create new bots on the subject you like and share them with others.
2. As a way to self reflect on an idea. The graph helps organize ones ideas in a structured way.
3. With a friend, as a way to have an organized discussion. One would be Socrates, the other one the interlocutor. The goal as in any friendly sport would be to get better and it by just practicing it

How you can help

I am hoping to get people involved at many levels,

1. just getting some simple feedback
2. getting suggestions for new questions/answers
3. have people to edit themselves the graph or even create a new one for a different topic

The plan is to have no limits, to explore this idea of bringing the Socratic method to the people, have fun, see what happens and hopefully make this world a better place :)

Credits

Credits for the conversation graph go to Anthony Magnabosco and his fantastic videos where he uses this questions with believers. https://www.youtube.com/user/magnabosco210