If I am not mistaken, you have several criticisms of truthmapper. I’ve tried to respond to them in a carefully numbered fashion. This separation might be a rough approximation of the way a software tool would structure an argument.
A proof from the sole premise ‘A is A’ concluding ‘Taxation is slavery’ is certainly fallacious, I agree. Can you expand on what the ‘same reason’ is? I’m not sure what I’m expected to see in the argument you reference. It is awkward at the very least, but it is more detailed, concrete and falsifiable than many trollish claims, and some of its flaws are pointed out in the critiques.
The site may encourage people to be sloppy in their argumentation, or it may make sloppiness more obvious.
The video makes a fallacious claim “all assumptions explicit”, and that diminishes my trust of the organization, I agree.
I’m not sure what you mean by “argument should work like an Aristotelian syllogism”. There are many flaws in syllogisms—the one I remember is the inability to prove that a horse’s head is an animal’s head. Because the claims are natural language text, the structure truthmapper enforces is looser than a syllogism; merely a tree of claims and supporting claims.
You’re entirely correct, the logo is not good.
Paying official attention to argumentation may encourage making it a status contest, with individuals striving to “win” rather than striving to discover the truth. This is a thorny problem for rationality, but I don’t think it is confined to argumentation software.
I think we only disagree on 4. (You agree with me on 2,3, and 5, and I agree with you that 6 is not confined to software). I think the expansion of 1 you want really is 4, and I admit I explained 4 poorly. It is kind of tangled in my own head, but maybe I can do better:
TruthMapper encourages people to think that an argument on politics or religion or culture is structured like a deductive proof, where if there’s a problem, it’s because someone accidentally used (A → B) and (B) to conclude (A) or something silly like that. The real problem with all of these arguments is that no one’s grounded their morality properly, people are treating generalizations as universals, people import hidden assumptions, people think proving a single major negative of a disliked theory is enough without running a cost-benefit analysis, people are using words wrongly and so on.
But upon further thought, you’re right that this is the program making a common flaw more obvious, not the program creating the flaw. But if I were to encounter for example the argument about art on a message board, I would try to explain why the whole argument was hopeless because of these points, and how the person’s argument style could become more rigorous. Whereas on TruthMapper, I am reduced to sniping at why Point 4 doesn’t follow from Point 3.
But I’m open to testing the system empirically. I trust the people here to avoid the sort of mistakes the people in the art argument used. If you want to organize a LessWrong debate about something on TruthMapper, I’ll participate and change my mind if the debate goes better than it would on a comment thread here.
Awesome; I think we may have actually communicated.
Despite my posting these things, I don’t really want to organize a LessWrong debate on TruthMapper or DebateGraph. They’re both so clumsy and annoying in user interface that I’d rather wait (or work) for something more pleasant to use.
If I am not mistaken, you have several criticisms of truthmapper. I’ve tried to respond to them in a carefully numbered fashion. This separation might be a rough approximation of the way a software tool would structure an argument.
A proof from the sole premise ‘A is A’ concluding ‘Taxation is slavery’ is certainly fallacious, I agree. Can you expand on what the ‘same reason’ is? I’m not sure what I’m expected to see in the argument you reference. It is awkward at the very least, but it is more detailed, concrete and falsifiable than many trollish claims, and some of its flaws are pointed out in the critiques.
The site may encourage people to be sloppy in their argumentation, or it may make sloppiness more obvious.
The video makes a fallacious claim “all assumptions explicit”, and that diminishes my trust of the organization, I agree.
I’m not sure what you mean by “argument should work like an Aristotelian syllogism”. There are many flaws in syllogisms—the one I remember is the inability to prove that a horse’s head is an animal’s head. Because the claims are natural language text, the structure truthmapper enforces is looser than a syllogism; merely a tree of claims and supporting claims.
You’re entirely correct, the logo is not good.
Paying official attention to argumentation may encourage making it a status contest, with individuals striving to “win” rather than striving to discover the truth. This is a thorny problem for rationality, but I don’t think it is confined to argumentation software.
I think we only disagree on 4. (You agree with me on 2,3, and 5, and I agree with you that 6 is not confined to software). I think the expansion of 1 you want really is 4, and I admit I explained 4 poorly. It is kind of tangled in my own head, but maybe I can do better:
TruthMapper encourages people to think that an argument on politics or religion or culture is structured like a deductive proof, where if there’s a problem, it’s because someone accidentally used (A → B) and (B) to conclude (A) or something silly like that. The real problem with all of these arguments is that no one’s grounded their morality properly, people are treating generalizations as universals, people import hidden assumptions, people think proving a single major negative of a disliked theory is enough without running a cost-benefit analysis, people are using words wrongly and so on.
But upon further thought, you’re right that this is the program making a common flaw more obvious, not the program creating the flaw. But if I were to encounter for example the argument about art on a message board, I would try to explain why the whole argument was hopeless because of these points, and how the person’s argument style could become more rigorous. Whereas on TruthMapper, I am reduced to sniping at why Point 4 doesn’t follow from Point 3.
But I’m open to testing the system empirically. I trust the people here to avoid the sort of mistakes the people in the art argument used. If you want to organize a LessWrong debate about something on TruthMapper, I’ll participate and change my mind if the debate goes better than it would on a comment thread here.
Awesome; I think we may have actually communicated.
Despite my posting these things, I don’t really want to organize a LessWrong debate on TruthMapper or DebateGraph. They’re both so clumsy and annoying in user interface that I’d rather wait (or work) for something more pleasant to use.