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.
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.