Nice. Did Braintropes see the tabsplosions as a good thing or a bad thing?
Andrea Gallagher
Karma: 19
Let me experiment with using a Page for this purpose, and see what seems like it’s missing.
I think Jim’s suggestions below are good:
Terms should have summaries
Let the summary show as a tool tip or roll-over, so the reader doesn’t have to leave the flow of the article
make it really easy to mark a word as a term (and perhaps even auto suggest if a term page is available for a string of a given length).
Great analysis of problems with TruthSift. Perhaps we should start a list of irregular and natural behavior that Arbital needs to handle gracefully. Hmm, I wonder what kind of page that should go on?
Can you point to other argument-structuring tools?
I see the point about this being a hard problem—it increases the likely investment needed to get the return, so my “high ROI for improving discussion quality” is a claim at risk. But if we can keep our eyes out for a low-effort way to solve the problem, the return still feels high.
Sounds right, but this “page” you speak of is new to me. I assume it’s the base structure of the math explanation incarnation of Arbital, and could be brought back to the surface to make it more discoverable. I see value in having a feed/domain/repository just of terms, so they can be explored differently than you would a claim or a post.
Also, what are splits?
Did you know that XX% of user requests are for features that already exist that users can’t find? :-)
This is great. I think my next core argument needs to be for why argument structuring is more than an optional bonus, and the user goal you frame up helps a ton to focus my case.
Thanks for picking apart my claim, folks! Rather than modify this claim, I think I’ll work on a Post approach, probably with a few different linked claims in it.
In retrospect, I don’t like the value comparison structure of the claim.
I’m used to formulating pseudo-hypotheses in a way that feel testable to me, and relative comparison can be easier than picking and measuring some absolute value. And I do think that in any project each effort is traded off against other efforts. But the claim focused as much on the value of reputation systems, rather than the value of structured discussions, and that muddied the discussion.
Since I’m using this to help get a feel for how good claims, posts, etc are crafted, this was very helpful.
Thanks for those links. My view is partly inspired by the first post, and the second is new to me. (The bit about Descartes’ dirty hands is pure Scott).
I think the value of structured discussion tools is driven by that need for an intricate discussion to asses evidence. Today, discussion platforms don’t have methods of weaving arguments together, so it becomes too hard to follow a debate with detailed and nested evidence.
Instead, the crowd throws up it’s collective hands in defeat and “trusts the scientists”, assuming that any given study is the best and only way to get an answer. But within scientific literature, it’s still very hard to trace the crux of a theory and the quality of evidence for it.
Scott is a master at the science literature tear-down, but he’s not sufficiently scalable. I’m hoping that by baking some of the best logical structure and process into the tools, we can make the crowd just a bit smarter.
I see reputation systems as being necessary, but not sufficient. Without argument structuring features, how is Arbital different than Reddit or Stack Exchange?
I imagine you could propose evidence as “for” or “against”, and then the discussion steps down a level to the quality and direction of the evidence.
This would all need to be hierarchical, and what I call “evidence” may really be a “sub-claim”.
Again I think I erred in including “reputation system” in the claim. I was trying to draw a distinction between voting up or down on a claim/comment/post and between providing evidence for or against.
While I’d like to think it could be evidence all the way down, in reality you would need voting at least at the leaf nodes. And the voting is probably useful at each level.
I wasn’t trying to make it exclusive, rather that conversational structures to support things like evidence, cruxes, and tests is an unexplored area in the field, while voting systems are both well known and hard to perfect. So the ROI feels higher for the first.
Good catch about reputation being critical. Perhaps I should remove that, since I’d like to see reputation systems, but have them depend on broad data (including claims, evidence, voting, etc).
So, how do we measure value in elevating accuracy or truth?
I would rather a claim is always in a clarification period. If a claim can’t be modified or varied, what are the possible ends of a claim?
It strikes me that forcing claims to freeze instantly HAS to create a sea of variants, as people manage to hash out what a claim means and the arguments for and against.
I don’t think there’s a binary choice between either a multiverse of claims, or single claims that are so malleable that they aren’t trusted. Is there a functional way of gradually ossifying a claim as it becomes clear? Of flagging unexpected changes? Of altering people’s votes if the claim changes enough to shift their agreements?
If claims are primitives, then all the interesting conversations will be at a parent level, which will need to stitch claims together to make an argument and form a perspective. I think many of the claims I’m seeing now are not actually primitives, and really need discussion around them to hash out the meaning.
I would love to see some mechanism to break a claim into both it’s definitions of terms and supporting arguments (cruxes, if we want to use that term).
After reading the Doc(tm), I think there is still design space to explore. For most readers, and many authors, keeping track of the points in an argument is actually pretty hard mental work. Just a little help would make them be better at it.
The trick would be to create “just enough” structure that is easy to fold into the process of authoring a long post or writing a quick comment. I don’t think we need to reproduce all the elements of formal analysis here (and if we tried, it would be unusable).
In the end, I might argue myself back into the model where there are just “claims”, not “claims” and “evidence”.