Different people would indeed have different value systems and also give different degrees of credence to different sources. So the goal would be to end up with a crowdsourced tree of moral & factual claims, and individual users could then decide which claims they agreed or disagreed with to come to their own conclusion on the topic.
(Look up 'argument mapping' for academic exploration of the concept).
My thinking now is that most online political arguments online are really about tribalism, not finding the truth. If you did have users who cared about the truth (and who could consider other viewpoints), you wouldn't need a fancy product: a simple web forum would suffice.
But do drop me an email at [email protected] if you'd like to chat more.
Showing people exactly where they disagree would be a huge advancement. I think there are plenty of people who care about the truth and also care to have a consistent worldview in terms of morality.
We'll never have a situation where 100% of people are 100% fact driven in their belief systems, but maybe the needle might move in the good direction if more tools were available to help the transition.
I'll have to look at them further, but what I think they might lack from what I posted is a notion that different users will value some gray area arguments differently. The system should preserve those differing value systems in the arguments constructed and use them to build upon the webs of trust. For example, user bob may find it axiomatic that "healthcare is a right". User jeff will typically downvote arguments that assume that right and not want to build his framework on top of it.
And if this is true, then the parent's idea might not be feasible. If it isn't true, then the parent might have a feasible idea. So... perhaps you could comment explaining why you're down-voting? I honestly don't understand.
(Also, the first sentence is just true... the venues I mentioned are nearly universally more informative than a comment board... srsly, not trolling.)
Original post:
If you want high-quality commentary all you need to do is get off the internet comment boards. These outlets exist. They are generally called journal articles, policy briefs, court opinions, etc.
> Rather than have new stories refine or even change arguments and their conclusions, most people on the internet just chase their tails in circles.
I think there's something deeper going on than a short memory span.
At some point (usually pretty quickly), you have to start either 1) making moral judgments, which is a whole branch of philosophy or 2) analyzing non-trivial factual claims.
To do this, you need people who are trained in science or well-read in philosophy/political science, depending on the topic. At that point, might as well just read journal articles in relevant fields.
The quality of argumentation on the internet might get a little better than it is today with good tools, but I don't think it can improve significantly. At some point you're asking for actual quality research (i.e. work), as opposed to armchair sophistry (i.e. fun).
> Even with those different value systems, it should be possible at some point to pick out the thought leaders across different spheres that transcend typical Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, Theist, Atheist labels with arguments that are acknowledged across the board as being internally consistent and factually based.
Maybe on some technical topics. But even academics and policy analysts often disagree along ideological lines.
> as being internally consistent and factually based.
These are both fairly low bars.
I agree that complex system discussions must be driven by people educated in the ways of complex systems, possibly from perspective of economists, justice system, etc.
Of course digging through the hieroglyphics around the issues becomes difficult for laymen, even those educated in the relevant topics. And it does become more work than fun. But many online discussions are at the level of work already. People start them for "fun" then get frustrated for being wrong, downvoted, misunderstood etc. There is an addicting effect and it turns from "fun" to work of salvaging reputation, revenge, etc.
Also content farms release misleading, throwaway information that gets attention. For them it is work and often very not fun.
Their efforts could be channeled to better ends by new software.
Compare this to Yahoo Answers: Somewhere where everybody has an opinion, but nobody is expert enough to give a straightforwardly correct answer to the most basic questions.
If your target is to have more intellectual questions, I don't think it follows that it will be straightforward to attract more informed opinion.
I don't think most people -myself included- would be able to accept the rational arguments. (There is probably research showing that people's beliefs become more entrenched if you show them evidence to debunk or otherwise convert them).
Using gun control as an example. I have a position. I'm in a discussion with soomeone. I think I'll use evidence to persuade them, so I visit your site. I find that the argument pretty much demolishes my point. I thus ignore your site on that occasion, complaining about bias and lack of use of the site hy right-headed people, and I add my tedious arguments to my discussion.
Or I find that the argument supports my position, in whichcase your sote is brilliant and the Internet is a marvel so I post a link, which the person I am talking to ignores.
But it is still a great idea and you're right that some subjects (abortion; gay marriage; drug control; gun control; Israel / Palestine; circumcision; etc) get discussed a lot, with repetitive and circular and eventually boring arguments.
Seeing how well, or poorly, Wikipedia has handled hot-button topics points out some difficulties of finding "accuracy" when people are not rationally calm headed.
It would be great to see it though.
Thanks, it's one of those ideas that has been in the back of my mind for a while, but it's not an easy idea for me to even convey properly. I thought I'd just make a best-effort at it and see what HN thought of it. The feedback has been really interesting and I have a bunch of URLs for somewhat similar concepts that I plan to spend some time on.
I don't think most people -myself included- would be able to accept the rational arguments.
I can't speak for everyone, but I can name several major political/religious positions I've had in my life that I've changed my mind on because of discussion/debate and research.
*I find that the argument pretty much demolishes my point*
*Or I find that the argument supports my position*
What it would allow you to do is say to someone on some random forum, "Look, I'm not interested in taking a trip on the merry-go-round with gun control in a Youtube comment. Here's the URL to my honest assessment of the issue, if you're wanting to do something more than just grandstand and create a bunch of strawmen about my arguments, there's a starting point for you. If you have a reference for your position, I'm more than happy to look at it. What's your URL?"
You can't reach everyone with logic and data, but I'd love to see a tool set that encourages people to explore their own positions in an environment that promotes really thinking about those positions rather than just going in with shields up and phasers set to kill.
Doug Engelbart the creator of NLS and famous for Mother of All Demos talks about such systems http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q and http://youtu.be/VeSgaJt27PM etc.
The general principle is we won't make much progress discussing complex issues by simply recreating the print world with increased convenience of a computer like we do now. The discussions have to take a fundamentally different form, possible only on computers, such as semantic argument maps, etc.
Of course his perspective comes from 1950's when educated people had civil discussions that solved problems, or at least that's the modern nostalgia. He imagined a new class of "knowledge workers" moderating information. Instead we have voting rings and content farms.
If anything, a structured argument map could shut down much of the attention seeking drivel surrounding every political/complex system issue.
btw: For presenting complex issues, journalism is dead. For uncovering hidden truth, not necessarily very complex ones, it's still very much alive.
I'm thinking "How to Lie With Statistics"[1] as a service - tell it you want to, say, show that guns are becoming safer, or that higher taxation causes obesity, and it will produce a nicely manipulated graph containing only real figures from readily available datasets, ready for feeding to a journalist.
Let me toss in some anecdotal evidence in support of your suspicion. The only "debate" site to hold my attention for more than a first visit is one that focuses on curating data to support arguments about certain issues (the curation is manual AFAIK). I initially stumbled across it when debating health care reform:
http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...
Pay particular attention to to "Projects" sidebar on the left. It's a goldmine of relevant quantitative information and the arguments surrounding their interpretation. I actually don't think it's cynical to expect that this is the right way to approach the "debate market." Discovering data in relevant "digested" forms is a huge friction point. It should be central to the political debate process, it isn't, and anyone who can reduce the friction will be doing a huge service to humanity.
In fact, I've found a good political test to see if the person I'm speaking to can articulate a valid criticism of their own position. I.e., if they're for universal healthcare can they state why one would oppose it, without calling into question the opposition's character.
If they can, you can have a fairly thoughtful discussion/debate on the topic.
If they can't, then there's no point discussing things.
"Voting" on the internet definitely added a lot but it created a bunch of hurdles: majoritarian thought, bubbles and averaged opinions.
Review sites like rotten tomatoes are a good example of the last one. The average opinion about a movie is nowhere near as good as asking a single person who shares my tastes in movies. A bubble would be much more useful here. I'm not sure where I'm going with this.
I think letting ideas branch might let controversial discussions get objective. Complicated can be mistaken for subjective. It also sounds like the kind of fun that can draw people in.
I really like the idea.
In particular, I see two big flaws.
(1) The essence of the use of this site would be that one chooses a position, and then finds arguments to support it. In other words, "I've made up my mind; now show me why I'm right."
Now suppose I'm the person discussing an issue with you. Why should I pay any attention to some page chosen based largely on the assumption that I'm wrong?
(2) You say "... I'm not looking for a democracy that rewards majoritarian thought and punishes less popular ...." And then you apparently want to use something along the lines of up/down voting to judge arguments. That's not the way to get what you say you want.
In short, the idea, as stated, strikes me mostly as a tool for increasing polarization.
More beneficial would be a site that simply provides information to help make decisions on whatever issues are of interest. To go with the gun-control example, you could have links to -- or summaries of -- studies on the effect of gun control. You could have comparative data on rates of various crimes in locations with different gun laws. Etc.
How do deal with (2) is a harder problem. The plague of voting-based-on-agreement that makes sites like HN & Reddit so much worse than they could be, is something I wish more people were trying to address.
If you have an online-community that you run and would like some ideas to combat vote-based-on-agreement, here are a few that I've thought up or come across:
(Not claiming that these strategies are ungameable).
* Limit the number of upvotes a user can give per day, thus making votes more valuable.
* Force users to space-out voting, allowing only 1 upvote every 5 minutes.
* Vote value: Votes are valued more the less you do it over a certain period - so if you only upvote once per-day, that post gets more points than if you upvoted everything in /new. Choice: Do it hidden on the backend, or could be interesting; do it in a user-configurable format. Give users, say, 100 points per-day and are allowed to upvote transparently - you can give one thing 100 points or four things 25 points.
* Time-delayed voting: votes are only allowed after a certain amount of time has passed since you clicked on a link. A well thought-out and reasoned article should take at least a couple of minutes to read, so I can upvote that after I read; I'm not likely to wait around to upvote an image-macro with fewer than a dozen words unless it's really special.
* Karma cap, both negative and positive: Limit max positive karma to something low, say 50. That's high enough to see that a user isn't brand new but isn't trivially attainable. That way, it's fine to get to the cap, but posting inane one-liners attempting to reap thousands of points for a single comment isn't so tempting. Limit negative karma to something lower, like -100 to dissuade trolls, while still showing that a user is disagreed with. Hopefully that encourages discussion for the sake of discussion.
* Meta-voting: You vote on how many points a post got, so if a pithy but well-timed comment that says "lol butts" gets a lot of points, you can vote to say that the post didn't deserve those points. Make this a limited power granted to a select (but changing) group.
* Make downvoting cost karma: If it cost karma to downvote, that could be a higher bar to drive-by-disagreeing.
* Not sure if it's a good idea, but turn the script around. Instead of trying to avoiding the Pepsi-Blue Advertising syndrome, charge money for votes transparently adding points to a post or comment. As users can still downvote items, it becomes expensive to elevate a bad piece of advertising. Maybe extend this to users by allowing users to receive money for lots of highly-rated comments. Or perhaps use Dogecoin as your currency of choice as the real-world value of 1 Doge is so low that it's effectively free in small quantities, but not actually free.
I don't think allowing the masses to vote on things is a bad idea, but it's an idea that needs some refinements for best effect.
2) I'm not looking to decrease polarization, necessarily. If anything, different echo chambers would necessarily form as like-minded sets of users would agree with and upvote similar arguments. If user sammy upvotes weak creationist arguments made by weak creationist supporters, fine. Within the region of the web of trust of weak creationist arguers, sammy may be king. The site should allow him his due, but when sammy goes to upvote a new argument that crusso is following, it should affect the ranking/view of that argument little if at all -- since crusso tends to not upvote weak creationist arguments and creationist argument supporters.
Although mechanics that allow for increasing polarization sounds bad (I hear it), the conventional approach of decreasing polarization is to beat the crap out of outliers with monolithic, single-dimension voting systems that reward populism and emotional rhetoric.
I'd rather let some polarization thrive because different people have different value systems... but what I would envision as being a "good" for a site like this is to allow people to both have their polarization AND to allow them to transcend their echo chambers by viewing the arguments of other thought leaders in other echo chambers using similar tools and metrics for evaluating arguments.
In that case you could see where you fundamentally disagree with a political idea, and accept the difference quickly without rehashing past arguments.
Unfortunately, there are still creationists. Even when there is overwhelming scientific evidence in support of one position, people will still hold another.
It's an interesting idea, but I think the conceit is that other people would actually read your arguments at that link. In my experience, that's not true.
For example if I cite a study as a reference, a counter argument could be the methodology used to gather the data
Edit: @harpastum made an excellent suggestion of existing sites. Disregard this
http://argumentrix.com/wiki/Main_Page
EDIT: opps looks like its dead.
shouldn't be to hard to clone
Aumann's Agreement Theorem suggests that two rational people can not disagree on a subject if they both fully understand all the evidence and arguments. All disagreements stem from some combination of misunderstanding, ignorance, or irrationality.
Then it's not a matter of disagreement or coming to different conclusions, it's just having different values.
But such a computer would obsolete humanity.
I'd like for the system to allow for continued refinement of arguments on various topics and to allow for various branching of thought. That is, I'm not looking for a democracy that rewards majoritarian thought and punishes less popular but logically consistent argumentation.
As an end product, if I'm discussing, say, gun control with someone, I should be able to give them a URL: http://www.xyz3323499.com/crusso/gun_control/ and all of the arguments and important information that I have upvoted, added to, or edited would show up.
Most of this stems out of my frustration with the tedious nature of arguments on the internet. New stories stir up old arguments. Forums like HN tend to rehash all those old arguments with often little thought for the mountains of arguments/evidence already out there. Rather than have new stories refine or even change arguments and their conclusions, most people on the internet just chase their tails in circles.
I'd view this kind of site as a "let's stand on each others' shoulders and provide our shoulders to others" kind of work. With a decent web of trust, I should be able to look at the arguments of the most "respected" members of the site and mix-in their arguments with my own.
I think that a sufficiently complex web of trust would allow for fundamentally different viewpoints on a given issue to thrive because the spheres of supporters of those viewpoints have different value systems. Even with those different value systems, it should be possible at some point to pick out the thought leaders across different spheres that transcend typical Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, Theist, Atheist labels with arguments that are acknowledged across the board as being internally consistent and factually based.
Yeah, I realize that I've rambled -- but if someone finds value in the idea and runs with it, I'd love to see it out there.