ihinsdale

This is really cool. I'm curious how the OP is calculating the shortest path -- recursive CTEs in Postgres? pgRouting? A graph db?

I recently built an explorer UI for a cultural knowledge graph: https://giraf.app/graph. I used recursive CTEs to find the longest paths through the graph, as a proxy for interestingness. Basically to answer the question: starting from a user post about a book, movie, song, etc., where is it possible to end up?

If the OP might be interested in using the visualization framework I've built, as a way of letting users browse the relationships between photographs, please get in touch.

Congrats again on bringing an awesome project to life!

I'm building that functionality into https://giraf.app, and will set the fees as low as possible (aiming for a flat 4%, compared to Bandcamp's 15% on digital items and 10% on physical items). My goal is for Giraf to help artists by maximizing how much they take home, and by giving them a platform for building a unique kind of relationship with their fans, around their interests in music, film, books, visual art, and other forms of culture.

Awesome!

I use an app called Giraf, which I built [0]. My friends and I use it to share the music (and culture in other mediums, e.g. books and movies) that we've been into lately. When something looks interesting, I can save it and it'll be added to a playlist in my Spotify account. I've found that this async format unlocks a lot of discovery that wouldn't have happened otherwise, because the recommendations wouldn't have risen to the level of sending them directly to each other in a text message.

I've worked on this for a few years now, and haven't really shared it on HN before. Any feedback is very welcome!

[0] https://giraf.app

Having passed on backing Roam Research multiple times[1], which proved to be a mistake[2], YC now funds a competitor that is quite explicitly a clone.

That said, all the best to the Athens Research team.

[1] https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1229978388787384320?s=20 [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-200-million-seed-v...

An app for sharing and discovering culture of all kinds (creative works, events, and places): Giraf (https://giraf.app)

Thanks for this excellent food for thought!

If you enjoyed this interview, I recommend you check out the book Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (https://www.amazon.com/Werner-Herzog-Perplexed-Conversations...), which is essentially a 400-page interview transcript covering Herzog's autobiography and filmography. One of the most inspiring books I've ever read.

I’d agree that theoretically the regulations could be made more complex in order to mitigate their regressive second-order effect. I believe that familiarity with the evolution of regulation in other domains should disabuse one of the idealistic notion that such complexity would “ensure that smaller organizations are not impacted” by the regulation. In practice, such complexity has a way of inhibiting companies from growing, for one thing because it creates levers which the incumbents can co-opt to make life more difficult for their aspiring competition.

The cost of complying with such regulations would effectively fall on companies as a regressive tax. Which companies benefit in relative terms from a regressive tax? The already-large ones.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat-Zinn

+1 for Stripe Atlas support for Delaware PBCs

I'm very optimistic that we can solve this problem with better tools. That's not to deny, as others have pointed out here, that emotions drive our thinking and that a post-fact world is as old as the art of rhetoric. It is, rather, based on the observation that we have an incredible ability to crowdsource information--including of an opinionated / normative variety--thanks to the internet, and yet we're still using the same rather rudimentary tool we started with: threaded comments. Threaded comments have their virtues, to be sure, but one of their downsides tends to be a lack of structure in the body of the content.

Sequiturs (https://sequiturs.com) is my attempt at a tool that solves this problem, of how to collaboratively reason and change people's minds about something. I've written a bit more here about why I think the answer is better tooling: https://sequiturs.com/blog/post/introducing-sequiturs/

Yeah, I think that's a great idea. What I'm imagining along those lines is an interface for marking up a source text--basically, for easily turning a highlighted portion of the text into a proposition.

I'm currently working on giving every proposition its own page that contains links to all the arguments where the proposition is used as a premise and all the arguments where the proposition is used as a conclusion. Once that's in place, I can work on the functionality for actually highlighting source text and creating propositions from it. The data model behind Sequiturs already features a notion of 'source text', in the form of a Prompt, which consists of a url or some actual text.

That's an idea! Motivating people to use the argument format has proven a challenge, since it often takes more time to break an argument down into this format than to string sentences together into a paragraph, but I'm confident that is a solvable problem.

You can search argument content at https://sequiturs.com/search?q=&page=0&limit=10.

The search indexing is pretty decent considering how easy it was to implement--I'm using Postgres's full text search capability. It's high on my to-do list to make comment content searchable as well, and at some point I'd like to switch over to ElasticSearch.

You've described a lot of my vision for Sequiturs (https://sequiturs.com). Check it out! I'd be very interested to get your feedback.

Sebald was a true genius. His writing is a journey down fascinating veins of human history and culture, and the uncanny experiences we have of these in the present. He had a profound sensitivity and empathy for what it is to be a human being. You will get something new from his books with each read, and always the same marveling at our world, the tragedy we make in it, and what an imagination could have captured this.

Highlights of the scant recordings we have of him are:

- Reading from Austerlitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccMCGjWLlhY

- An interview with Michael Silverblatt shortly before his death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSFcTWIg-Pg

Yes! I completely agree. Sequiturs is a great fit for these opinionated discussions that don't work in Stack Overflow's Q&A format.

Here's an example of debating a technology choice on Sequiturs: https://sequiturs.com/arguments/a-beginning-programmer-who-n...

Cool, thanks.

Woah. Thanks for the heads-up. I'm unable to reproduce that in Chrome or Firefox but I'll look into it. I ran the Qualys SSL test on sequiturs.com just yesterday and got an A+!

EDIT: I encountered a transient NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID a while back as well, actually. I've just replaced the Comodo cert I was using with one issued by Amazon. Would be very interested to know that it works for you now!

Cool. On Sequiturs each step in an argument is called a proposition; a proposition can be used in an argument as either a premise or a conclusion. Propositions are sort of the atomic element of content on Sequiturs, since they can be reused across arguments. Soon, propositions will have their own pages, so that users can efficiently explore all the arguments where the proposition is used, as well as vote on whether the proposition is true or false and discuss that.

I'll pose a question to get things started:

What do you think of the argument format that Sequiturs uses, namely, a series of premises and conclusions?

I think this format has enormous value. It makes an argument much simpler to parse, compared to reading paragraphs, and if I disagree with the argument, I can easily express my disagreement by referencing the specific step(s) I disagree with. It has a lot of other neat advantages, such as allowing arguments to build upon each other, or to contradict each other, very precisely.

On the other hand, we're not all used to breaking arguments down into this format. You might be familiar with it if you took a philosophy or law class, but otherwise there's a bit of a learning curve. I believe the benefits of the format clearly outweigh this learning cost, but it's an open question what the market thinks about that.

Creator of Sequiturs here. Very happy to receive your feedback and answer questions!

"What can we do to bring up the baseline and make the vast majority of our mass media better?"

I see Sequiturs (https://sequiturs.com) as taking this problem on pretty directly. It's a tool for crowdsourcing the strongest arguments on a given topic. These arguments are presented in a format that is easily digested and encourages iterative improvement. Sequiturs can 'bring up the baseline' by serving as a reference for discussions to turn to, to gain clarity and avoid reinventing the wheel when considering the in's and out's of an argument. This includes serving as a reference for journalists, in informing the articles they write and the questions they ask of those in power.

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Sequiturs--and would love to know what you think of it!

Thanks for your comment! And for the suggestion of sequuntur. My experience thus far does suggest remembering spelling is an issue. Relatedly, I've registered misspellings (sequiters, sequitors, sequitirs) and am redirecting those to sequiturs.com.

As for other attempts in this space, I've encountered argüman [0], TruthMapping [1], debategraph [2], and Rationale [3]. I like a lot about those projects, and Sequiturs certainly shares with them the idea that there's enormous room for improvement in the way we discuss ideas online, and that structure is key to that. They all have an important difference with Sequiturs, though, which is their emphasis on mapping. I see the format they use as attempting to generate a sense of what the 'argument space', so to speak, looks like: the format is basically saying, "Here are all these different claims someone could make around this topic and here's how they could feed into each other or conflict with each other".

By contrast, Sequiturs' format emphasizes logical coherence in the series of steps that comprise an argument. It highlights the reasoning that leads from starting point to conclusion. By putting the reasoning in focus, the platform facilitates iterative refinement of an argument into its strongest form. Here's how that works.

Suppose I make an argument like: https://sequiturs.com/arguments/tech-companies-should-not-be.... Someone could come along as they did today and comment on step 3: https://sequiturs.com/arguments/tech-companies-should-not-be.... That comment on step 3 makes me realize I could word that step better, so I revise the argument: https://sequiturs.com/arguments/tech-companies-should-not-be....

What emerges from discussion on Sequiturs is an argument for some position boiled down to its essence--to its most digestible, shareable form. If I want to convince you that backdoors are a bad idea, I can send you a link to my argument on Sequiturs, and it's immediately clear what I think you should believe and why. That's not the case with the other, mapping-based tools, because they are more about charting the space of possible points and counterpoints, and less about yielding rigorous sequences of reasoning (you could call them proofs or syllogisms, but those terms connote a bit too much formality and strictness for my taste).

I'd love to know if you know of other attempts in this space. And I'd love to know what you think about Sequiturs!

[0] http://en.arguman.org/ [1] https://www.truthmapping.com [2] http://debategraph.org/ [3] https://www.rationaleonline.com/

Sequiturs: https://sequiturs.com

Sequiturs is a platform for rigorous and civil discussion. Discussion revolves around arguments, which consist of a series of premises and conclusions. This argument format requires coherence, which improves the quality of the views asserted, and makes it easier to identify where one might disagree.

It's really cool that you outlined the argument here in a simple series of steps. That's the approach that I'd like to see more online discussions take, and I've created Sequiturs to promote that approach: https://sequiturs.com/arguments/apple-by-now-banning-uber-s-.... I left you a comment there about step 2.

If you're a fan of this argument format, I'd love to get your feedback about what you think of Sequiturs.

I think a major reason that online arguments don't lead to persuasion much of the time is their format. In the Change My View sub-reddit and elsewhere, people tend to write in blocks of unstructured text--paragraphs--that allow them to express whatever they want to, which may not be coherent or actually respond directly to the assertions of the person they're replying to.

I'm now working full-time on what used to be a side project that tries to solve this problem: https://sequiturs.com.

Arguments on Sequiturs consist of a series of statements divided into premises and conclusions. This format creates in the reader an expectation of coherence, an expectation that there is a logical progression from some starting point to some conclusion. In my experience this format is extremely effective at causing the author of an argument to boil it down to the bare essentials. If someone else thinks the argument is flawed, he/she can point to a specific numbered step in the argument to identify very concretely what he/she disagrees with. Here's an example of what this looks like, with an example argument I wrote up about why backdoors around encryption are a bad idea: https://sequiturs.com/arguments/tech-companies-should-not-be...

I'm very hopeful about the prospects of this format for improving the quality of debates online, and, compared to the unstructured status quo, I think it's a lot more conducive to participants in an exchange understanding clearly where they disagree with others and why.

There are some great insights in this thread about the nature of arguing online, and I'd love to hear what you all think about the approach that Sequiturs takes.