00:53
@BrewerGorge What I see is that they are similar in the following ways: Both SE and your project are mechanisms for finding information that other random people on the Internet know that you don't. Both Skeptics.SE and your project are mechanisms for finding the truth value of a proposition.
I have considered such a project before - in particular, taking transcripts of political speeches, and allowing people to annotate them with references supporting or rejecting the propositions within them. (A link to a Skeptics.SE answer might be an example of such a reference.) But also being able to mark them as formal or informal fallacies (e.g. with a drop-down list, with comments to support it).
Then recursively, people could consider the proposition that the statement was a fallacy, and defend or pull apart that argument.
In the end, I decided such an attempt to crowd-source formal logical structure to political/emotional arguments was destined to failure, because it would be a cheap action to simple flag everything as a fallacy, and then for the other side to counter-flag every flag as fallacy, ad infinitum.
Now, I may well be wrong in this assessment. After all, with similar logic, I concluded Wikipedia was doomed to fail within 12 months of its launch, and it certainly would never amount to anything useful.
01:43
@Oddthinking glad to hear you came up with a similar system. :) Especially happy to hear that recursive proposition reasoning also came to you. Probably hard to deliver the right kind of UX for it (and imo one of the biggest problems with Arguman), but will definitely look into it.
Fallacy flagging is also on the list, though Arguman made overflagging too easy, just like you said. With SE and Wiki I have two systems that I can learn from, penalty/reward wise. A different route I considered was having a quiz for people to show that they are able to identify sound arguments (would be with ima…
Fallacy flagging is also on the list, though Arguman made overflagging too easy, just like you said. With SE and Wiki I have two systems that I can learn from, penalty/reward wise. A different route I considered was having a quiz for people to show that they are able to identify sound arguments (would be with ima…
7 hours later…
08:41
@BrewerGorge The quiz might stop random drive-by flagging, but consider a discussion about gamergate or pizzagate. You are going to get motivated trolls.
@BrewerGorge Absolutely, the false flags (ooh, bad name... uh, troll flags) are going to have reasons against them, but they will serve to distract from the real issues - both in the UI and in the time wasted defending against them.
@BrewerGorge Innnteresting. Some discussions - like "should cosmetics be animal tested?" have a lot of valid scientific arguments on both sides, but ultimately seem to boil down to a value judgement: How many rabbits should suffer and die to prevent one human from suffering and dying?" Suppose there is an argument that ultimately turns out to be made by someone who thinks the value should be zero. For a user who thinks the value should be 100 million, what should they see?
(Similarly: I am find myself reluctant to join some arguments on Facebook, because they boil down to "Do you trust scientific method to determine between two ideas?" If the answer for one person is "No" and the other "Yes", then their debate about the fluoridation of water is at totally the wrong level.
7 hours later…
15:39
@Oddthinking Maybe motivated trolling can be obstructed by letting only trusted users create new propositions directly, while the rest have to be approved.
In the case of Gamergate I think there might be valuable discussion in the propositions "People on the internet shouldn't be harassed" and "Video game journalism is corrupted". When I read of Gamergate I always get frustrated because I think those are the two propositions the respective sides think Gamergate is about, so misunderstanding is the basis of the discussion.
Arguman, again, has a clever solution here: Terms that are part of the proposition can be defined first. Though that definition would need to be up for discussion as well. And that discussion would have to be settled before the "real" one can begin
In the case of Pizzagate I couldn't even imagine a reasonable discussion. Yesterday I crawled Arguman and read through holocaust denying discussion which was quite disheartening, though at least there the arguments were well-phrased. Before approving these discussion I'd probably get in contact with a quality historian to be ready to quickly disprove the points raised
16:00
About value discussions like "should cosmetics be animal tested?":
Another feature I had in mind could come in handy here. When a proposition A is used to argue for/against another proposition B, one can argue about the validity of A itself and about whether the proposition that "A supports/opposes B". E.g. someone who values other animals' lifes just as much as humans' could reasonably agree that "animal testing saves human lifes" but disagree that it's valid argument for animal testing.
Another feature I had in mind could come in handy here. When a proposition A is used to argue for/against another proposition B, one can argue about the validity of A itself and about whether the proposition that "A supports/opposes B". E.g. someone who values other animals' lifes just as much as humans' could reasonably agree that "animal testing saves human lifes" but disagree that it's valid argument for animal testing.
A bit unsure whether there could be a good UX for it, it's a complex matter/difficult distinction and I would prefer something way simpler than Arguman.
Still, I think those topics can lead to very valuable ground level discussions like "animal lifes are less valuable than human lifes" or "The scientific method is the best tool for gathering tool we have", so why not have many discussions link to/embed those, if that's the source of disagreement anyway?
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