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Brewer Gorge

 Hub of Reason

General discussion about skeptics.stackexchange.com
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Brewer Gorge
Jan 10, 2017 20:59
@Sklivvz Some loonies got the idea from the Clinton mails that the democratic party has a child-sex ring underneath a pizza store. From what I can gather it might just have been a successful 4chan trolling, though there were apparently actual people defending the idea.
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 16:03
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?
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 16:01
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.
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 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.
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 15:44
That got rather lengthy, pardon moi. Many thoughts in my head about this, few people to talk to so far.
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 15:43
(also I'm based in germany, I think I might be breaking the law when hosting such a discussion :x)
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 15:43
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
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 15:40
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
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 15:40
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.
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 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.
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 01:46
Semi related idea I had though was having values or axioms. At some depth in the proposition tree you are bound to hit the bottom where truthy/falsyness of a proposition is determined by one's values.
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 01:44
The trusted people route is probably not one I'd like to take, I'd prefer the site looking the same for everyone. If you think a source is (not) to be trusted, there should be an argument for it :D
Brewer Gorge
Jan 9, 2017 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…
Brewer Gorge
Jan 8, 2017 19:34
@Oddthinking While some Q's on (Skeptics)-StackExchange are simple questions with simple answers, some (in the case of Skeptics I'd tend to say the more popular ones) are quite controversial. Some of the answers to these controversial questions take a balanced view, trying to show both sides of the argument. Others present one side of the argument, sometimes with a narrative and a conclusion.
I believe there is value in subdividing the content a bit more here. Arguments (propositions? claims? not sure with the wording here) should be the most atomic unit as proper reasoning requires a full …
Brewer Gorge
Jan 7, 2017 17:05
A rough outline: I want to build a webapp that facilitates crowdsourced reasoning, with deep trees of arguments (possibly even graphs). Think of it as a StackExchange + Reddit but for arguments, instead of questions & answers
Brewer Gorge
Jan 7, 2017 14:40
Heya lovely skeptics, I'm looking into building a webapp very similar to en.arguman.org . skeptics.stack looks also somewhat related, though with more of a fact-check Q&A touch. Anybody interested in talking with me about it?