Its posts like this and Paul's "How to Disagree" that remind me of an idea that I keep coming back to again and again.
I've often wondered what would be possible in terms of designing a website that aims to moderate debate in a way that leads to new ideas and conclusions and attempts to negate as many of these types of effects as possible.
Some formal system, that the users would have no choice but to follow, that begins with some one making a statement such as "X is true because of Y and Z" and then everyone debates it, reforms the statement as necessary and at some point it gets locked in as either true or false and then the discussion has to proceed based on that understanding.
People are forced to address each others points and eliminate as much bias as possible in their statements.
You could visually map out the progress that gets made until perhaps some new interesting conclusion gets reached.
Obviously no perfect solution exists but for me its an interesting question of how useful a system could be designed. There's also the obvious problems that a) few people are likely to want to use such a system and b) those that do are probably skewed to favor some particular point of view.
There is just so much wasted energy on the internet not being harnessed for actual progress. There are many blogs etc that have been created with the specific purpose of progressing some cause or area of expertise but people are just turning up, yelling opinions at one another and leaving with very little gained. Such is life I guess...
To go into a bit more detail of this likely pipe dream...
One approach could be to have a group of site moderators who make it their mission to, as Paul said, keep their identities as small as possible and simply judge the logic and biases of peoples arguments.
Perhaps their vote is what locks in a statement to be taken as true or false and then everyone has to then play by the rule of accepting their judgment on the matter for future debates.
In a similar way that scientific research builds on the work that was done before it to make progress, standing on the shoulders of giants type stuff, the conversation could be mapped to show these towers of progress grow as people logically move from "if A is true then B must be true..." and so on.
Perhaps the debate branches at points of contention and goes off down different paths.
The idea being that anyone can join in and quickly get up to speed as to where the conversation is up to by looking at the map of statements that have been dealt with so far.
If someone wants to reopen the debate around some statement and attack the foundation of one of these towers and bring it crashing down then they can.
Of course an enormous element of this will be based on the subjective judgment of the moderators. It can't be entirely based on pure logic but if it is useful and leads to new and interesting things then who cares...
Even if it succeeded in removing a lot of the crap around a debate and focus precisely on the points that people differ on so they can be attacked directly I think that would be a useful thing.
My idea for making this somewhat enjoyable and stand a chance of people participating in it would be to make it game like in some way.
Anyway, its all pretty out there stuff I know, but I'll no doubt continue to think about anyway...
It's not a pipe dream. There are some folks out there working on this kind of stuff, and I prototyped one for my master's project. However, I didn't go the route of having propositional-level granularity, because I'm aiming for Wikipedia levels of participation, and it's understood in HCI that the more structure you impose on input at the interface level, the lower the adoption.
Some stuff you may want to look up (all but the first are actually online):
MIT's Collaboratorium (should be an article in Sloan)
DebateGraph
TruthMapping
DebateWise
Debatepedia
There are also a bunch of other more commercial attempts whose names I can't recall. ReadWriteWeb or a similar site did a roundup of them last year. But they suck. Even the listed examples have probems insofar as they screw up the interface, interaction design, and/or information architecture. (That is, if the goal is to achieve widespread use.) Within small, interested communities, there may be sufficient motivation to use them. In Collaboratorium's case, they had a class at MIT use it w/r/t climate change.
If you're really interested in tackling this problem, let me know. I'm too busy working on a for-profit venture to keep developing my MS project, but my design doc might give you some ideas, even if you don't go the route I did.
Well yes, except that wikipedia doesn't lead to new and interesting conclusions as far as I'm aware. It does a good job of converging on good truthiness for a lot of things but avoids the harder stuff for which these types of problems make impossible to deal with.
I've considered the idea too. Perhaps a Wikipedia based on prolog. The main problem is that the expert system would be too tedious for most to fill out. There needs to be some kind of happy medium between rigor and usability. That middle point hasn't occurred to me yet.
Perhaps just some kind of reference system, so when an old debate reemerges, people can just refer to the online record until new ground is broken. The problem in this case is succinct yet meaningful summaries of the debate.
I keep thinking something useful could be achieved without getting too formal or needing something as strict and complex as Prolog.
Looking at how well a site like Stack Overflow is working gives me hope of a happy medium between rigor and usability being possible in the future somehow.
It combines a whole bunch of ideas from social sites such as voting, points, awards, wiki style editing into an effective solution. Far from perfect but useful which as about all you could ask for I guess.
It would also be interesting if a company like Disqus started experimenting with features in this area.
I've often wondered what would be possible in terms of designing a website that aims to moderate debate in a way that leads to new ideas and conclusions and attempts to negate as many of these types of effects as possible.
Some formal system, that the users would have no choice but to follow, that begins with some one making a statement such as "X is true because of Y and Z" and then everyone debates it, reforms the statement as necessary and at some point it gets locked in as either true or false and then the discussion has to proceed based on that understanding.
People are forced to address each others points and eliminate as much bias as possible in their statements.
You could visually map out the progress that gets made until perhaps some new interesting conclusion gets reached.
Obviously no perfect solution exists but for me its an interesting question of how useful a system could be designed. There's also the obvious problems that a) few people are likely to want to use such a system and b) those that do are probably skewed to favor some particular point of view.
There is just so much wasted energy on the internet not being harnessed for actual progress. There are many blogs etc that have been created with the specific purpose of progressing some cause or area of expertise but people are just turning up, yelling opinions at one another and leaving with very little gained. Such is life I guess...