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The key is to apply DRY principles to argumentation. If someone makes a claim, you should be able to hyperlink to it where the argument has already been explai
by blipblop 10y ago
The key is to apply DRY principles to argumentation.
If someone makes a claim, you should be able to hyperlink to it where the argument has already been explained.
Then each participant can "agree" or "disagree" with each claim in an argument chain. And every time they disagree they need to dive deeper to refine their argument.
Eventually all arguments reach a point of "because I say so" and ultimately it becomes a popularity contest. E.g. We should maximise happiness for all, etc.
But...the good news is argument reasoning can be objectively validated to some extent. Soundness and validity.
And definitions are arbitrary. People have to agree on definitions or there is no point in debating something. I would say that most arguments are about the parties not agreeing on definitions, and wasting time stringing together argument chains where both sides have different conceptions of the words being used.
I believe lawyers/politicians should be programmers and instead of arguing and making laws in English prose, they should use a structured programming language.
- ihinsdale 10y agoYou've described a lot of my vision for Sequiturs (https://sequiturs.com https://sequiturs.com). Check it out! I'd be very interested to get your feedback.
- Chris2048 10y agoNow we just need to go through HN an incorporate comment-knowledge into this format :-) Is there good search across questions?
- ihinsdale 10y agoThat'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 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.
- Chris2048 10y agoHere's another idea - have a index from news-source article to a page that breaks down it's assertions, then links each one to a discussion of it :-)
- ihinsdale 10y agoYeah, 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.
- Chris2048 10y agoNow we just need to go through HN an incorporate comment-knowledge into this format :-) Is there good search across questions?