14 ms·

Kialo – a platform for rational debate

179 points by lukeplato 8y ago

JoshMnem 8y ago
That's interesting -- "kialo" is the Esperanto word for reason or motive.
- colanderman 8y ago
  Specifically "motive". "Racio", not "kialo", is "reason" in the sense of logical reasoning.
mombul 8y ago
Hmm... calling a dog a duck doesn't make a dog a duck.
Semirhage 8y ago
This looks interesting, but in my cynical heart I’m afraid the issue isn’t the toolset, it’s the people.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I'm a strong proponent of using Technology to buttress human deficiencies. However, I have yet to see a technology that can adequately give scaffolding to support human reasoning in a way that doesn't exacerbate some bias.
- antpls 8y ago
  I'm kind of the cynical type guy too, but that looks like an interesting initiative to me. What makes you think it's the people? Do you have experience with previous similar tools? Also, you have to look at it with the expectation of a rise of automated moderation tools, and maybe even AIs entering into the debates.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    We are waiting for IBM to unleash their Debate AI on us :)
    - Semirhage 8y ago
      Look out, it’ll just be a guy in a shiny box who makes tutting sounds whenever someone uses the word “fuck” and they bill by the picosecond.
- bootlooped 8y ago
  But it's possible that the people who are drawn to use this toolset will be more interested in and committed to honest rational discussion than the mean.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
myWindoonn 8y ago
Unfortunately, Kialo does not have any features for structural reasoning, where the logical connections between arguments are completely formalized and precise. It relies on a human element to check each argument. Edit: How to do this formally? Look at formal systems for hints of how to do it in the 1900s, or category theory for how to do it in the modern day. [0][1] [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889v2 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  That's interesting, is there enough agreement on word-meanings that structural reasoning can coexist in some way (example: Someone could request a rewrite of a post to a structurally-reasoned format), or would the entire messaging system need some kind of re-do?
  - worldsayshi 8y ago
    I think such a structural reasoning system needs it's own serious iteration to find the right form. It's a very interesting topic!
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Good points, these things will come over time thoug. It's a fairly new platform and they are still finding their way. I agree you need much more to make the comments more "unique".
- antpls 8y ago
  If arguments are too formal, people won't be able to naturally share them. It would become programming in a argumentation DSL. Maybe new NLP algorithms will be able to give you a mapping from natural language to a more formal one.
  - worldsayshi 8y ago
    I agree and want to stress how interesting UX and NLP challenge this is. I believe there's a pragmatic solution to it.
codeprimate 8y ago
This is VERY similar to a site I helped write back in 2009 called RiledUp.com. Unfortunately it never took off. I hope this platform has better luck.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Thank you! We are trying hard, meanwhile >4k public debates, some of which have ~3k unique (without multi-linking) arguments, 5x that in comments and thousands of participants. https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-income-ubi-1634 https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-inco...
pjc50 8y ago
Interesting that the example debate is over flat-eartherism, which is one of those things on which all rational people agree. So therefore all the people on the other side are simply not playing the rational argument game - they're delusional or trolling.
- Kialo 8y ago
  That was a tongue-in-cheek example that many (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/factcheck https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/factche...) considered to be lighthearted, uncontroversial and settled. In case you wonder, we agree with this user's debate on the matter :) https://www.kialo.com/7216 https://www.kialo.com/7216
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "rational". My understanding is that many flat-earthers of course don't seriously believe the earth is flat, and the argument is made as a form of artistic expression, which is to say that it is meant to demonstrate that rationality can be abused and does not inherently lead to truth. One of Asimov's I, Robot stories did a similar thing, with a robot on a space station making rational arguments against the existence of earth. Of course, there are also nutters...
  - Semirhage 8y ago
    There are also religious extremists who believe that a flat earth is strongly implied in the Bible. If I remember correctly, they point to a passage in which someone is shown the whole world, and the “idea” is that obviously you can’t see the whole surface of a sphere at once. sigh Plus yes, nutters, obligate contrarians, and conspiracy theorists.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      That's silly. This is God we're talking about, if God wants to show you the entire surface of the earth at once I'm sure they can pull it off. Probably still has the blueprints if nothing else.
aidos 8y ago
I like the idea but found it a little hard to follow the arguments. Especially difficult if you follow down the cons thread, because a con of a con is a pro of the original point. I worry that it won’t really result in more rational outcome but I do wish it luck. Is there anyway to downvote the points for being, for example, strawman arguments? Edit: maybe I’d parse it better if they were labelled “agree” and “disagree”?
- antpls 8y ago
  I would like to add that the "agree"/"disagree" or "pro"/"cons" should have a random placement (left or right) and also random colors every time the page is loaded. "Cons" shouldn't be red. The brain has several cognitive biases, such as giving more value to the last paragraphes it reads (which are usually at the right, or at the end of a text block). Cultural biases, such as colors (red for "alert","bad" for example) also influence judgements. By the way, the website doesn't look easily usable or accessible to impaired people
  - bootlooped 8y ago
    Being consistent is good UX. I'm not sure the cognitive biases associated with color or left/right orientation are good enough reasons to intentionally confuse and disorient users.
    - antpls 8y ago
      When you want to ensure people are only focusing on the content, and that they stay vigilant about the debate, shouldn't there be UX to make sure people don't develop habits? All debates are unique
  - Kialo 8y ago
    We thought that green = pro and red = con, is kind of universally agreed upon, no? The most common misunderstanding is the one mentioned before, a con to a con, indirectly supports the thesis, but is red. But changing that around is even more confusing. Especially when the parent to that con is then used as a pro somewhere else (and the con now having to be labeled red again). We consider pros and cons always to be relating to the parent directly above them. This allows them to be linked or copied between debates, irrespective of what debate they originally were a part of.
egberts1 8y ago
The only problem with radial fan-out design is that it doesn’t allow issues to reconnect as they evolve.
- Kialo 8y ago
  We do allow linking of arguments so that they don't have to be spelled out a gazillion times. Linking naturally also includes all their pro / cons underneath.
backpropaganda 8y ago
A subreddit with a similar idea: https://www.reddit.com/r/steelmanning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/steelmanning/ Note that it is different from /r/CMV. Unlike CMV, Steelmanning wants to bring out the best form of either sides of an argument. The goal is not to change OP's views, but just to lay down the best arguments for lurkers to inform themselves with. It's more like /r/neutralpolitics but without the restriction to politics.
egberts1 8y ago
Symbolic logic is the flow of premise interacting with another premise to form a conclusion. And radial fan-out does not allow premises that are at the edge of the fan-out to correlate with each other for additional but new conclusion.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Did you have a look at the tree view, which follows when you enter the discussion? :) And yes, we do allow multi-linking and intermap-linking of claims.
jasonhansel 8y ago
I'm not quite sure what the authors of this site mean by "reason" and "rational." Its design promotes the arguments that are most popular, not the ones with the most intrinsic validity or soundness. Furthermore, it's by no means obvious that rationality alone is sufficient to resolve moral and ethical questions; other virtues may also be required.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Well, at least we tell people to vote the claims "impacts" not likability. We haven't yet researched how well this works, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it does have some impact. The heart, is just a thanks to the original author and doesn't impact the sorting. We are going to do something drastic to the default impact shown, because we agree that the average is not really an interesting measure. 1-2 months. I hope we are not overselling ourselves. We are no panacea, what we do, is facilitate and capture the reasoning of all viewpoints. This won't automatically lead to consensus. But at the very least you can now truly understand where others are coming from and write your opposing claims to whatever they consider being their strongest points.
  - jasonhansel 8y ago
    I agree that further research on this topic would be excellent! But we should keep in mind that what's really important is not to reach consensus, but to ascertain the truth. More generally, though, I would be interested to hear how you would define "reason" and "rationality." These are difficult questions, and I'm interested to hear more about your approach.
    - Kialo 8y ago
      In a democracy, consensus on truths actually matters a lot. Not speaking for the team, but, I would probably consider something to be argued rationally, that is logical within a cultural setting and frame of mind. Very often, this depends on the epistemological system a person is using. Take believers vs non-believers. Both can be rational within their framework, but many will consider other people's framework as not rational. We think that claims should always be logical and pertaining to the parent claim above them, in YOUR belief system, otherwise it becomes incoherent and unreadable for others.
Kialo 8y ago
Hi HN! 9 months after launch we make it to the frontpage :) Happy to answer any questions! More info about us and our mission can be found in this interview with our founder: https://twitter.com/FT/status/956126468635004928 https://twitter.com/FT/status/956126468635004928
- Kialo 8y ago
  One of the best showcases of what can be done with Kialo in the public sphere is probably the gun legislation debate, with >2.4k unique claims and thousands of participants, mapping out the reasoning for all perspectives. Was created by user paulmoore about 9 months ago. https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-controls-3346 https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-contr...
  - username3 8y ago
    It’s hard to follow cons side when support for red cons are green pros. The pro side always has green pros. https://banter.wiki/ https://banter.wiki/ keeps the same color for a position.
    - Kialo 8y ago
      Do you allow multi linking, intermap linking, branch copying to other Kialos of claims or do people always have to rewrite them from scratch (and all their children?)? Because if you did, you would know that claims have to change their color based on what is exactly above them. Also, when you are on level 10 of a debate, the claims might very well be a subdiscussion that attack the veracity or relevance of their parents, not of the thesis. Our debates often have >1k claims, that's the only way to handle it. A pro or a con relates directly to the parent above. (Linking your site once, instead of thrice, would have been polite, like the others did. :) )
      - username3 8y ago
        Did you flag my comments? It’s even not my site. I compared Kialo and other debate sites in the past. Linking is how we refer to things on the Internet. Don’t be so defensive. When people like your ideas, they’ll link you.
fghtr 8y ago
I think votes should not be more important than real scientific references in the evaluation of an argument.
- bootlooped 8y ago
  But how do you have users rate the validity of the scientific references? Probably with votes.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    Exactly, we often see discussions about linked papers underneath a claim, where then often the paper is taken out as a pro for the original claim, to make it clearer. Also, many discussions have little scienitifi papers to use, e.g. most of the ethics and religion debates. "The Existence of God", "Theodicy"...
MikeGale 8y ago
I wish the venture good luck and hope its users gain. I decided not to use it for various reasons including: 1. The situations I deal with cannot be reasoned through the skein of a boolean network. 2. The core of a useful discussion, in my mind, is talking with a few people who, in general, are each smarter / more knowledgeable in part of the discussion space, than I. I didn't see provision for such things in Kialo.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Not sure, what would you want to see in Kialo for that? We and others have tried that. We gave experts a multi theses debate and let them discuss the various options (that's also what we do internally when having to decide things) and then looked at the outcome and switched through the perspectives to see what the individual experts thought. Some use it in that way for board meetings. Instead of receiving memos that don't touch upon each other's points, you receive a Kialo in which all departments added their reasoning for why their favorite solution is good and the others' not.
malproksimajeto 8y ago
Mi ne pensas, ke Kialo estas kiala afero.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Ni afable konsentas :)
empath75 8y ago
People often think that if only everyone understood logic, we’d solve all the world’s problems. But let’s say I’m a billionaire that made my fortune in the fossil fuel industry. You’re not going to reason me out of opposing any sort of carbon tax or cap. I simply don’t give a fuck if the world burns because my wealth depends on burning it. You’re not going to reason me out of that position. And of course, I can’t get my candidates to win on a ‘fuck the planet’ platform so I do political science research and public policy polling so I can figure out how to cobble together a political coalition that can win, while having a ‘fuck the planet’ as a side effect. You have your pro-life people, your anti-immigration people, etc, all of whom are voting for different motivations and all of whom are using logic and reason to decide who to vote for in pursuit of those motivations. Politics is about power and wealth and any attempt to improve ‘public debate’ that doesn’t recognize that is doomed to failure.
ludwigvan 8y ago
Reminds me of arguman.org : http://en.arguman.org/capitalism-is-not-the-best-system-for-economic-organisation http://en.arguman.org/capitalism-is-not-the-best-system-for-...
acover 8y ago
Have you considered fading the text of low score claims? Currently my attention is drawn to good and bad claims equally. Only after reading do I check the score and realize the claim is incorrect. It wastes my time reading bad claims and the thought will stay with me regardless of quality.
- Kialo 8y ago
  We had filters already, but removed them about 2y ago... The hordes would have been an issue, just coming in and downvoting claims that they disagree with. When we switch from the all votes average, we might introduce them again. For individual perspectives, it would already make sense, you would then only see claims that a particular user voted of at least impact 2 or so. I would not rely on the "impact votes" today, plus, the average is not really interesting. What is more interesting is how people that agree or disagree with the main thesis voted. (hint: what we'll be building)
AlphaWeaver 8y ago
I feel after a brief initial read of the landing page that Kialo might be trying to do too much... It seeks to have debates over hot-topics in the public, but also wants to be a tool for private debates, or just for "private discussion?" Then there's also a catering towards this being used in enterprises? I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a product, but the entrepreneur in me screams "too large of a scope!"
- Kialo 8y ago
  Agreed. It's one of our main issues, we are effectively three startups: 1 public discussions / repository of the why / community 2 free edtech solution 3 SAAS for decision-making, -preparation, ideation... We have for now focussed on 1, as we consider it the hardest and most pertinent problem. 2 We are deploying a dedicated edu cluster in 2 weeks. Already quite popular for classroom debates (some Harvard profs being the first to use it), introducing students to controversial issues, etc 3 We provide teams for free right now and are building another cluster for them. (they too do not want to be inundated with gun / atheist debates) In the end, our core, is something like a wiki technology. When we launched, we didn't know what would stick and now we have all three kind of sticking. 3 being the one that has received the least amount of love till now, as companies seem to be doing ok, regarding decision-making, even though everybody hates emails, chat and meetings...
gravypod 8y ago
I did everyone a benifit by opening the holy war: https://www.kialo.com/tabs-vs-spaces-16646/16646.0=16646.1 https://www.kialo.com/tabs-vs-spaces-16646/16646.0=16646.1 I'm surprised this was not yet posted on the platform. As for the platform it was very easy to use. The UI is simple and it makes you flesh out both sides of the argument to the best of your ability before it is publicly visible. This dynamic is very interesting as even before the topic is visible it will appear as if there is considerable participation in the topic's discussion. I bet that will definitely drive participation. I'm very interested in seeing how this shapes up. Love the idea and the implementation!
- Kialo 8y ago
  You couldn't just let it go...next up emacs vs vi? :) At least we have a >1k claims Star Wars The Last Jedi (https://www.kialo.com/7055 https://www.kialo.com/7055) and Rebel alliance would defeat the United Federation (https://www.kialo.com/9394 https://www.kialo.com/9394) debate already. :) Thank you for your kind words!
- avodonosov 8y ago
  Unfortunately, it doesn't allow to post formatted code.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    You mean like bold, italics and different font sizes? We tried that and it made the whole reading experience much more cumbersome. What we might do is allow inline graphics attachments. The problem with those are DMCA takedowns...
    - avodonosov 8y ago
      For code is must also be monospaced font and allow newlines - currently, the text should be on one line. I understand about the reading experience. But maybe then allow formatting in comments, not in the claim title?
      - 8y ago
kamyarg 8y ago
This is exactly like arguman's approach: http://en.arguman.org/ http://en.arguman.org/
westoncb 8y ago
I started something like this a couple years ago, but it allowed hierarchy in the argument for either side, so that particular points could have 'justifications,' and the justifications could have their own, recursively—but a particular reader just dives as deep as they need to satisfy their personal curiosity. (There are shared justifications that you can link into your argument so you people aren't always wasting time justifying the same things; or you can share from just your own arguments you've written in the past). The debate format required that one proposition be addressed at a time, and the result of a debate is a reconciled hierarchy of claims/justifications. You could ask for critique on personal beliefs, have private debates, or public debates. This looks like the closest thing I've come across since, and I like it, though I'm still curious about the format I was tinkering with... (Also: funny side story: I e-mailed Leslie Lamport about the idea when I was still working on it [because of how I saw it relating to some ideas of his about writing proofs]. Out of respect for his privacy I won't say much about his reply other than that he was... not optimistic that folks would actually use it. I was also surprised by his generosity in reading about my idea and replying to me.)
- Kialo 8y ago
  What was it called? We are building this since 2011.
  - westoncb 8y ago
    It was never launched—still sitting on my computer with along with a pile of other ideas/projects I haven't had time for ;) I don't have a version hosted at the moment, but here's a blog post I wrote on it: http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/improving-idea-representation-and-debate.html http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/improving-idea-represen... Edit: it was tentatively named 'Hypothesis Crucible'. And I have no concrete plans to do anything with it anymore—I wish you guys good luck.
    - Kialo 8y ago
      Thanks!
brailsafe 8y ago
How can a platform enforce rationality?
- Kialo 8y ago
  You can't and we aren't. What is considered rational, is often cultural and builds on very different epistemological systems. Thus all you can do in a collaborative reasoning platform like ours, is give everybody the tools to portray their reasoning as well as they can. E.g. an underlying reason for somebody's arguments might be the existence of God. An atheist would consider this irrational, but the logic, given the underlying thesis, might be sound. So in the end, we are going to debate epistemology. Something, I feel, we don't do enough. Nor are we taught in school enough how (utility vs happiness) to evaluate the different epistemological systems.
  - sethrin 8y ago
    Perhaps I'm missing something, but are epistemological systems directly comparable?
    - Kialo 8y ago
      On our site, or in general? They broadly fall into, "science is knowledge" vs "whatever I want / feels right" is knowledge. We have perspectives, with which you can look at a believers vs a non-believers voting, other than that we are still waiting for the world to build AIs that can distinguish those....enough are working on this :)
      - sethrin 8y ago
        In general. Again, I may be missing a trick here, but I don't see how there can be any objective way to evaluate different truth-finding systems against each other.
brailsafe 8y ago
Seems like a good platform. Layout looks quite nice. The sidebar opening transition is kind of choppy. Haven't written CSS in a while, but there seems to be quite a bit of layout re-calc happening when everything on the page shifts over.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Firefox?
  - brailsafe 8y ago
    That's right. Can't believe I forgot to include that. Firefox Developer Edition, macOS High Sierra, 13" MBP 2017. Everything latest update.
    - Kialo 8y ago
      Being investigated. Thanks for feed-back!
Fellshard 8y ago
One observation I made about this tool: the questions are often framed with bias themselves, usually by introducing some hidden assumption. That can start a whole discussion on a tilt, and would take some serious work to curate and sculpt.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Could you give some examples of the hidden biases introduced by the theses? I presume you don't mean the way the theses are written, as in for or against the motion, instead of as a question?
  - username3 8y ago
    Can you make the UI like https://banter.wiki/ https://banter.wiki/
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Fellshard 8y ago
    Usually the question embeds an initial assumption that one answer or the other is the 'default' state, so anchor bias is introduced in the very consideration of the question. Visiting the page, I'm seeing fewer anchor issues than I'd seen previously, but still seeing some like the following: 'Students Keep "No Platforming" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?' 'Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?' 'Is Science Political?' Some of these can't be phrased any other way, but a little tuning might help: the latter, for example, has a subtle bias towards science being apolitical, and introduces a new claim: that science may be political. Rephrasing the question 'Is science political or apolitical?' would leave you with only an ordering anchor bias - a slight weighting towards the first item in the list. This also seems to be a factor in the foundational claim made in each question: it usually picks one side or the other, and all arguments and counterarguments are then firmly grounded in that claim. Perhaps expressing each claim as both a positive and negative claim would make a difference. For example, in the 'no-platforming' question, the foundational claim is 'Social justice movements should abandon the use of no-platforming at universities'. If there were a way to present both claims as foundational - 'should abandon' vs. 'should embrace', e.g. - you would get a more fleshed-out debate, as the arguments for and against the one are not necessarily arguments against and for the other, respectively. EDIT: I do see you've added what you call 'multi-thesis debates', this seems to tackle the latter half of this post fairly directly.
avodonosov 8y ago
Cool. I was thinking about something like this for a long time. We need tools for more effective collective thinking.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Thanks. The best term we have found for it yet is collaborative reasoning platform, but that's a bit of a mouthful.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    "groupthink" is shorter, but a bit tongue in cheek
    - Kialo 8y ago
      Oh boy have we have had success with tongue in cheek, at least 100 twitter messages regarding those flat earth examples on the tour page, incl. support emails from astrophysicists... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486633
ajnin 8y ago
I have 2 issues, first is that it looks more like a popularity contest. Popupar points of view get propelled at the top where they get more exposure and get all the discussion and votes, like on any other discussion site with threads. Second, there is not "yes, but ..." answer, you are forced to take sides, for example to the hypothetical question "should drugs be legalized ?", I'd probably want to aswer "yes, but regulated". Not sure how to express that.
- avodonosov 8y ago
  I think the feature currently is simply removal of duplicated points.
  - username3 8y ago
    They need a spectrum of positions.
    - Kialo 8y ago
      We do have a spectrum of positions, via the Perspective feature. There you can see how others see an issue.
- ibeckermayer 8y ago
  >it looks more like a popularity contest. Right, is what is rationally justified decided by what is democratically popular? The best solution would allow for customizable curation, where different systems of authority and checks/balances on that authority could be tried, with different participants. Equally-weighted voting is obviously not the solution for promoting rational debate, since in almost all domains there are a select few with much more knowledge than all others.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    >Right, is what is rationally justified decided by what is democratically popular? The best solution would allow for customizable curation, where different systems of authority and checks/balances on that authority could be tried, with different participants. We do have perspectives, where you can see the votes of individuals and will introduce a measure to show you the votes that agree / disagree with the main thesis. That is the best auto splitting of votes we could come up with. Happy about better suggestions. Weighing voting brings a whole new set of problems. But agree, the ALL votes perspectives, isn't really that great. The reason being that often then many votes there end up in the middle (2), but the interesting bit being what the sides(0+4) are thinking. See here: https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-controls-3346/3346.0=3346.1/=3346.1/voters https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-contr...
greggman 8y ago
I love the idea and added a topic here https://www.kialo.com/macos-and-windows-should-sandbox-all-apps-16655/16655.0=16655.1 https://www.kialo.com/macos-and-windows-should-sandbox-all-a... Some comments: The site seems designed for desktop first. The fancy radial graph doesn't seem to appear on mobile. That would seem like a pretty big barrier to popularity. I have lots of friends who's only access to the net is their phone. It's not at all clear to me which link to share with people. Was the one above correct? It's not showing the radial graph in my topic so I assumed it was the wrong link since links to other topics show a graph. Clicking the "share" button is not helpful with providing a link It's entirely unclear whether to respond pro or con on 2nd level topics. It feels intuitively to me that it should be green vs orange for the entire discussion. All green is pro the original topic, all orange is con the original topic. But that is not how others are using it. The comment for "con" of sub topic says "attack the parent ...." What's the parent here? The parent to this comment? The parent to this sub-topic so if it's sub-sub-topic that's what? Whatever Kialo want's it to be it needs to made 1000x clearer. Even the help is unhelpful. It shows topic->pro->con which is uncontroversial. It needs to show topic->con->con or topic->con->pro. But of course most people won't click to the help so the actual form needs to make this far clearer.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Thanks for feed-back and giving us a try. The fancy sunburst, currently, only appears on initial load of a discussion, we are thinking of changing that. You can open it by clicking the (i) on the thesis, or via discussion menu "Discussion Info". The link one above is correct, if you want people to have viewer rights, (which allows them to vote and suggest claims). If you want people to have writers rights, where they can immediately write into a discussion, you have to go to share, enable the writers sharing link and paste that. We do not recommend using that for public posting though. Generally speaking, claims are supposed to make sense and relate to their parent claim, the one directly above it. This is the only way to allow for linking, intermap linking and copying of branches into other debates. In very large debates, with thousands of claims and levels, often, a discussion on level 10, is really only pertaining ot the parent, e.g. this is not relevant here or attacking the veracity of a statement. How this claim relates to the thesis on top, isn't anymore that relevant. Due to linking, it would also be quite confusing, one time the claim is a pro, then a con. And most people read claims as relevant for the parent directly above. That's why we spell out the "Support /Attack parent". I think it's also in the intro video.
vesak 8y ago
How does this tool keep stupid and evil people from participating?
- Kialo 8y ago
  Stupid is a problematic term, because many people use it to categorize people who are very smart and but adhere to questinable belief / epistemological systems. People that are incoherent, don't normally get their claims accepted. The admins after all don't want gibberish in their debates. People that have very different points of views, get their claims accepted and get them rebuked underneath. We believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant. You need to spell out bad thinking and then debunk it underneath.
anilgulecha 8y ago
This is an idea that I (like many many other technical folks, I'm sure!) have given some thought it. I believe, this implementation, in it's current form, will not take off for the following reasons: 1) Most issues don't fall on a binary - and are not conducive to the pro/con, positive/negative, yes/no binary. 2) Most individual positions are not reached at one end of the spectrum. They start of near center gradually oscillate and deviate the more someone studies a subject. As such, a UX that places pros/cons front and center robs the reader of the actual learning/oscillating phase. I ask that you to find the source of any opinion you hold and try to reach back to it's source. You'll rarely find that it was a table that you studied and picked a side on. 4) Discussions should not center around individual issues. Rather it should be communities around a certain topic, where the discussions evolve and debates arise. The OP only does the latter -- which perhaps makes sense if say some communities like sub-reddits use it. 3) Expertise is not up for debate. An expert's opinion should not be moderated, or weighed, in the same way as a layman's opinion. you can argue for pure meritocracy, but an expert will simply not indulge in an environment when they have to prove their expertise day-in-and-day-out. The platform needs to acknowledge the parallels with how debates and opinions are shaped AFK. (note above is purely for matters-of-opinions, not for matters-of-fact.) Overall, what you don't need (and what's been done many times) is a table with all positions listed down. What you instead need is to solve for the larger problem, or handling moderation, reputation and expertise, because consensus and debates actually do care about the above. This does not mean anonymous/pseudonymous discussion is not possible, just that the framework has to allow for it in an integrated manner. I have tried multiple implementations of above (not public-ally available), but none satisfactorily handled the above -- it is a hard problem to solve, so I commend and wish all the best to the Kialo team.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Thanks for your feed-back. Re 1-3) Most discussions can actually be distilled to a single pointed issue or a very specific discussion (https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-income-ubi-1634 https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-inco...). You can then ask in a follow up, using a multi thesis discussion, which variant of e.g. legislation is the best (https://www.kialo.com/what-is-the-best-drug-regulation-system-2027 https://www.kialo.com/what-is-the-best-drug-regulation-syste...). Or you can start with a multi and discuss various options, as e.g. done here: (https://www.kialo.com/who-will-win-the-game-of-thrones-1203 https://www.kialo.com/who-will-win-the-game-of-thrones-1203) It's really up to the discussion creator. Multis allow you to change the theses and add a "better" one, as happened in the drug legislation debate (I think). Re 4) Do you remember nupedia, it didn't work. Wikipedia is not perfect, but the best resource we have to look up the "what". What we are building with the public site is a repository of the "why". It doesn't require experts to write the reasoning of experts, which is what is happening, sometimes phds come in and post all the scientific papers pertaining to a position. We agree that the hardest issue is actually moderation. When you have thousands of people chime in, as is the case with e.g. the UBI debate, you need a good system to filter for duplicates and trolls. That's why we implemented the suggestion system (https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003791445-Suggesting-Claims https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003791445-Sug...) and 5 different permission levels(https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003877705-Participant-Rights-and-Roles https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003877705-Par...). This seems to work, as can be witnessed in the large debates. It's by no means perfect though and we are constantly improving it. The last bit we added was nested suggestions and suggestion commenting. Again, thanks for your input. :)
ksaitor 8y ago
This is great. I thought i'd use this platform to discuss the most important topic of this week — whether Kylie Jenner's wealth is self-made or not: https://www.kialo.com/kylie-jenners-fortune-is-self-made-16807 https://www.kialo.com/kylie-jenners-fortune-is-self-made-168... ;)
ksaitor 8y ago
@kialo requires 8 pros/cons for a discussion to be discoverable. That sounds like a draconian requirement that likely to damage the platform more, than it'll benefit it. I understand they are trying to keep the quality high, but if users cant discover new content daily, they wont be able to engage with it and will just churn… Hope you guys will lower this limit, as the idea is truly great and Internet need a well-structured discussion platform!

179 points by lukeplato 8y ago

JoshMnem 8y ago

That's interesting -- "kialo" is the Esperanto word for reason or motive.

colanderman 8y ago
Specifically "motive". "Racio", not "kialo", is "reason" in the sense of logical reasoning.

mombul 8y ago

Hmm... calling a dog a duck doesn't make a dog a duck.

Semirhage 8y ago

This looks interesting, but in my cynical heart I’m afraid the issue isn’t the toolset, it’s the people.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago
I'm a strong proponent of using Technology to buttress human deficiencies. However, I have yet to see a technology that can adequately give scaffolding to support human reasoning in a way that doesn't exacerbate some bias.
antpls 8y ago
I'm kind of the cynical type guy too, but that looks like an interesting initiative to me. What makes you think it's the people? Do you have experience with previous similar tools? Also, you have to look at it with the expectation of a rise of automated moderation tools, and maybe even AIs entering into the debates.
- Kialo 8y ago
  We are waiting for IBM to unleash their Debate AI on us :)
  - Semirhage 8y ago
    Look out, it’ll just be a guy in a shiny box who makes tutting sounds whenever someone uses the word “fuck” and they bill by the picosecond.
bootlooped 8y ago
But it's possible that the people who are drawn to use this toolset will be more interested in and committed to honest rational discussion than the mean.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

myWindoonn 8y ago

Unfortunately, Kialo does not have any features for structural reasoning, where the logical connections between arguments are completely formalized and precise. It relies on a human element to check each argument. Edit: How to do this formally? Look at formal systems for hints of how to do it in the 1900s, or category theory for how to do it in the modern day. [0][1] [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889v2 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526

themodelplumber 8y ago
That's interesting, is there enough agreement on word-meanings that structural reasoning can coexist in some way (example: Someone could request a rewrite of a post to a structurally-reasoned format), or would the entire messaging system need some kind of re-do?
- worldsayshi 8y ago
  I think such a structural reasoning system needs it's own serious iteration to find the right form. It's a very interesting topic!
ThomPete 8y ago
Good points, these things will come over time thoug. It's a fairly new platform and they are still finding their way. I agree you need much more to make the comments more "unique".
antpls 8y ago
If arguments are too formal, people won't be able to naturally share them. It would become programming in a argumentation DSL. Maybe new NLP algorithms will be able to give you a mapping from natural language to a more formal one.
- worldsayshi 8y ago
  I agree and want to stress how interesting UX and NLP challenge this is. I believe there's a pragmatic solution to it.

codeprimate 8y ago

This is VERY similar to a site I helped write back in 2009 called RiledUp.com. Unfortunately it never took off. I hope this platform has better luck.

Kialo 8y ago
Thank you! We are trying hard, meanwhile >4k public debates, some of which have ~3k unique (without multi-linking) arguments, 5x that in comments and thousands of participants. https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-income-ubi-1634 https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-inco...

pjc50 8y ago

Interesting that the example debate is over flat-eartherism, which is one of those things on which all rational people agree. So therefore all the people on the other side are simply not playing the rational argument game - they're delusional or trolling.

Kialo 8y ago
That was a tongue-in-cheek example that many (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/factcheck https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/factche...) considered to be lighthearted, uncontroversial and settled. In case you wonder, we agree with this user's debate on the matter :) https://www.kialo.com/7216 https://www.kialo.com/7216
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Depends on what you mean by "rational". My understanding is that many flat-earthers of course don't seriously believe the earth is flat, and the argument is made as a form of artistic expression, which is to say that it is meant to demonstrate that rationality can be abused and does not inherently lead to truth. One of Asimov's I, Robot stories did a similar thing, with a robot on a space station making rational arguments against the existence of earth. Of course, there are also nutters...
- Semirhage 8y ago
  There are also religious extremists who believe that a flat earth is strongly implied in the Bible. If I remember correctly, they point to a passage in which someone is shown the whole world, and the “idea” is that obviously you can’t see the whole surface of a sphere at once. sigh Plus yes, nutters, obligate contrarians, and conspiracy theorists.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    That's silly. This is God we're talking about, if God wants to show you the entire surface of the earth at once I'm sure they can pull it off. Probably still has the blueprints if nothing else.

aidos 8y ago

I like the idea but found it a little hard to follow the arguments. Especially difficult if you follow down the cons thread, because a con of a con is a pro of the original point. I worry that it won’t really result in more rational outcome but I do wish it luck. Is there anyway to downvote the points for being, for example, strawman arguments? Edit: maybe I’d parse it better if they were labelled “agree” and “disagree”?

antpls 8y ago
I would like to add that the "agree"/"disagree" or "pro"/"cons" should have a random placement (left or right) and also random colors every time the page is loaded. "Cons" shouldn't be red. The brain has several cognitive biases, such as giving more value to the last paragraphes it reads (which are usually at the right, or at the end of a text block). Cultural biases, such as colors (red for "alert","bad" for example) also influence judgements. By the way, the website doesn't look easily usable or accessible to impaired people
- bootlooped 8y ago
  Being consistent is good UX. I'm not sure the cognitive biases associated with color or left/right orientation are good enough reasons to intentionally confuse and disorient users.
  - antpls 8y ago
    When you want to ensure people are only focusing on the content, and that they stay vigilant about the debate, shouldn't there be UX to make sure people don't develop habits? All debates are unique
- Kialo 8y ago
  We thought that green = pro and red = con, is kind of universally agreed upon, no? The most common misunderstanding is the one mentioned before, a con to a con, indirectly supports the thesis, but is red. But changing that around is even more confusing. Especially when the parent to that con is then used as a pro somewhere else (and the con now having to be labeled red again). We consider pros and cons always to be relating to the parent directly above them. This allows them to be linked or copied between debates, irrespective of what debate they originally were a part of.

egberts1 8y ago

The only problem with radial fan-out design is that it doesn’t allow issues to reconnect as they evolve.

Kialo 8y ago
We do allow linking of arguments so that they don't have to be spelled out a gazillion times. Linking naturally also includes all their pro / cons underneath.

backpropaganda 8y ago

A subreddit with a similar idea: https://www.reddit.com/r/steelmanning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/steelmanning/ Note that it is different from /r/CMV. Unlike CMV, Steelmanning wants to bring out the best form of either sides of an argument. The goal is not to change OP's views, but just to lay down the best arguments for lurkers to inform themselves with. It's more like /r/neutralpolitics but without the restriction to politics.

egberts1 8y ago

Symbolic logic is the flow of premise interacting with another premise to form a conclusion. And radial fan-out does not allow premises that are at the edge of the fan-out to correlate with each other for additional but new conclusion.

Kialo 8y ago
Did you have a look at the tree view, which follows when you enter the discussion? :) And yes, we do allow multi-linking and intermap-linking of claims.

jasonhansel 8y ago

I'm not quite sure what the authors of this site mean by "reason" and "rational." Its design promotes the arguments that are most popular, not the ones with the most intrinsic validity or soundness. Furthermore, it's by no means obvious that rationality alone is sufficient to resolve moral and ethical questions; other virtues may also be required.

Kialo 8y ago
Well, at least we tell people to vote the claims "impacts" not likability. We haven't yet researched how well this works, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it does have some impact. The heart, is just a thanks to the original author and doesn't impact the sorting. We are going to do something drastic to the default impact shown, because we agree that the average is not really an interesting measure. 1-2 months. I hope we are not overselling ourselves. We are no panacea, what we do, is facilitate and capture the reasoning of all viewpoints. This won't automatically lead to consensus. But at the very least you can now truly understand where others are coming from and write your opposing claims to whatever they consider being their strongest points.
- jasonhansel 8y ago
  I agree that further research on this topic would be excellent! But we should keep in mind that what's really important is not to reach consensus, but to ascertain the truth. More generally, though, I would be interested to hear how you would define "reason" and "rationality." These are difficult questions, and I'm interested to hear more about your approach.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    In a democracy, consensus on truths actually matters a lot. Not speaking for the team, but, I would probably consider something to be argued rationally, that is logical within a cultural setting and frame of mind. Very often, this depends on the epistemological system a person is using. Take believers vs non-believers. Both can be rational within their framework, but many will consider other people's framework as not rational. We think that claims should always be logical and pertaining to the parent claim above them, in YOUR belief system, otherwise it becomes incoherent and unreadable for others.

Kialo 8y ago

Hi HN! 9 months after launch we make it to the frontpage :) Happy to answer any questions! More info about us and our mission can be found in this interview with our founder: https://twitter.com/FT/status/956126468635004928 https://twitter.com/FT/status/956126468635004928

Kialo 8y ago
One of the best showcases of what can be done with Kialo in the public sphere is probably the gun legislation debate, with >2.4k unique claims and thousands of participants, mapping out the reasoning for all perspectives. Was created by user paulmoore about 9 months ago. https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-controls-3346 https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-contr...
- username3 8y ago
  It’s hard to follow cons side when support for red cons are green pros. The pro side always has green pros. https://banter.wiki/ https://banter.wiki/ keeps the same color for a position.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    Do you allow multi linking, intermap linking, branch copying to other Kialos of claims or do people always have to rewrite them from scratch (and all their children?)? Because if you did, you would know that claims have to change their color based on what is exactly above them. Also, when you are on level 10 of a debate, the claims might very well be a subdiscussion that attack the veracity or relevance of their parents, not of the thesis. Our debates often have >1k claims, that's the only way to handle it. A pro or a con relates directly to the parent above. (Linking your site once, instead of thrice, would have been polite, like the others did. :) )
    - username3 8y ago
      Did you flag my comments? It’s even not my site. I compared Kialo and other debate sites in the past. Linking is how we refer to things on the Internet. Don’t be so defensive. When people like your ideas, they’ll link you.

fghtr 8y ago

I think votes should not be more important than real scientific references in the evaluation of an argument.

bootlooped 8y ago
But how do you have users rate the validity of the scientific references? Probably with votes.
- Kialo 8y ago
  Exactly, we often see discussions about linked papers underneath a claim, where then often the paper is taken out as a pro for the original claim, to make it clearer. Also, many discussions have little scienitifi papers to use, e.g. most of the ethics and religion debates. "The Existence of God", "Theodicy"...

MikeGale 8y ago

I wish the venture good luck and hope its users gain. I decided not to use it for various reasons including: 1. The situations I deal with cannot be reasoned through the skein of a boolean network. 2. The core of a useful discussion, in my mind, is talking with a few people who, in general, are each smarter / more knowledgeable in part of the discussion space, than I. I didn't see provision for such things in Kialo.

Kialo 8y ago
Not sure, what would you want to see in Kialo for that? We and others have tried that. We gave experts a multi theses debate and let them discuss the various options (that's also what we do internally when having to decide things) and then looked at the outcome and switched through the perspectives to see what the individual experts thought. Some use it in that way for board meetings. Instead of receiving memos that don't touch upon each other's points, you receive a Kialo in which all departments added their reasoning for why their favorite solution is good and the others' not.

malproksimajeto 8y ago

Mi ne pensas, ke Kialo estas kiala afero.

Kialo 8y ago
Ni afable konsentas :)

empath75 8y ago

People often think that if only everyone understood logic, we’d solve all the world’s problems. But let’s say I’m a billionaire that made my fortune in the fossil fuel industry. You’re not going to reason me out of opposing any sort of carbon tax or cap. I simply don’t give a fuck if the world burns because my wealth depends on burning it. You’re not going to reason me out of that position. And of course, I can’t get my candidates to win on a ‘fuck the planet’ platform so I do political science research and public policy polling so I can figure out how to cobble together a political coalition that can win, while having a ‘fuck the planet’ as a side effect. You have your pro-life people, your anti-immigration people, etc, all of whom are voting for different motivations and all of whom are using logic and reason to decide who to vote for in pursuit of those motivations. Politics is about power and wealth and any attempt to improve ‘public debate’ that doesn’t recognize that is doomed to failure.

ludwigvan 8y ago

Reminds me of arguman.org : http://en.arguman.org/capitalism-is-not-the-best-system-for-economic-organisation http://en.arguman.org/capitalism-is-not-the-best-system-for-...

acover 8y ago

Have you considered fading the text of low score claims? Currently my attention is drawn to good and bad claims equally. Only after reading do I check the score and realize the claim is incorrect. It wastes my time reading bad claims and the thought will stay with me regardless of quality.

Kialo 8y ago
We had filters already, but removed them about 2y ago... The hordes would have been an issue, just coming in and downvoting claims that they disagree with. When we switch from the all votes average, we might introduce them again. For individual perspectives, it would already make sense, you would then only see claims that a particular user voted of at least impact 2 or so. I would not rely on the "impact votes" today, plus, the average is not really interesting. What is more interesting is how people that agree or disagree with the main thesis voted. (hint: what we'll be building)

AlphaWeaver 8y ago

I feel after a brief initial read of the landing page that Kialo might be trying to do too much... It seeks to have debates over hot-topics in the public, but also wants to be a tool for private debates, or just for "private discussion?" Then there's also a catering towards this being used in enterprises? I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a product, but the entrepreneur in me screams "too large of a scope!"

Kialo 8y ago
Agreed. It's one of our main issues, we are effectively three startups: 1 public discussions / repository of the why / community 2 free edtech solution 3 SAAS for decision-making, -preparation, ideation... We have for now focussed on 1, as we consider it the hardest and most pertinent problem. 2 We are deploying a dedicated edu cluster in 2 weeks. Already quite popular for classroom debates (some Harvard profs being the first to use it), introducing students to controversial issues, etc 3 We provide teams for free right now and are building another cluster for them. (they too do not want to be inundated with gun / atheist debates) In the end, our core, is something like a wiki technology. When we launched, we didn't know what would stick and now we have all three kind of sticking. 3 being the one that has received the least amount of love till now, as companies seem to be doing ok, regarding decision-making, even though everybody hates emails, chat and meetings...

gravypod 8y ago

I did everyone a benifit by opening the holy war: https://www.kialo.com/tabs-vs-spaces-16646/16646.0=16646.1 https://www.kialo.com/tabs-vs-spaces-16646/16646.0=16646.1 I'm surprised this was not yet posted on the platform. As for the platform it was very easy to use. The UI is simple and it makes you flesh out both sides of the argument to the best of your ability before it is publicly visible. This dynamic is very interesting as even before the topic is visible it will appear as if there is considerable participation in the topic's discussion. I bet that will definitely drive participation. I'm very interested in seeing how this shapes up. Love the idea and the implementation!

Kialo 8y ago
You couldn't just let it go...next up emacs vs vi? :) At least we have a >1k claims Star Wars The Last Jedi (https://www.kialo.com/7055 https://www.kialo.com/7055) and Rebel alliance would defeat the United Federation (https://www.kialo.com/9394 https://www.kialo.com/9394) debate already. :) Thank you for your kind words!
avodonosov 8y ago
Unfortunately, it doesn't allow to post formatted code.
- Kialo 8y ago
  You mean like bold, italics and different font sizes? We tried that and it made the whole reading experience much more cumbersome. What we might do is allow inline graphics attachments. The problem with those are DMCA takedowns...
  - avodonosov 8y ago
    For code is must also be monospaced font and allow newlines - currently, the text should be on one line. I understand about the reading experience. But maybe then allow formatting in comments, not in the claim title?
    - 8y ago

kamyarg 8y ago

This is exactly like arguman's approach: http://en.arguman.org/ http://en.arguman.org/

westoncb 8y ago

I started something like this a couple years ago, but it allowed hierarchy in the argument for either side, so that particular points could have 'justifications,' and the justifications could have their own, recursively—but a particular reader just dives as deep as they need to satisfy their personal curiosity. (There are shared justifications that you can link into your argument so you people aren't always wasting time justifying the same things; or you can share from just your own arguments you've written in the past). The debate format required that one proposition be addressed at a time, and the result of a debate is a reconciled hierarchy of claims/justifications. You could ask for critique on personal beliefs, have private debates, or public debates. This looks like the closest thing I've come across since, and I like it, though I'm still curious about the format I was tinkering with... (Also: funny side story: I e-mailed Leslie Lamport about the idea when I was still working on it [because of how I saw it relating to some ideas of his about writing proofs]. Out of respect for his privacy I won't say much about his reply other than that he was... not optimistic that folks would actually use it. I was also surprised by his generosity in reading about my idea and replying to me.)

Kialo 8y ago
What was it called? We are building this since 2011.
- westoncb 8y ago
  It was never launched—still sitting on my computer with along with a pile of other ideas/projects I haven't had time for ;) I don't have a version hosted at the moment, but here's a blog post I wrote on it: http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/improving-idea-representation-and-debate.html http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/improving-idea-represen... Edit: it was tentatively named 'Hypothesis Crucible'. And I have no concrete plans to do anything with it anymore—I wish you guys good luck.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    Thanks!

brailsafe 8y ago

How can a platform enforce rationality?

Kialo 8y ago
You can't and we aren't. What is considered rational, is often cultural and builds on very different epistemological systems. Thus all you can do in a collaborative reasoning platform like ours, is give everybody the tools to portray their reasoning as well as they can. E.g. an underlying reason for somebody's arguments might be the existence of God. An atheist would consider this irrational, but the logic, given the underlying thesis, might be sound. So in the end, we are going to debate epistemology. Something, I feel, we don't do enough. Nor are we taught in school enough how (utility vs happiness) to evaluate the different epistemological systems.
- sethrin 8y ago
  Perhaps I'm missing something, but are epistemological systems directly comparable?
  - Kialo 8y ago
    On our site, or in general? They broadly fall into, "science is knowledge" vs "whatever I want / feels right" is knowledge. We have perspectives, with which you can look at a believers vs a non-believers voting, other than that we are still waiting for the world to build AIs that can distinguish those....enough are working on this :)
    - sethrin 8y ago
      In general. Again, I may be missing a trick here, but I don't see how there can be any objective way to evaluate different truth-finding systems against each other.

brailsafe 8y ago

Seems like a good platform. Layout looks quite nice. The sidebar opening transition is kind of choppy. Haven't written CSS in a while, but there seems to be quite a bit of layout re-calc happening when everything on the page shifts over.

Kialo 8y ago
Firefox?
- brailsafe 8y ago
  That's right. Can't believe I forgot to include that. Firefox Developer Edition, macOS High Sierra, 13" MBP 2017. Everything latest update.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    Being investigated. Thanks for feed-back!

Fellshard 8y ago

One observation I made about this tool: the questions are often framed with bias themselves, usually by introducing some hidden assumption. That can start a whole discussion on a tilt, and would take some serious work to curate and sculpt.

Kialo 8y ago
Could you give some examples of the hidden biases introduced by the theses? I presume you don't mean the way the theses are written, as in for or against the motion, instead of as a question?
- username3 8y ago
  Can you make the UI like https://banter.wiki/ https://banter.wiki/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Fellshard 8y ago
  Usually the question embeds an initial assumption that one answer or the other is the 'default' state, so anchor bias is introduced in the very consideration of the question. Visiting the page, I'm seeing fewer anchor issues than I'd seen previously, but still seeing some like the following: 'Students Keep "No Platforming" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?' 'Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?' 'Is Science Political?' Some of these can't be phrased any other way, but a little tuning might help: the latter, for example, has a subtle bias towards science being apolitical, and introduces a new claim: that science may be political. Rephrasing the question 'Is science political or apolitical?' would leave you with only an ordering anchor bias - a slight weighting towards the first item in the list. This also seems to be a factor in the foundational claim made in each question: it usually picks one side or the other, and all arguments and counterarguments are then firmly grounded in that claim. Perhaps expressing each claim as both a positive and negative claim would make a difference. For example, in the 'no-platforming' question, the foundational claim is 'Social justice movements should abandon the use of no-platforming at universities'. If there were a way to present both claims as foundational - 'should abandon' vs. 'should embrace', e.g. - you would get a more fleshed-out debate, as the arguments for and against the one are not necessarily arguments against and for the other, respectively. EDIT: I do see you've added what you call 'multi-thesis debates', this seems to tackle the latter half of this post fairly directly.

avodonosov 8y ago

Cool. I was thinking about something like this for a long time. We need tools for more effective collective thinking.

Kialo 8y ago
Thanks. The best term we have found for it yet is collaborative reasoning platform, but that's a bit of a mouthful.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  "groupthink" is shorter, but a bit tongue in cheek
  - Kialo 8y ago
    Oh boy have we have had success with tongue in cheek, at least 100 twitter messages regarding those flat earth examples on the tour page, incl. support emails from astrophysicists... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486633

ajnin 8y ago

I have 2 issues, first is that it looks more like a popularity contest. Popupar points of view get propelled at the top where they get more exposure and get all the discussion and votes, like on any other discussion site with threads. Second, there is not "yes, but ..." answer, you are forced to take sides, for example to the hypothetical question "should drugs be legalized ?", I'd probably want to aswer "yes, but regulated". Not sure how to express that.

avodonosov 8y ago
I think the feature currently is simply removal of duplicated points.
- username3 8y ago
  They need a spectrum of positions.
  - Kialo 8y ago
    We do have a spectrum of positions, via the Perspective feature. There you can see how others see an issue.
ibeckermayer 8y ago
>it looks more like a popularity contest. Right, is what is rationally justified decided by what is democratically popular? The best solution would allow for customizable curation, where different systems of authority and checks/balances on that authority could be tried, with different participants. Equally-weighted voting is obviously not the solution for promoting rational debate, since in almost all domains there are a select few with much more knowledge than all others.
- Kialo 8y ago
  >Right, is what is rationally justified decided by what is democratically popular? The best solution would allow for customizable curation, where different systems of authority and checks/balances on that authority could be tried, with different participants. We do have perspectives, where you can see the votes of individuals and will introduce a measure to show you the votes that agree / disagree with the main thesis. That is the best auto splitting of votes we could come up with. Happy about better suggestions. Weighing voting brings a whole new set of problems. But agree, the ALL votes perspectives, isn't really that great. The reason being that often then many votes there end up in the middle (2), but the interesting bit being what the sides(0+4) are thinking. See here: https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-controls-3346/3346.0=3346.1/=3346.1/voters https://www.kialo.com/should-the-us-adopt-stricter-gun-contr...

greggman 8y ago

I love the idea and added a topic here https://www.kialo.com/macos-and-windows-should-sandbox-all-apps-16655/16655.0=16655.1 https://www.kialo.com/macos-and-windows-should-sandbox-all-a... Some comments: The site seems designed for desktop first. The fancy radial graph doesn't seem to appear on mobile. That would seem like a pretty big barrier to popularity. I have lots of friends who's only access to the net is their phone. It's not at all clear to me which link to share with people. Was the one above correct? It's not showing the radial graph in my topic so I assumed it was the wrong link since links to other topics show a graph. Clicking the "share" button is not helpful with providing a link It's entirely unclear whether to respond pro or con on 2nd level topics. It feels intuitively to me that it should be green vs orange for the entire discussion. All green is pro the original topic, all orange is con the original topic. But that is not how others are using it. The comment for "con" of sub topic says "attack the parent ...." What's the parent here? The parent to this comment? The parent to this sub-topic so if it's sub-sub-topic that's what? Whatever Kialo want's it to be it needs to made 1000x clearer. Even the help is unhelpful. It shows topic->pro->con which is uncontroversial. It needs to show topic->con->con or topic->con->pro. But of course most people won't click to the help so the actual form needs to make this far clearer.

Kialo 8y ago
Thanks for feed-back and giving us a try. The fancy sunburst, currently, only appears on initial load of a discussion, we are thinking of changing that. You can open it by clicking the (i) on the thesis, or via discussion menu "Discussion Info". The link one above is correct, if you want people to have viewer rights, (which allows them to vote and suggest claims). If you want people to have writers rights, where they can immediately write into a discussion, you have to go to share, enable the writers sharing link and paste that. We do not recommend using that for public posting though. Generally speaking, claims are supposed to make sense and relate to their parent claim, the one directly above it. This is the only way to allow for linking, intermap linking and copying of branches into other debates. In very large debates, with thousands of claims and levels, often, a discussion on level 10, is really only pertaining ot the parent, e.g. this is not relevant here or attacking the veracity of a statement. How this claim relates to the thesis on top, isn't anymore that relevant. Due to linking, it would also be quite confusing, one time the claim is a pro, then a con. And most people read claims as relevant for the parent directly above. That's why we spell out the "Support /Attack parent". I think it's also in the intro video.

vesak 8y ago

How does this tool keep stupid and evil people from participating?

Kialo 8y ago
Stupid is a problematic term, because many people use it to categorize people who are very smart and but adhere to questinable belief / epistemological systems. People that are incoherent, don't normally get their claims accepted. The admins after all don't want gibberish in their debates. People that have very different points of views, get their claims accepted and get them rebuked underneath. We believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant. You need to spell out bad thinking and then debunk it underneath.

anilgulecha 8y ago

This is an idea that I (like many many other technical folks, I'm sure!) have given some thought it. I believe, this implementation, in it's current form, will not take off for the following reasons: 1) Most issues don't fall on a binary - and are not conducive to the pro/con, positive/negative, yes/no binary. 2) Most individual positions are not reached at one end of the spectrum. They start of near center gradually oscillate and deviate the more someone studies a subject. As such, a UX that places pros/cons front and center robs the reader of the actual learning/oscillating phase. I ask that you to find the source of any opinion you hold and try to reach back to it's source. You'll rarely find that it was a table that you studied and picked a side on. 4) Discussions should not center around individual issues. Rather it should be communities around a certain topic, where the discussions evolve and debates arise. The OP only does the latter -- which perhaps makes sense if say some communities like sub-reddits use it. 3) Expertise is not up for debate. An expert's opinion should not be moderated, or weighed, in the same way as a layman's opinion. you can argue for pure meritocracy, but an expert will simply not indulge in an environment when they have to prove their expertise day-in-and-day-out. The platform needs to acknowledge the parallels with how debates and opinions are shaped AFK. (note above is purely for matters-of-opinions, not for matters-of-fact.) Overall, what you don't need (and what's been done many times) is a table with all positions listed down. What you instead need is to solve for the larger problem, or handling moderation, reputation and expertise, because consensus and debates actually do care about the above. This does not mean anonymous/pseudonymous discussion is not possible, just that the framework has to allow for it in an integrated manner. I have tried multiple implementations of above (not public-ally available), but none satisfactorily handled the above -- it is a hard problem to solve, so I commend and wish all the best to the Kialo team.

Kialo 8y ago
Thanks for your feed-back. Re 1-3) Most discussions can actually be distilled to a single pointed issue or a very specific discussion (https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-income-ubi-1634 https://www.kialo.com/should-there-be-a-universal-basic-inco...). You can then ask in a follow up, using a multi thesis discussion, which variant of e.g. legislation is the best (https://www.kialo.com/what-is-the-best-drug-regulation-system-2027 https://www.kialo.com/what-is-the-best-drug-regulation-syste...). Or you can start with a multi and discuss various options, as e.g. done here: (https://www.kialo.com/who-will-win-the-game-of-thrones-1203 https://www.kialo.com/who-will-win-the-game-of-thrones-1203) It's really up to the discussion creator. Multis allow you to change the theses and add a "better" one, as happened in the drug legislation debate (I think). Re 4) Do you remember nupedia, it didn't work. Wikipedia is not perfect, but the best resource we have to look up the "what". What we are building with the public site is a repository of the "why". It doesn't require experts to write the reasoning of experts, which is what is happening, sometimes phds come in and post all the scientific papers pertaining to a position. We agree that the hardest issue is actually moderation. When you have thousands of people chime in, as is the case with e.g. the UBI debate, you need a good system to filter for duplicates and trolls. That's why we implemented the suggestion system (https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003791445-Suggesting-Claims https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003791445-Sug...) and 5 different permission levels(https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003877705-Participant-Rights-and-Roles https://support.kialo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003877705-Par...). This seems to work, as can be witnessed in the large debates. It's by no means perfect though and we are constantly improving it. The last bit we added was nested suggestions and suggestion commenting. Again, thanks for your input. :)

ksaitor 8y ago

This is great. I thought i'd use this platform to discuss the most important topic of this week — whether Kylie Jenner's wealth is self-made or not: https://www.kialo.com/kylie-jenners-fortune-is-self-made-16807 https://www.kialo.com/kylie-jenners-fortune-is-self-made-168... ;)

ksaitor 8y ago

@kialo requires 8 pros/cons for a discussion to be discoverable. That sounds like a draconian requirement that likely to damage the platform more, than it'll benefit it. I understand they are trying to keep the quality high, but if users cant discover new content daily, they wont be able to engage with it and will just churn… Hope you guys will lower this limit, as the idea is truly great and Internet need a well-structured discussion platform!