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Show HN: Trophi.com – A forum the represents both sides of an argument

48 points by panchoviz 6y ago

windex 6y ago
This "both sides of an argument" thing is poisoning logic. Somethings dont have 2 sides. The earth is round, for instance.
- est 6y ago
  > Somethings dont have 2 sides. The earth is round, for instance Not exactly round, but it's an ellipsoid with an uneven surface.
  - lhorie 6y ago
    Ellipsoids are round, just not radially symmetrical.
  - lukifer 6y ago
    "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
  - AndrewStephens 6y ago
    You are technically correct (the best kind of correct) but the Earth IS round for most intents and purposes. Only people who need very accurate maps care that it is not. If the Earth was shrunk down to bowling ball size and taken to a lane it would be just as spherical as any of the other balls.
    - musicale 6y ago
      I have verified this experimentally.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  And those incorrect arguments can be listed and directly refuted.
  - yodelshady 6y ago
    By sane people, they already have been. I have no need or desire to "engage with" the idea the Holocaust is a good way to control population (not a hypothetical, that's on the front page as I visited). That's not rational debate, "marketplace of ideas", or whatever you want to call it. It's screeching until everyone else realises there's nothing to gain from being there, and leaves.
  - zbyte64 6y ago
    By the time they have been refuted there's a stack of new arguments. Checkmate atheists.
- panchoviz 6y ago
  I agree, but maybe the flat earthers need to see how their argument doesn't hold up to logic from the other side.
  - prohobo 6y ago
    That only happens if they are engaged in healthy discussion. A flame war separated into two columns isn't that.
  - Freaken 6y ago
    At a certain point, people get in this so deep that it becomes a religion, and unfortunately logic doesn't help in these cases.
  - smt88 6y ago
    Flat earthers are not going to change their minds based on logic. They are bombarded with evidence and logic any time they mention their beliefs. Contrary information often entrenches their wrong beliefs even further.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    Have you ever tried to argue with someone who is into conspiracy theories? One of my former best friends went down the deep end. It started with 9/11 conspiracies and just spiralled down from there. I engaged with him, because I care deeply about him, but it just got worse and worse. Initially it was 9/11 and questions about wealth and power distribution and there are some valid questions that can be asked (although all the 9/11 stuff is bonkers). It soon became crazier and crazier, it was about "energy from the vacuum" (essentially a code-word for perpetual motion), how Gates is trying to sterilize the population through vaccination. The irony was that he was seeing himself as a freedom fighter who is speaking the truth to prevent the next fascist regime, completely ignoring that many of the people he followed or supported were literal Nazis. Engaging with him was not possible. He would bombard me with links that somehow were supposed to proof his point. If I brought up counterarguments, he would say that he has strong evidence that one can not believe mainstream media, science, logic ... And that I'm just a sheep blindly following "propaganda" and he knows better. There was absolutely no way of getting through to him or engaging in any kind of discussion. This was just his monologues and flooding me links (many I suspect he did not even read/watch). In the end I had to cut contact, because it was affecting me mentally, the interactions would just leave me exhausted angry and incredibly sad. I don't have a solution, we need to somehow find a way of how people can be drawn into these crazy web of conspiracies and I don't think that creating forums were these crazy things are debated like they are valid opinions is an answer.
- maxehmookau 6y ago
  Indeed. I notice "The Holocaust could be used as population control" has appeared on the list. Just because a human can put together a thought, doesn't make it good.
- bjt2n3904 6y ago
  And climate change! And my opinions on gun control! Which arguments are "allowed" to have a side? Given the recent disregard for the concept of freedom of speech, this site seems quaint. These websites always seem to be like an episode of Big Talk.[1] "Alright, let's get this sorted! Does God exist, yes or no?" 1 - https://youtu.be/EUbjpwyesk0 https://youtu.be/EUbjpwyesk0
- mancerayder 6y ago
  That's true, but that's the price we pay for open discussion. I'll take faulty logic that needs correction over a Philosopher King-style oversight. Because I don't trust oversight not on the question of the Earth's shape, but rather on controversial or grey areas where Fact Checkers might be tempted to feel are in scope for correcting.
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  A bigger challenge is that arguments on issues are often actually a proxy for some deeper cause: climate change debates ostensibly are about science, but seem mostly about whether we redistribute wealth or exercise control over people. Same with e.g. wearing masks. People try to craft arguments based on science, but the science is almost as irrelevant as it is obvious, the real question people are debating is perspective on how government can limit freedom. People like to hide behind "science says this" because there is usually objective science available, but science provides facts about cause and effect, not priorities, which is what leads to debate, and often blatant distortion of facts. I think a bigger challenge than presenting both sides of an argument is actually getting to the core of what is being debated.
- Nowado 6y ago
  Or worse cases, where there's more than 2 sides and design decision stops you from noticing it.
  - zbyte64 6y ago
    My family was surprised by the insurrection because the two sides presented didn't consider that a realistic possibility. But if one was to listen to leftist podcasts covering the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web) then it's far less surprising. Manufacturing consent is real.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Can you expand on what you mean by this?
    - MockObject 6y ago
      There may be more than two sides to a question posed on this website, but the site only offers two columns.
    - jjj123 6y ago
      Not the OP but I had the same thought. I get frustrated by the “both sides” presented by mainstream media like the NYT, CNN, etc. it’s always democrats on one side, republicans on the other, as if there’s not an entire political spectrum that expands beyond those two. The effect is it limits the “allowed” perspectives to within those two bounds. This is often exploited by those in power to control the bounds of possibility (that’s the manufacturing consent part).
      - stevenicr 6y ago
        Been thinking similar. I've been kicking ideas around on how to make something similar, but with many sides - but how many sides are there really? 5 main groups 10? Been thinking it would be nice to have comments / replies showing the top 3 conservative takes, the top 3 liberal takes, the top 3 science, 3 libertarian? top 3 fiscally conservative/socially liberal etc. Ability to vote up and notate inaccuracies and removing personal attacks / insults.. finding a way to stop trolls from another side upvote frivolous things.. what the icons would look like.. all sorts of things I've been thinking about this. Seeing the two sides thing really makes me feel the 'powers that be' really want people fighting on two sides.
- mistermann 6y ago
  I would say that this very common phenomenon of people rhetorically/cognitively framing disagreements between people as "both sides", which seems to be commonly interpreted (and I assume, intended) as something like "the 'wrong' side is asserting that these things are 'equivalent/identically equal', which is obviously not true, and therefore their entire argument can be dismissed" is poisoning reality. I think that approaches like this website are a not yet a perfect solution [1], but it feels like a step in the right direction. An improved implementation would have some clever means of allowing a crowd-sourced decomposition of the issue into it's constituent entities and behaviors, graphically displayed in some magical way to maximize the likelihood of everyone seeing the big picture free from misunderstanding, which "all" parties could agree upon (no agreement means more refinement is needed) and refer to in their arguments (so we're all talking about the same thing), and arguments/thinking could take place with precision (attached to the the specific entities and behaviors where the true disagreement resides). A lot of people may have a strong aversion to this approach as it would turn easy argumentation into a painstakingly laborious & pedantic process, which is a natural consequence of using slow but accurate cognitive processing, rather than fast but unreliable heuristic processing (the root problem in the first place). Arguments under such a methodology would also more closely resemble the scientific method, or systems analysis in software (where one does not simply throw together an analysis and insist that it is 100% free of material flaws). See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903747 The First result for me (https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041 https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041) is proof why this idea of "all opinions are equal and should be given equal opportunity to be heard" is bunk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903962 I don't see the point of this platform being to coddle inferior points of view by elevating them to faux equal footing. This logically flawed "both sides" heuristic has become extremely broadly distributed through the system. It very commonly makes an explicit appearance in culture war arguments, and it is surely invisibly participating in cognitive processing even where it does not make a visible appearance. I wonder how many of these bug-ridden heuristics are out there in the wild (there are several others present in this thread already, with only 36 comments), messing up execution for reasons that are not apparent from the UI perspective? If you think of reality as a system (which it technically is) that you had been hired to debug and fix, how might one go about locating all/most instances of such bugs, and then how would you fix them, considering we do not have direct access to the source code, but rather can only "write" to it via the api's that have been made available to us? [1] Someone points out that a sub-component of a more elaborate platform already exists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map I expect most of the necessary components already exist as features embedded in other platforms, if they could all be mashed up together into a new "Collective Cognition" platform of some sort, I think we'd have something really useful on our hands. The biggest missing piece that I can see is a means (a user interface for) decomposing complex problem spaces, and then (more difficultly), a way to visually(?) represent this high dimensional space that is understandable to a very broad cross-section of people (in the shorter run, even something that only "smarter" people could understand would be a good start). Does anyone know of any existing systems out there for the "visual" representation of highly dimensional spaces, in a manner that makes it easy/easier to understand for teams? UML, sequence diagrams, etc are the only approaches I have any awareness of.
- MockObject 6y ago
  The argument does have two sides, even though one side has loads of evidence and the other doesn't. The other side doesn't just go away. It's kept away by constant refutation.
high_byte 6y ago
Worth mentioning: kialo.com
malikNF 6y ago
I like the idea, I also like how light the webpage is. Not a fan of the way the usernames and the scores are arranged though. Having the username first before the score causes the scores to not align properly, and therefore it makes it really hard to scan the page for topics worth reading.
- panchoviz 6y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the feedback. I've been struggling to come up with the best layout (not the best designer). I'll see if I can move around the username and score so its easier to read.
lhorie 6y ago
Clicked around a bit and it looks you can only reply to your own side? It's also a bit hard to follow which comments are replies, so UX-wise it seems to encourage dropping quick takes and nodding along. Case in point, comments seem mostly rehashes of tired talking points. The value of debating IMHO comes from depth, but depth cannot be achieved by merely segregating comments into team buckets. It requires fostering a culture of willingness to introspect and question your own beliefs. Forums like lesswrong are a good example of that
AndrewStephens 6y ago
Congratulations on launching a website, now let me enumerate the problems you will now be facing: * Some arguments do not really have two sides because there is an objective truth. The Earth orbits the Sun, humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, etc. These were once debatable topics but now the issue has been settled and debate is pointless. * Some arguments do not really have two sides because in reality there are multiple viewpoints. Global warming is not real because how can we know if it is, global warming is a deliberate hoax, global warming is real but not that bad, global warming is real and bad but not man made, global warming is real and bad and we can do something about it. How does your site help with this kind of topic? * Trolls. The design of your site encourages trollish behavior. I am not sure how you plan to moderate harmful or offensive content but if you think that people will step up to shout down offensive topics you are very wrong. The sensible people will just leave and you will be left with only the trolls. * Moderation. If you site gets any sort of traction you will need moderation. Moderation of topics, moderation of comments, outright banning users. Put simply, you are going to have to take sides defeating the whole "both sides" approach you are trying to foster. At the moment, one of the front page topics is how the Holocaust could be used for population control - a real nice way to introduce your site. Good luck, but I will not be joining.
- panchoviz 6y ago
  Andrew, Thanks for taking a look and yeah I agree with a lot of your points. I was just trying to start a different type of conversation online. I find myself searching for "what the other side thinks" alot these days. Maybe this could help bridge the gap a bit. As any forum there will be a need for moderation and at the moment this is only a passion project. So I'll do my best I can for now. I went ahead and took that post down. Not sure if I'll be able to control everything but like I said I'll do the best that I can.
  - AndrewStephens 6y ago
    Philosophically, I think searching out "what the other side thinks" is the wrong approach, as it presupposes that there are only two sides. I know that a lot of our media is based around the two-sides narrative but it really isn't true. Even in politics there are as many opinions as there are people. If you examine your own beliefs you will probably find that you don't really agree with everything on "your own side". It is not people are quiet about their beliefs - just read some of their books/blogs if you want to know how they think. Just avoid sites like youtube where people are paid by advertising - there you will only get deliberately provocative content just to get clicks. You UI is interesting but I think you are setting yourself up for hosting arguments rather than discussion. Sites like ycombinator, reddit, twitter, and yes even parlor have the cultures they do due to careful (and often unseen) moderation. I don't envy the task you have set for yourself.
sputr 6y ago
The First result for me (https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041 https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041) is proof why this idea of "all opinions are equal and should be given equal opportunity to be heard" is bunk. Politics is a serious topic with, serious, almost always life-changing/defining/ending consequences. Immature people and people preoccupied with their own emotional issues should be signaled by the community at large that, maybe, they should first take care of themselves before they try to change/influence the community. I'm not saying censure them or "deplatform" them. Just that they should not be encouraged/coddled/enabled. We got here because the position on people saying stupid stuff about politics in public was met with "just leave him/her be, everyone is entitled to their opinion". Yes, they are, but if those opinions are stupid and spoken in public they should be laughed at so that everyone is clear that sharing stupid opinions leads to loss of social standing.
- darepublic 6y ago
  I don't see the point of this platform being to coddle inferior points of view by elevating them to faux equal footing. I think if anything having a site like this could illuminate how inferior a party's position is on an issue more clearly than trying to research yourself. It also may be that both sides are not uniformly wrong on all issues, and seeing where this is the case is potentially useful. That being said I feel like this platform is not going to work simply due to lack of users willing to put in the work. I feel like politifact is supposed to do the job of this already but since it is owned by Democrats(?) People already don't trust it
  - michaelt 6y ago
    That link doesn't show an inferior point of view being elevated to an equal footing. It shows two dumb posts placed side by side.
keiferski 6y ago
Controversial issues aren't about logic or arguments. They're about sociopolitical issues, economics, and who has the most effective marketing plan. I'd really love to see a site that tries to dispassionately explain why the Flat Earth movement exists (hint: it's probably not because a bunch of people really believe the Earth is flat) instead of just berating people for being dumb and wrong. You will never convince anyone of anything by calling them stupid.
- blablabla123 6y ago
  On the other hand it has been proven that the earth is not flat thousands of years ago. The effort to do so is surprisingly limited. Basically you need to dig a hole in the ground and reason about the angles of the sun rays if I remember correctly.
- jacobmischka 6y ago
  This exactly. No attempt at forcing logical or unbiased discourse will ever work, because people simply are not persuaded by logical argument, regardless of how many irrefutable facts are presented. It's a laudable and understandable goal to try to fix online discourse using clever tech, but I am highly skeptical it will ever work, because people simply do not care to have their minds changed. I'm unsure what the actual solution to this, if there ever will be one. Improving population education as a whole seems to me to be the only way, but I fear that even if possible that will take so long that it will no longer matter. I legitimately fear that ultimately human beings are not evolved enough to be able to effectively manage the effortless global communication systems that we've developed.
- jl2718 6y ago
  To me, the flat earth movement is about scientific epistemiology in the form of advancing the most ridiculous argument devoid of social consequence. It’s basically the same thing as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The real question is whether facts and explanations are declared by an authority, or whether they must be proven laboriously to each individual prior to acceptance. If flat earth cannot be easily disproven to an individual, imagine what else we may have been led to believe on the authority of a third-grade textbook or a 30-second news report. I think their message, assuming the best of them, is not that we should accept ridiculous ideas like flat earth, but that we should be less certain about many things that we really don’t know very well.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thih9 6y ago
I don't like how the website just presents an extreme point of view without a clear option to engage in a discussion across sides (to ask about reasons, etc). I think instead of giving people a chance to get heard we should give people a chance to participate in a respectful dialogue with others who think differently.
darepublic 6y ago
The problem with this platform is the sides speak only in relation to the topic but do not rebut each other. I think there needs to be forced rebuttals and I'd one side cannot mount a defense against a rebuttal it should be highlighted, to better illustrate which side has the weight of evidence
clarkevans 6y ago
This approach doesn't seem to consider evidence. For reasonable dialogue, various sides have to come to an agreement of shared evidence. In this case, there is no listing of evidence, hence those involved still talk past each other because it does not build a shared understanding. There is also the burden of evidence. Those making unsubstantiated claims often do so quite freely without much effort; this often incorrectly places the burden on those to disprove sometimes extraordinary claims. Moreover, in these cases, reporting circumstantial evidence that shows the underlying claim is highly unlikely can have the opposite of the intended effect.
varispeed 6y ago
I wish there was a site that would recognise common manipulation techniques in the text and based on that give it some sort of trustworthiness score. This could be then embedded in a search engine. It also work as a browser's plugin and highlight text that contains such patterns, so that the reader could be made aware that the publisher is trying to manipulate. You don't need to actually verify whether the content of the message is true or not, but a reader knowing that text is trying to manipulate, they could try to verify the story themselves.
MockObject 6y ago
This is a good idea that has potential. Next I think would be to facilitate some guided interaction flow, in terms of responses between the sides, and somehow preventing it from devolving into a flame war.
aaron695 6y ago
I'd ban politics. Personally I'd find it interesting on science articles. I'd even pin it to DOIs, keep the media out of it. But media articles are shit, which gets people arguing which is what you want for clicks..... I'd work towards only DOIs but media science articles to start to get numbers. Just my thoughts. I know I'd like to see dissenting and agreeing opinions on DOIs, just not sure how you would get there.
rosmax_1337 6y ago
Looks like a website that strives to further good things, such as free debate between people of different opinions. Good idea but the execution is lacking, I find the UI to be clumsy on full-page width. The font is too large and while I don't mind monospace fonts usually, it does not look neat for me in this case. And as others have mentioned, things are rarely a two-sided topic. Would it be possible to allow for a topic to have more than two sides? n-number of positions to take that are somehow pre-picked by the OP? Also, as others have mentioned, how will you moderate it? Will you allow highly controversial topics like those regarding WW2 and race? Where will you draw the line? The quality of a forum is firstly decided by the people who post on the forum, but moderators decide who are able to post on a forum, so in effect, moderators end up being the final arbiters of forum quality in the end. I would find it very interesting if there was a forum that was formal in tone, allowing people to sometimes border on offensive but never hateful topics. A forum like that would in theory perhaps allow most if not all voices to be heard and talk to one another? While such a place probably would not be pleasing to most, it seems like something the internet lacks at the moment.
followbl 6y ago
I really like this - congrats on launching. Really effective UI that helps cut through the complexity of single column vertical threads.
brut_m 6y ago
I think this is actually a pretty good start. There are features you could add, but overall I enjoyed the way the arguments were presented. It didn’t do much to change my opinion, but it was nice to have each crazy in its own place.
brut_m 6y ago
I think this is pretty good, lots of places to add features but it’s interesting.
vannevar 6y ago
Argument mapping is a pretty well-established genre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map), and over the years there have been many software incarnations of it. I think one reason that it hasn't caught on as a way of resolving political issues is simply that many people, if not most, are not interested in rational argument. They have an objective in mind that they did not arrive at by reasoning it out, and now they want to achieve that objective. To them, argument simply gets in the way of a decision that they have already made.
- jl2718 6y ago
  Have you ever considered that the point of engaging your argument in a rational structured manner against skeptics is to discover how you might be wrong, and not how they might be?
  - vannevar 6y ago
    I've not only considered it, I actively do it on a regular basis. My point was not to suggest argument mapping is useless, it was only to observe that it's never caught on as a social way to resolve political disputes, and to offer a possible reason.
jl2718 6y ago
I’m surprised at the dogmatism and ad-hominem employed as resistance to presenting any argument supporting an opinion that opposes mainstream consensus. Here is an excellent talk on scientific epistemology, one which I happen to strongly disagree with, but it presents the point directly: https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU
MockObject 6y ago
Here are some ideas that might inspire you. "E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime refers to a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms... advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding or conflict" [1] "Verifiability principle, a philosophical doctrine fundamental to the school of Logical Positivism holding that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime [2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/verifiability-principle https://www.britannica.com/topic/verifiability-principle
- keiferski 6y ago
  Therefore I took a delight in it, practising it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continued this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engaged in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversion are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purpose for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet, at the same time, express yourself as firmly fixed in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
ilaksh 6y ago
Also check out improvethenews.org and the work of Jonathan Haidt.
sergiotapia 6y ago
Giant waste of time to debate people online. You never get _anything_ out of it.
crocodiletears 6y ago
It's a neat concept, but I think that 'both sides' doesn't work in a world with nuance, especially in a world where most (social) disputes are moral, teleological, or epistemological disagreements masking themselves as disputes of a factual nature. I don't think this format is particularly conducive to achieving persuasion, synthesis, or producing comparisons between equivalent perspectives (some people are just wrong, some peoples precepts are so fundamentally incompatible with each-other's that their perspectives are like apples and oranges).
lolsal 6y ago
Having only two sides to any argument seems like part of the problem, not the solution.
joohwan 6y ago
I personally find the font very hard on the eyes.

48 points by panchoviz 6y ago

This "both sides of an argument" thing is poisoning logic. Somethings dont have 2 sides. The earth is round, for instance.

est 6y ago
> Somethings dont have 2 sides. The earth is round, for instance Not exactly round, but it's an ellipsoid with an uneven surface.
- lhorie 6y ago
  Ellipsoids are round, just not radially symmetrical.
- lukifer 6y ago
  "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
- AndrewStephens 6y ago
  You are technically correct (the best kind of correct) but the Earth IS round for most intents and purposes. Only people who need very accurate maps care that it is not. If the Earth was shrunk down to bowling ball size and taken to a lane it would be just as spherical as any of the other balls.
  - musicale 6y ago
    I have verified this experimentally.
Karunamon 6y ago
And those incorrect arguments can be listed and directly refuted.
- yodelshady 6y ago
  By sane people, they already have been. I have no need or desire to "engage with" the idea the Holocaust is a good way to control population (not a hypothetical, that's on the front page as I visited). That's not rational debate, "marketplace of ideas", or whatever you want to call it. It's screeching until everyone else realises there's nothing to gain from being there, and leaves.
- zbyte64 6y ago
  By the time they have been refuted there's a stack of new arguments. Checkmate atheists.
panchoviz 6y ago
I agree, but maybe the flat earthers need to see how their argument doesn't hold up to logic from the other side.
- prohobo 6y ago
  That only happens if they are engaged in healthy discussion. A flame war separated into two columns isn't that.
- Freaken 6y ago
  At a certain point, people get in this so deep that it becomes a religion, and unfortunately logic doesn't help in these cases.
- smt88 6y ago
  Flat earthers are not going to change their minds based on logic. They are bombarded with evidence and logic any time they mention their beliefs. Contrary information often entrenches their wrong beliefs even further.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  Have you ever tried to argue with someone who is into conspiracy theories? One of my former best friends went down the deep end. It started with 9/11 conspiracies and just spiralled down from there. I engaged with him, because I care deeply about him, but it just got worse and worse. Initially it was 9/11 and questions about wealth and power distribution and there are some valid questions that can be asked (although all the 9/11 stuff is bonkers). It soon became crazier and crazier, it was about "energy from the vacuum" (essentially a code-word for perpetual motion), how Gates is trying to sterilize the population through vaccination. The irony was that he was seeing himself as a freedom fighter who is speaking the truth to prevent the next fascist regime, completely ignoring that many of the people he followed or supported were literal Nazis. Engaging with him was not possible. He would bombard me with links that somehow were supposed to proof his point. If I brought up counterarguments, he would say that he has strong evidence that one can not believe mainstream media, science, logic ... And that I'm just a sheep blindly following "propaganda" and he knows better. There was absolutely no way of getting through to him or engaging in any kind of discussion. This was just his monologues and flooding me links (many I suspect he did not even read/watch). In the end I had to cut contact, because it was affecting me mentally, the interactions would just leave me exhausted angry and incredibly sad. I don't have a solution, we need to somehow find a way of how people can be drawn into these crazy web of conspiracies and I don't think that creating forums were these crazy things are debated like they are valid opinions is an answer.
maxehmookau 6y ago
Indeed. I notice "The Holocaust could be used as population control" has appeared on the list. Just because a human can put together a thought, doesn't make it good.
bjt2n3904 6y ago
And climate change! And my opinions on gun control! Which arguments are "allowed" to have a side? Given the recent disregard for the concept of freedom of speech, this site seems quaint. These websites always seem to be like an episode of Big Talk.[1] "Alright, let's get this sorted! Does God exist, yes or no?" 1 - https://youtu.be/EUbjpwyesk0 https://youtu.be/EUbjpwyesk0
mancerayder 6y ago
That's true, but that's the price we pay for open discussion. I'll take faulty logic that needs correction over a Philosopher King-style oversight. Because I don't trust oversight not on the question of the Earth's shape, but rather on controversial or grey areas where Fact Checkers might be tempted to feel are in scope for correcting.
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
A bigger challenge is that arguments on issues are often actually a proxy for some deeper cause: climate change debates ostensibly are about science, but seem mostly about whether we redistribute wealth or exercise control over people. Same with e.g. wearing masks. People try to craft arguments based on science, but the science is almost as irrelevant as it is obvious, the real question people are debating is perspective on how government can limit freedom. People like to hide behind "science says this" because there is usually objective science available, but science provides facts about cause and effect, not priorities, which is what leads to debate, and often blatant distortion of facts. I think a bigger challenge than presenting both sides of an argument is actually getting to the core of what is being debated.
Nowado 6y ago
Or worse cases, where there's more than 2 sides and design decision stops you from noticing it.
- zbyte64 6y ago
  My family was surprised by the insurrection because the two sides presented didn't consider that a realistic possibility. But if one was to listen to leftist podcasts covering the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web) then it's far less surprising. Manufacturing consent is real.
- mistermann 6y ago
  Can you expand on what you mean by this?
  - MockObject 6y ago
    There may be more than two sides to a question posed on this website, but the site only offers two columns.
  - jjj123 6y ago
    Not the OP but I had the same thought. I get frustrated by the “both sides” presented by mainstream media like the NYT, CNN, etc. it’s always democrats on one side, republicans on the other, as if there’s not an entire political spectrum that expands beyond those two. The effect is it limits the “allowed” perspectives to within those two bounds. This is often exploited by those in power to control the bounds of possibility (that’s the manufacturing consent part).
    - stevenicr 6y ago
      Been thinking similar. I've been kicking ideas around on how to make something similar, but with many sides - but how many sides are there really? 5 main groups 10? Been thinking it would be nice to have comments / replies showing the top 3 conservative takes, the top 3 liberal takes, the top 3 science, 3 libertarian? top 3 fiscally conservative/socially liberal etc. Ability to vote up and notate inaccuracies and removing personal attacks / insults.. finding a way to stop trolls from another side upvote frivolous things.. what the icons would look like.. all sorts of things I've been thinking about this. Seeing the two sides thing really makes me feel the 'powers that be' really want people fighting on two sides.
mistermann 6y ago
I would say that this very common phenomenon of people rhetorically/cognitively framing disagreements between people as "both sides", which seems to be commonly interpreted (and I assume, intended) as something like "the 'wrong' side is asserting that these things are 'equivalent/identically equal', which is obviously not true, and therefore their entire argument can be dismissed" is poisoning reality. I think that approaches like this website are a not yet a perfect solution [1], but it feels like a step in the right direction. An improved implementation would have some clever means of allowing a crowd-sourced decomposition of the issue into it's constituent entities and behaviors, graphically displayed in some magical way to maximize the likelihood of everyone seeing the big picture free from misunderstanding, which "all" parties could agree upon (no agreement means more refinement is needed) and refer to in their arguments (so we're all talking about the same thing), and arguments/thinking could take place with precision (attached to the the specific entities and behaviors where the true disagreement resides). A lot of people may have a strong aversion to this approach as it would turn easy argumentation into a painstakingly laborious & pedantic process, which is a natural consequence of using slow but accurate cognitive processing, rather than fast but unreliable heuristic processing (the root problem in the first place). Arguments under such a methodology would also more closely resemble the scientific method, or systems analysis in software (where one does not simply throw together an analysis and insist that it is 100% free of material flaws). See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903747 The First result for me (https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041 https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041) is proof why this idea of "all opinions are equal and should be given equal opportunity to be heard" is bunk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903962 I don't see the point of this platform being to coddle inferior points of view by elevating them to faux equal footing. This logically flawed "both sides" heuristic has become extremely broadly distributed through the system. It very commonly makes an explicit appearance in culture war arguments, and it is surely invisibly participating in cognitive processing even where it does not make a visible appearance. I wonder how many of these bug-ridden heuristics are out there in the wild (there are several others present in this thread already, with only 36 comments), messing up execution for reasons that are not apparent from the UI perspective? If you think of reality as a system (which it technically is) that you had been hired to debug and fix, how might one go about locating all/most instances of such bugs, and then how would you fix them, considering we do not have direct access to the source code, but rather can only "write" to it via the api's that have been made available to us? [1] Someone points out that a sub-component of a more elaborate platform already exists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map I expect most of the necessary components already exist as features embedded in other platforms, if they could all be mashed up together into a new "Collective Cognition" platform of some sort, I think we'd have something really useful on our hands. The biggest missing piece that I can see is a means (a user interface for) decomposing complex problem spaces, and then (more difficultly), a way to visually(?) represent this high dimensional space that is understandable to a very broad cross-section of people (in the shorter run, even something that only "smarter" people could understand would be a good start). Does anyone know of any existing systems out there for the "visual" representation of highly dimensional spaces, in a manner that makes it easy/easier to understand for teams? UML, sequence diagrams, etc are the only approaches I have any awareness of.
MockObject 6y ago
The argument does have two sides, even though one side has loads of evidence and the other doesn't. The other side doesn't just go away. It's kept away by constant refutation.

high_byte 6y ago

Worth mentioning: kialo.com

malikNF 6y ago

I like the idea, I also like how light the webpage is. Not a fan of the way the usernames and the scores are arranged though. Having the username first before the score causes the scores to not align properly, and therefore it makes it really hard to scan the page for topics worth reading.

panchoviz 6y ago
Awesome, thanks for the feedback. I've been struggling to come up with the best layout (not the best designer). I'll see if I can move around the username and score so its easier to read.

lhorie 6y ago

Clicked around a bit and it looks you can only reply to your own side? It's also a bit hard to follow which comments are replies, so UX-wise it seems to encourage dropping quick takes and nodding along. Case in point, comments seem mostly rehashes of tired talking points. The value of debating IMHO comes from depth, but depth cannot be achieved by merely segregating comments into team buckets. It requires fostering a culture of willingness to introspect and question your own beliefs. Forums like lesswrong are a good example of that

AndrewStephens 6y ago

Congratulations on launching a website, now let me enumerate the problems you will now be facing: * Some arguments do not really have two sides because there is an objective truth. The Earth orbits the Sun, humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, etc. These were once debatable topics but now the issue has been settled and debate is pointless. * Some arguments do not really have two sides because in reality there are multiple viewpoints. Global warming is not real because how can we know if it is, global warming is a deliberate hoax, global warming is real but not that bad, global warming is real and bad but not man made, global warming is real and bad and we can do something about it. How does your site help with this kind of topic? * Trolls. The design of your site encourages trollish behavior. I am not sure how you plan to moderate harmful or offensive content but if you think that people will step up to shout down offensive topics you are very wrong. The sensible people will just leave and you will be left with only the trolls. * Moderation. If you site gets any sort of traction you will need moderation. Moderation of topics, moderation of comments, outright banning users. Put simply, you are going to have to take sides defeating the whole "both sides" approach you are trying to foster. At the moment, one of the front page topics is how the Holocaust could be used for population control - a real nice way to introduce your site. Good luck, but I will not be joining.

panchoviz 6y ago
Andrew, Thanks for taking a look and yeah I agree with a lot of your points. I was just trying to start a different type of conversation online. I find myself searching for "what the other side thinks" alot these days. Maybe this could help bridge the gap a bit. As any forum there will be a need for moderation and at the moment this is only a passion project. So I'll do my best I can for now. I went ahead and took that post down. Not sure if I'll be able to control everything but like I said I'll do the best that I can.
- AndrewStephens 6y ago
  Philosophically, I think searching out "what the other side thinks" is the wrong approach, as it presupposes that there are only two sides. I know that a lot of our media is based around the two-sides narrative but it really isn't true. Even in politics there are as many opinions as there are people. If you examine your own beliefs you will probably find that you don't really agree with everything on "your own side". It is not people are quiet about their beliefs - just read some of their books/blogs if you want to know how they think. Just avoid sites like youtube where people are paid by advertising - there you will only get deliberately provocative content just to get clicks. You UI is interesting but I think you are setting yourself up for hosting arguments rather than discussion. Sites like ycombinator, reddit, twitter, and yes even parlor have the cultures they do due to careful (and often unseen) moderation. I don't envy the task you have set for yourself.

sputr 6y ago

The First result for me (https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041 https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041) is proof why this idea of "all opinions are equal and should be given equal opportunity to be heard" is bunk. Politics is a serious topic with, serious, almost always life-changing/defining/ending consequences. Immature people and people preoccupied with their own emotional issues should be signaled by the community at large that, maybe, they should first take care of themselves before they try to change/influence the community. I'm not saying censure them or "deplatform" them. Just that they should not be encouraged/coddled/enabled. We got here because the position on people saying stupid stuff about politics in public was met with "just leave him/her be, everyone is entitled to their opinion". Yes, they are, but if those opinions are stupid and spoken in public they should be laughed at so that everyone is clear that sharing stupid opinions leads to loss of social standing.

darepublic 6y ago
I don't see the point of this platform being to coddle inferior points of view by elevating them to faux equal footing. I think if anything having a site like this could illuminate how inferior a party's position is on an issue more clearly than trying to research yourself. It also may be that both sides are not uniformly wrong on all issues, and seeing where this is the case is potentially useful. That being said I feel like this platform is not going to work simply due to lack of users willing to put in the work. I feel like politifact is supposed to do the job of this already but since it is owned by Democrats(?) People already don't trust it
- michaelt 6y ago
  That link doesn't show an inferior point of view being elevated to an equal footing. It shows two dumb posts placed side by side.

keiferski 6y ago

Controversial issues aren't about logic or arguments. They're about sociopolitical issues, economics, and who has the most effective marketing plan. I'd really love to see a site that tries to dispassionately explain why the Flat Earth movement exists (hint: it's probably not because a bunch of people really believe the Earth is flat) instead of just berating people for being dumb and wrong. You will never convince anyone of anything by calling them stupid.

blablabla123 6y ago
On the other hand it has been proven that the earth is not flat thousands of years ago. The effort to do so is surprisingly limited. Basically you need to dig a hole in the ground and reason about the angles of the sun rays if I remember correctly.
jacobmischka 6y ago
This exactly. No attempt at forcing logical or unbiased discourse will ever work, because people simply are not persuaded by logical argument, regardless of how many irrefutable facts are presented. It's a laudable and understandable goal to try to fix online discourse using clever tech, but I am highly skeptical it will ever work, because people simply do not care to have their minds changed. I'm unsure what the actual solution to this, if there ever will be one. Improving population education as a whole seems to me to be the only way, but I fear that even if possible that will take so long that it will no longer matter. I legitimately fear that ultimately human beings are not evolved enough to be able to effectively manage the effortless global communication systems that we've developed.
jl2718 6y ago
To me, the flat earth movement is about scientific epistemiology in the form of advancing the most ridiculous argument devoid of social consequence. It’s basically the same thing as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The real question is whether facts and explanations are declared by an authority, or whether they must be proven laboriously to each individual prior to acceptance. If flat earth cannot be easily disproven to an individual, imagine what else we may have been led to believe on the authority of a third-grade textbook or a 30-second news report. I think their message, assuming the best of them, is not that we should accept ridiculous ideas like flat earth, but that we should be less certain about many things that we really don’t know very well.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thih9 6y ago

I don't like how the website just presents an extreme point of view without a clear option to engage in a discussion across sides (to ask about reasons, etc). I think instead of giving people a chance to get heard we should give people a chance to participate in a respectful dialogue with others who think differently.

darepublic 6y ago

The problem with this platform is the sides speak only in relation to the topic but do not rebut each other. I think there needs to be forced rebuttals and I'd one side cannot mount a defense against a rebuttal it should be highlighted, to better illustrate which side has the weight of evidence

clarkevans 6y ago

This approach doesn't seem to consider evidence. For reasonable dialogue, various sides have to come to an agreement of shared evidence. In this case, there is no listing of evidence, hence those involved still talk past each other because it does not build a shared understanding. There is also the burden of evidence. Those making unsubstantiated claims often do so quite freely without much effort; this often incorrectly places the burden on those to disprove sometimes extraordinary claims. Moreover, in these cases, reporting circumstantial evidence that shows the underlying claim is highly unlikely can have the opposite of the intended effect.

varispeed 6y ago

I wish there was a site that would recognise common manipulation techniques in the text and based on that give it some sort of trustworthiness score. This could be then embedded in a search engine. It also work as a browser's plugin and highlight text that contains such patterns, so that the reader could be made aware that the publisher is trying to manipulate. You don't need to actually verify whether the content of the message is true or not, but a reader knowing that text is trying to manipulate, they could try to verify the story themselves.

MockObject 6y ago

This is a good idea that has potential. Next I think would be to facilitate some guided interaction flow, in terms of responses between the sides, and somehow preventing it from devolving into a flame war.

aaron695 6y ago

I'd ban politics. Personally I'd find it interesting on science articles. I'd even pin it to DOIs, keep the media out of it. But media articles are shit, which gets people arguing which is what you want for clicks..... I'd work towards only DOIs but media science articles to start to get numbers. Just my thoughts. I know I'd like to see dissenting and agreeing opinions on DOIs, just not sure how you would get there.

rosmax_1337 6y ago

Looks like a website that strives to further good things, such as free debate between people of different opinions. Good idea but the execution is lacking, I find the UI to be clumsy on full-page width. The font is too large and while I don't mind monospace fonts usually, it does not look neat for me in this case. And as others have mentioned, things are rarely a two-sided topic. Would it be possible to allow for a topic to have more than two sides? n-number of positions to take that are somehow pre-picked by the OP? Also, as others have mentioned, how will you moderate it? Will you allow highly controversial topics like those regarding WW2 and race? Where will you draw the line? The quality of a forum is firstly decided by the people who post on the forum, but moderators decide who are able to post on a forum, so in effect, moderators end up being the final arbiters of forum quality in the end. I would find it very interesting if there was a forum that was formal in tone, allowing people to sometimes border on offensive but never hateful topics. A forum like that would in theory perhaps allow most if not all voices to be heard and talk to one another? While such a place probably would not be pleasing to most, it seems like something the internet lacks at the moment.

followbl 6y ago

I really like this - congrats on launching. Really effective UI that helps cut through the complexity of single column vertical threads.

brut_m 6y ago

I think this is actually a pretty good start. There are features you could add, but overall I enjoyed the way the arguments were presented. It didn’t do much to change my opinion, but it was nice to have each crazy in its own place.

brut_m 6y ago

I think this is pretty good, lots of places to add features but it’s interesting.

vannevar 6y ago

Argument mapping is a pretty well-established genre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map), and over the years there have been many software incarnations of it. I think one reason that it hasn't caught on as a way of resolving political issues is simply that many people, if not most, are not interested in rational argument. They have an objective in mind that they did not arrive at by reasoning it out, and now they want to achieve that objective. To them, argument simply gets in the way of a decision that they have already made.

jl2718 6y ago
Have you ever considered that the point of engaging your argument in a rational structured manner against skeptics is to discover how you might be wrong, and not how they might be?
- vannevar 6y ago
  I've not only considered it, I actively do it on a regular basis. My point was not to suggest argument mapping is useless, it was only to observe that it's never caught on as a social way to resolve political disputes, and to offer a possible reason.

jl2718 6y ago

I’m surprised at the dogmatism and ad-hominem employed as resistance to presenting any argument supporting an opinion that opposes mainstream consensus. Here is an excellent talk on scientific epistemology, one which I happen to strongly disagree with, but it presents the point directly: https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU

MockObject 6y ago

Here are some ideas that might inspire you. "E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime refers to a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms... advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding or conflict" [1] "Verifiability principle, a philosophical doctrine fundamental to the school of Logical Positivism holding that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable." [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime [2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/verifiability-principle https://www.britannica.com/topic/verifiability-principle

keiferski 6y ago
Therefore I took a delight in it, practising it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continued this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engaged in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversion are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purpose for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet, at the same time, express yourself as firmly fixed in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

ilaksh 6y ago

Also check out improvethenews.org and the work of Jonathan Haidt.

sergiotapia 6y ago

Giant waste of time to debate people online. You never get _anything_ out of it.

crocodiletears 6y ago

It's a neat concept, but I think that 'both sides' doesn't work in a world with nuance, especially in a world where most (social) disputes are moral, teleological, or epistemological disagreements masking themselves as disputes of a factual nature. I don't think this format is particularly conducive to achieving persuasion, synthesis, or producing comparisons between equivalent perspectives (some people are just wrong, some peoples precepts are so fundamentally incompatible with each-other's that their perspectives are like apples and oranges).

lolsal 6y ago

Having only two sides to any argument seems like part of the problem, not the solution.

joohwan 6y ago

I personally find the font very hard on the eyes.