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I can't see this working in practice: Here is how I see this system playing out in the reality of today. People will go to the main page, and they will see an

• richardjordan 14y ago
  Right. I think you're addressing a fundamental problem with all of the pleas for more reasoned debate in the US and the West as a whole - societies free enough for debate to take place in theory. As someone who ends up with way too much NPR on in the background I hear this stuff all the time with all kinds of worthy never-gonna-happen simplistic answers to what'll make debate better in society (if only Obama has lunch with Senator X then everything will be find and dandy). The core issue - certainly in the United States, perhaps to a lesser degree in some European countries with better education systems - is that our schools are turning out people by the million with severely crippled critical thinking skills. Sure we are in the rarified atmosphere of people who are self selecting for better than average critical thinking skills, here on Hacker News. But out there in the real world, folks struggle to comprehend simple argument structures and logical flows. It doesn't matter how many smart appealing mechanisms we provide for letting ordinary folks debate complex issues, most are simply not armed with the tools for the job. Sure, that's an elitist argument and we can all mumble platitudes about how it's unfair to people, and come up with anecdotes about how my great uncle bob didn't graduate high school and is super smart etc. That doesn't make it wrong. Just a highly regrettable situation.
  • dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    > is that our schools are turning out people by the million with severely crippled critical thinking skills. I sort of agree with your overall point but to this point, I do agree, in some sense, but is it really the schools, per se, that are turning out those people. It's not as if there was a point in time that we know where the public had better critical thinking skills.
    • ordinary 14y ago
      When our current education system was first conceived (with the notable exception of universities), back during the industrial revolution (minor updates notwithstanding), the goal was not producing capable citizens: The goal was to produce capable labourers. To a large extent, our education systems are still stuck in that "teach kids to behave, then teach them how to earn money" mentality. We keep kids away from their parents to allow them to earn money, and while we're in control of what the kids do for 5-8 hours a day, anyway, we should turn them into the employees we'll need 10 years from now. And that is where your statement, though technically correct, is (I imagine unintentionally) little misleading. Schools have been turning out people like this for the past 2 centuries, because for people who have no influence on the political process, the more fundamental skills of critical thinking, creativity and scepticism are simply not required. If you're a salesman, a nurse or a factory worker without the right to vote, you don't need to be able to form an opinion on the best way to recover from an economic depression. So these are incidental skills: usually not actively discouraged, but by and large not aimed for. The kicker is, you do need those skills in order to participate effectively in a democracy that's better than "watch a lot of television and vote for the man in the best suit once every four years". Over the past 100 years, we've moved away from excluding people from suffrage (mostly). This means that it's not just the (relatively) well-educated white male bourgeoisie that needs to have critical thinking skills. It's everyone. Our education system has not yet adapted to this 'new' reality. It still aims for capable workers, not capable citizens. Our education system is vastly better than it was 150 years ago, but our standards have gone up even further.
      • pron 14y ago
• eah13 14y ago
  > The premise of this system is invalid: it relies on people being rational and logical when debating issues that they are passionate about - people are neither rational nor logical in these situations. You're right that we can't rely on logic in debate. But I would contend that the premise of the system is that structure will be salubrious for debate. There's nothing about the system that would prevent me from developing a totally irrational series of arguments on it and, crucially, the system itself doesn't reason about things. Instead, it keeps track of my reactions to claims and evidence, reactions that will differ from yours. This pluralism is a great strength, and the one he identifies out of Github. The reddit-style populism you identify is a possible problem with the system. The question is how _could_ this work in practice? I think there are users who would be motivated to structure arguments this way but I cant think of who they might be.