Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered if there was a platform where we could have some standardized set of arguments regarding a proposition. Then, one would not need to tolerate repetitive pointless discussion: something that usually arises regarding propositions that require little expertise to discuss.

For instance, nothing would make me happier than to be able to reply to the nth discussion regarding the idea that "the GPL is freer than the BSD licence" with a universal fully-qualified link to every argument for and against the idea. Or "For software engineers, open-plan offices lead to greater productivity than individual offices".

While it may appear that this would lead to some sort of _Futurological Congress_-esque situation where we respond to people in paragraph numbers, it has many advantages:

* No longer will people be misled by a correct statement poorly argued for.

* No longer will message boards be polluted by the nth iteration of the same argument.

* Undiscovered lines of argument will be universally available.

Of course there's the disadvantage that you'll get less participation, and there's value in just having some number of comments even if they're repetitive: at the least, the desire to respond to that may bring people who later on make novel arguments.

This seems like a fine UI to do that. Deep link to the relevant sub-graph, and let the collective intelligence of thousands do your arguing for you. I like it.

There is lots of rich ground here to explore, but claims like "the GPL is freer than the BSD licence", will be open to a lot of subjectivity, due to there being no clear (or even given) definition of 'freer'.

I think the biggest challenge is UI and user education (most people don't know what a fallacy is, let alone how many there are and how often they likely make them).

Even in the case of subjective debates, having all common arguments summarized in one place with links to relevant essays and source material from the original authors about their intentions would be useful.

I agree, but you still have the problem of finding the argument tree that uses your particular definition of the subjective word. :)

The "X is freer than Y" example is only superficially subjective. The issue at hand is that people disagree on what "free" means. This can be resolved in a mutually agreeable way by first clarifying the different possible aspects of freeness and clearly separating them out (in your example, one might state them as: BSD allows you to do more things than GPL with source code you receive under the respective license; GPL makes it likelier for you to receive more source code in the future, hence leading to a larger total number of potential actions you can do with source code over time (a point which requires a sub-tree of arguments)).

Then you further need to relate those back to the original statement by clarifying how different subjective target functions will have you come to a different final conclusion. (Not to mention that the "GPL is freer than BSD" or vice versa discussion is itself merely a sub-part of the larger "GPL is better than BSD (for my purpose)" or vice versa discussion.)

So my point is that it is possible in principle to provide a fully qualified link to a non-subjective presentation of arguments on that particular issue (and any other issue). I agree with you that the real challenge is UI, and probably moderation more than user education.

If you get the UI right and have reliably automated (even if user-sourced) tools for qualifying statements and disallowing (or rather, marking) logical fallacies, the users can educate themselves.

I've played around with UI ideas in the past. I think you need a nested structure, which can ideally be generated by the users (but would need to conform to the basic rules of logic [to whatever extent it has been defined]). Any argument will be in some knowledge domain, until you get to some "ultimate high level domain" (which probably doesn't exist -- not sure how you'd represent this in the UI; probably just the superset of all your as-yet-undomained arguments), so the nesting of domains should be reflected in the interface.

I think the UI problem is related to the data modeling problem. In my view, it seems like the UI should directly expose the data model. If that is the case, then the question is, "What is the right data model?".

For that, I think it's primarily directed graphs showing the relationship between the arguments. Of course there is more needed, as you'd need to annotate the arguments with various meta-arguments (eg. argument's conclusion is assumed as premise).

I do agree that one can probably come up with solutions for handling subjective arguments relatively well, I just think it might be difficult to come to a "this will handle all cases" solution. If someone says a particular argument is fallacious, why should we believe them? What happens when your database gets spammed with tons of bogus info? How do you make sure it stays out (or at least, can somehow be "excluded" from what you normally see)?

Now think about finding a way to have some machine learning sytem learn out of this... that would be interesting...

I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. If you could get arguments reduced to individual propositions, you could begin to run the resolution algorithm to find new conclusions.

Only angle we might be missing here, is that people seem to rather enjoy arguing as a pastime.

There is this misconception today that you can argue everything, including the laws of nature.

For "For software engineers, open-plan offices lead to greater productivity than individual offices" we don't need arguments but experiments and science.

> There is this misconception today that you can argue everything, including the laws of nature.

I just wrote a comment about this, responding to global warming debate. Perhaps what this platform needs to address that is an ability to separate facts (that is, sources) and opinions (that is, synthesis or analysis of the sources).

Once you have the experiments and science, you still need to conclude for yourself. Empirical science does not give you perfectly proven insights. Especially, if the question is hard to define, costly to evaluate, and underfunded.

If you had 5 studies regarding open-plan offices, you still need to check which ones are the most trustworthy, find out if and why they disagree, decide which outliers you ignore, etc.

The problem is that outside of a debate forum, you'd only be making a statement to accomplish some goal, and providing the link will only help you do that if people generally agree with your statement, which is exactly the case right now.

I think you're assuming bad faith here. Of course some people who don't want to be convinced. But I think there are many people who engage in debates and are open to be convinced by counterarguments. Or they just joined the topic and just have naive questions. After all, it's in our interest to understand reality.

The problem with "the GPL is freer than the BSD license" is that it's the wrong question to ask, because the perspective is too narrow. What matters most IMHO is which license will lead to the largest and most viable ecosystem of free software. If you take this perspective of a whole ecosystem instead of the license of a single project, a lot of complex dynamics and unintended consequences need to be considered, and it may make more sense to investigate empirically instead of armchair arguing.

The problem with "which license will lead to the largest and most viable ecosystem of free software" is that it's the wrong question to ask, because the perspective is too narrow. What matters most IMHO is which option will lead to longest and most viable ecosystem of satisfied engineers. If you take this perspective of satisfied people instead of an ...

IOW, I suggest such a system simply moves the problem from answering virtually the same question over and over to the problem of which level to ask a question at. Perhaps, in the name of progress, a step forward, or perhaps not.

I fail to see what your point is. I believe there does exist an appropriate perspective for questions such as these. Are you arguing that it doesn't exist, that the one I suggested isn't the appropriate one, or that we can just ignore the problem? This is basically about framing issues, something which is generally recognized as a crucial factor in debate.

"Are you arguing that it doesn't exist, that the one I suggested isn't the appropriate one, or that we can just ignore the problem? "

None. For any area, there will exist numerous levels of perspectives such that people will argue over which level matters.

"This is basically about framing issues"

People will move to arguing which frame is relevant.

There you go: http://en.arguman.org/the-gpl-is-more-free-than-the-bsd-lice...

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