Rbutr: a browser extension that finds rebuttals to web pages you're reading | Hacker News Reader

Rbutr: a browser extension that finds rebuttals to web pages you're reading

rbutr.com

68 pointsMichaelJW36 comments

This reminds me of Intel Research Berkeley's (now-defunct?) Confrontational Computing project, which produced a Firefox extension called Dispute Finder: http://ennals.org/rob/disputefinder.html, http://confront.intel-research.net/Dispute_Finder.html

We are in contact with Rob Ennals atm, who was the creator of Dispute Finder which aimed to provide a line by line annotation system which provided rebuttals to disputed claims.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/u8q8a/new_tool_to_h...

Or Ka-Ping Yee's crit.org back in the 90s.

In my experience:

> Foster good principles of logical debate within the community

This is the most agonizingly difficult problem to deal with.

Getting people to actually judge arguments on their logical and factual merit is ridiculously difficult. Many do not even seem aware such criteria exists, much less have capability to recognize or respect those traits in opposing arguments. The moment you start touching on politically or emotionally-charged issues like religion and discrimination, fair judgment of opposing logic and facts becomes scarce.

We'd need to vote on votes, dispute reasons for your reasons, have a checklist of user's logic for voting and then filter out users with bad logic history.

We could instead argue in code or in language that can compile, so "[y]ou are punished swiftly for obvious errors." [1]

[1] http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/05/16/please_lear...

Great idea - I've always wanted to see something like this.

But... compulsory registration? This just dissuades most of your potential users from even giving it a try....

Yeah, that's what kept me away from using their services.

We are building a website version of the 'Request a rebuttal' and 'Submit rebuttal' functions, so you don't need to install the plugin in order to participate (or view the material being generated either, of course, as is already the case).

However, in order to use these functions, there needs to be a user account for it. Otherwise people might 'test' things out and create nonsense links. Repeatedly. User accounts are a necessary filter in order to ensure we aren't inundated with testing clicks, and to provide quality control, and all the other things which follow from having registered users.

Most every page these days requires registration, so I don't think this is particularly odd.

Though we are now looking at creating a membership-free installation which allows you to complete our tutorial - and if we can, I would like it if that un-registered version could also deliver rebuttal alerts... So feedback is working. Now it will just take time to implement it all!

That might be beneficial. Their philosophy section states that they want people submitting and voting on rebuttals to have an understanding of argumentative logic; making registration difficult makes it more likely users have some idea of what rebutr is before they start using it.

Considering this is auto research for lazy people, any price point creates a chicken egg problem nearly impossible to solve.

While it will no doubt get used as 'auto research for lazy people', the implications of success for this project are much bigger than just that. Providing automatic skepticism for the average person is unheard of, but with a wide enough net cast by an active community, and wide uptake by common users, that is exactly what can come of it.

Definitely the chicken-egg problem is our main hurdle, but we are working on that by turning this project in to something more than just the plugin. We are also focusing on connecting with the most active communities who already engage in exactly the sort of activity which we need - the Skeptic community is exactly that community. So we are walking away from chickens and eggs, and going straight after the seeds.

Going after the skeptics would certainly be a niche market that could easily be created, I get that for sure.

I still think there is a model where you can impact the wider lay internet audience by providing healthy skepticism for everyone. Between Twitter and Facebook, communities with large, lasting impacts on social knowledge distribution and the behavioral modification that follows really helps gain mainstream traction.

I guess what I'm saying is - please don't only solve the small problem of giving balanced skepticism to those who want it (and thus may have the drive to do it on their own), but make those who don't look for it want it in the first place by making it easy to obtain (paying for that service would not be one of those ways).

The lazy people will think paying for such a service is a scam, but little do they know they get scammed for free all the time with unbalanced points of view.

One of the developers posted this on Reddit, in response to someone asking whether there's a registration-free version[1]:

I'm afraid not at this point. The system is set up to be connected to the user account (to make sure the votes and the links are attributed to an account).

However, it does make sense that some people might want a "Viewer only" version which doesn't add or vote, but just displays. We might look in to this....?

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/u8q8a/new_tool_to_h...

Having gone through the tutorial, I had a couple issues. I couldn't mark a page to be rebutted, switch tab to the rebuttal, then mark that page as the rebuttal except by manually copy-pasting the url. When adding tags, I could only add tags from the list and couldn't remove a tag I accidentally added. Shouldn't the tag text box be editable?

Zakharov, I'm really sorry it didn't work for you. It is clear that this happens to a small percentage of the people because we occasionally get messed up submission coming through from the tutorial (which in theory should all be the same).

As of yet though, we are unable to replicate the problems. If you could provide some details of your OS and browser, and exactly what happened, I would appreciate it.

Because normally, copy and pasting a URL in to the rebuttal place actually isn't allowed at all. So something has gone very wrong! Also, the Tag box is indeed normally editable (after addition of the first tag).

So I just wanted to let you know, that there is a bug causing those faults, and we haven't identified what is causing that bug yet...

This sounds really cool. Very minor quibble: in rebutr's Philosophy, section 3, "backs it's claims up" should be "backs its claims up".

Fixed.

This extension can access:

* Your data on all websites

This item can read every page that you visit -- your bank, your web email, your Facebook page, and so on. Often, this kind of item needs to see all pages so that it can perform a limited task such as looking for RSS feeds that you might want to subscribe to.

Caution: Besides seeing all your pages, this item could use your credentials (cookies) to request or modify your data from websites.

* Your tabs and browsing activity

Virtually every Chrome extension that has to deal with a web page somehow requires those two permissions.

A bookmarklet would be better. https://github.com/eliaskg/AlreadyHN

This is fantastic. I've always wanted to be able to see this, but the only way so far has been either if they allow comments, or if I see a discussion in the place I used to follow the link (eg. Twitter, HN, Reddit).

Is it all manual or is there some automated component?

It is all manual I am afraid. We are reaching out to Skeptic communities right now in an effort to get the ball rolling and get as many rebuttals added as possible. We're getting amazingly positive support from the Reddit skeptical community (which is where this post came from), and I will be at the Amazing Meeting in July, talking to skeptic community leaders from all over the world.

But of course, everyone and anyone can add rebuttals, so please, feel free to add any whenever you happen across one :)

Websites/domains should be allowed to rebut rbutr rebuttals and be highlighted/referenced like Talk.Origins and True.Origins do for each other.[1]

What are they going to do with all these rebuttals? This is like level two. We need to go up some more levels.[2]

[1]: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html

[2]: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

rbutr rebuttals can absolutely be rebutted. Any page can be rebutted, so you can follow a whole multi-step debate online.

Is that what you meant?

For example, one link:http://rbutr.com/rbutr/WebsiteServlet?requestType=showLink&#... where the rebuttal is rebutted: http://rbutr.com/rbutr/WebsiteServlet?requestType=showLinksB... where the rebuttal is rebutted: http://rbutr.com/rbutr/WebsiteServlet?requestType=showLinksB...

There is definitely room for some cool innovation in the online flame war space. I've thought it would be cool to have some kind of dedicated place for summarizing well-worn debate topics so that whenever comments on a site dissolve into assertions about the same old things you can point them towards an existing summary instead of again rehashing the same old facts and contexts. I haven't taken the time to flesh the idea out to see if it could really work, though.

It seems that users have to submit rebuttals to articles they read, I thought that was done by the system using NLP techniques, specifically Sentiment Analysis. Now that would be really cool.

This makes me think of sidewiki. Will many people really go find rebuttals and contribute back to the original page? It seems a little bit too much of work.

So far we are getting very promising numbers. The main difference betwen us and all of the annotation services which have come before us (around 50 on last count, thanks to Hypothes.is), is that we are page level. We connect one URL to another. It is so simple your grandmother could probably do it. The previous versions were all line-level, meaning that you had to highlight text and then write your comment, or connect to another page etc. It was overwhelming and confusing. rbutr requires you to press two button, small descriptive comment and tag. You don't need to be an expert on the subject matter or anything. You just connect the two authors who claim to know about it to one another...

Related, but not implemented yet: http://hypothes.is

From the looks of it, the hivemind has already taken over.

Nice work Shane. How do you find the rebuttals?

I would love this but 90% of the people I meet and know are not actually interested in actual discussion of the ideas they believe in and consume.

I don't blame them. We keep having the same discussions and don't get anywhere. Have the discussion once and for all. Let them follow it and show you what they agree with. Give us multiple choice discussions. We could just pick what's already been said to each other. Auto-complete ideas. Auto-correction for discussions.

<snark> A browser that flames debate on the internet? Yeah, that's helpful. </snark>

rbutr is the best tool for keeping yourself genuinely informed online.

I'm not so sure about that, I wonder if there are any articles that disagree..

Haha. Consider it a goal :)

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