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Comment by Joeboy | Hacker News Reader

On vaguely this subject, I had an idea that I mean to implement but so far haven't found time. The idea was for a captcha-type system that required the user to match bad arguments to whatever logical fallacy they fell into, eg. they'd have to match "If we tolerate homosexuality, how long before it becomes normal for people to marry their pets?" to "slippery slope fallacy".

I think requiring people to answer a few of these correctly might raise the standard of online discussion, both by keeping dumb people out and setting a tone of reasoned debate.

Please steal this idea, as I don't know when I'll find time to do it.

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That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to evaluate arguments.

Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of fallacies.

> That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to evaluate arguments.

I think the chances of somebody learning to match the entries without understanding at all are fairly low. Computers could do it of course, but that's a different problem.

> Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of fallacies.

The former is not a necessary consequence of the latter and the latter is not a prerequisite for the former, but I think if your debate only involves people that know about common logical fallacies it's likely to be a better debate.

"If we tolerate mass electronic tracking of our children's locations to keep them safe today, how long before it becomes normal for everyone to be location-tracked all the time?"

Slippery-slope arguments are only fallacies when they go against your own beliefs.

Seems to me this would have the disadvantage of being a maintenance hassle, i.e., not providing the CAPTCHA half of the functionality very well because of a finite number of questions.

Of course, if you're willing to not care about that, it'd be cool.

Describing it as a "captcha-type system" was probably misleading, it's not intended to solve the problem of computers being able to match the answers easily. It's intended to require people to either know or learn about common logical fallacies.

Not objecting to the specific idea, but ... I'd prefer to think more about ways to elevate everyone's contribution than just about ways to filter people we perceive to be unhelpful.

(Unfortunately that requires letting go of us-vs.-them, and just speaking for myself, that's surprisingly difficult and ongoing work.)

Elevating everyone's contribution seems to be the thrust of much of the features in Discourse.

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