This dates back to 2014 where Turkey was still struggling with the aftermath of widespread civil unrest. The entire nation found itself highly polarized while debates were fueled with mutual anger and disbelief.
Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting.
For sake of completeness, this field has been processed both by theory and and practical applications before. Formerly, those system were known as Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS).
The wikipedia article gives some background and references to (mostly abandoned) tools.
Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time. As an early career developer poring over Usenet in the late 80's, I thought IBIS would be The Answer to working out requirements in a large team.
This is magnificent, thank you for the link!
Interestingly, Argdown appears to use a different model: it has statements and arguments, where IBIS has issues, positions, and arguments.
This is not limited to software development. Try being involved in Wikipedia and you'll eventually have the displeasure of experiencing the same lack of structure and rigor in arguments. (I'll say, though, that the author mentions GitHub, which does seem particularly bad in comparison to the average Bugzilla instance, say, 10+ years ago, and it's part of why I avoid GitHub, purely for my own sanity and productivity.) It's these experiences that make you appreciate the role of a judge if you've ever sat in court or read through trial transcripts.
What we're all really aching for is a solution to the ratiocination problem. pron put together a nice overview of some of the history of thought in that area a couple years back[1]. There's also the Toulmin model[2].
This is fascinating and a very cool concept to be able to clearly respond to specific points in a technical discussion. I agree that sometimes these discussions are hard to follow and sometimes get derailed by minor quibbles. I'm plenty responsible for starting to debate about minutiae in a meeting when it really doesn't advance the conversation meaningfully. (That's more of a synchronous issue, this works at improving asynchronous communication, if I understand it correctly).
One thing that isn't immediately clear to me is how to associate specific individuals to a comment. Sometimes knowing who made an argument is very important. I like to believe that people are a little more careful about forming their reasoning when they are debating with the author or maintainer of a project, for example.
Perhaps, not knowing the author of a point is a feature? I'm often engaged in discussions where the authorship hurts more than it helps. Ideas are being referred to as "John's idea", conflating objective ideas with subjective positions. I recall explicitly asking WebGPU group to not consider an idea to be "mine" but rather just discuss it objectively for what it is.
Combine `argdown` with something similar to `roam research` and you have the makings of a 21st century platform for knowledge production.
When we have conversations in person, there is a natural Clarify -> Challenge -> Refine loop that hopefully ends in some resolution. One of the major issues with long run, asynchronous, online platforms is that they don't enable newcomers to easily contribute novel thoughts to that cycle. As an outsider viewing discussion around async rust that occurred on here and on reddit, by far the most common reply was "not a new thought- already discussed HERE".
But as OP pointed out, those HERE links were hundreds of posts you'd have to read through and reconstruct the clarify -> challenge loop in your head before figuring out whether your question had been addressed.
Yesterday in my mad dash to slurp down whatever good stuff I can find in the ACM library while the window is still open, I ran across a paper about using hypertext for "Representing the structure of a legal argument" (haven't been able to give it any real attention yet, though, since the candle is still burning down).
I would love to see some more rich voting options than just up and down.
Allowing users to vote using tags like "Great Summary", "I agree", "I disagree but strong argument", "Sources check out", etc could really help users filter. People often upvote/downvote based on agreement rather than the quality of the content.
If you have an in-progress discussion that's still finding its way, that's not going to happen. And the curators may or may not have their own agenda.
Perhaps technical discussions are just messy because the problems are messy and don't have obvious solutions.
In the context of Rust, the bigger problem, IMO, is that things that aren't Mozilla/Firefox driven don't get driven to conclusion/completion. The discussion simply peters out with no resolution and then remains open indefinitely (look at how many issues from Rust 1.0 are still open with no conclusion, discussion or resolution.)
I'm curious, what kinds of things do you see that are being prioritized for Firefox or Mozilla over things the community wants? I can't think of anything, but I am also extremely biased.
> (look at how many issues from Rust 1.0 are still open with no conclusion, discussion or resolution.)
Issues for the project are prioritized based on need and ability to complete them, not age.
I find the HN structure very effective in following discussions and it is really the same structure that the author creates, just spread vertically instead of horizontally.
Has anyone used this for their company internal discussions? I'm keen on giving it a try. I've even grabbed the last published HN source code to give this a try.
Surprised that 4chan isn't mentioned here. IMO the linear structure combined with references gives you the best of both worlds. You can follow the discussion linearly, but also jump around to check references.
[+] [-] serkandurusoy|5 years ago|reply
This dates back to 2014 where Turkey was still struggling with the aftermath of widespread civil unrest. The entire nation found itself highly polarized while debates were fueled with mutual anger and disbelief.
This is an "argument analysis platform", as they call it, and it is open source, too, maintained at https://github.com/arguman/arguman.org .
The basic premise is the construction of an argument map, "arguably" a common utility to practice critical thinking.
More info on that at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map .
[+] [-] pabs3|5 years ago|reply
https://pol.is/ https://github.com/pol-is/
Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting.
https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-min... https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5 https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...
[+] [-] rocgf|5 years ago|reply
For example, https://en.arguman.org/there-is-no-such-thing-as-global-warm.... Every argument, good or bad, falls under some sort of fallacy.
[+] [-] storkblue|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smartmic|5 years ago|reply
The wikipedia article gives some background and references to (mostly abandoned) tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system
[+] [-] pjmorris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cxr|5 years ago|reply
What we're all really aching for is a solution to the ratiocination problem. pron put together a nice overview of some of the history of thought in that area a couple years back[1]. There's also the Toulmin model[2].
1. https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Toulmin#The_Toulmin_Mo...
[+] [-] samkater|5 years ago|reply
One thing that isn't immediately clear to me is how to associate specific individuals to a comment. Sometimes knowing who made an argument is very important. I like to believe that people are a little more careful about forming their reasoning when they are debating with the author or maintainer of a project, for example.
[+] [-] kvark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michael_j_ward|5 years ago|reply
When we have conversations in person, there is a natural Clarify -> Challenge -> Refine loop that hopefully ends in some resolution. One of the major issues with long run, asynchronous, online platforms is that they don't enable newcomers to easily contribute novel thoughts to that cycle. As an outsider viewing discussion around async rust that occurred on here and on reddit, by far the most common reply was "not a new thought- already discussed HERE".
But as OP pointed out, those HERE links were hundreds of posts you'd have to read through and reconstruct the clarify -> challenge loop in your head before figuring out whether your question had been addressed.
[+] [-] cxr|5 years ago|reply
https://doi.org/10.1145/74014.74031
[+] [-] aeternum|5 years ago|reply
Allowing users to vote using tags like "Great Summary", "I agree", "I disagree but strong argument", "Sources check out", etc could really help users filter. People often upvote/downvote based on agreement rather than the quality of the content.
[+] [-] nitrogen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swagasaurus-rex|5 years ago|reply
https://viz.chat/
[+] [-] ArubaJamaica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] awinter-py|5 years ago|reply
I could see more rigid logic formats than just 'tree' (and am indeed working on this) but the goals here are right
both for ease of reading and truth-seeking
[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
If you have an in-progress discussion that's still finding its way, that's not going to happen. And the curators may or may not have their own agenda.
Perhaps technical discussions are just messy because the problems are messy and don't have obvious solutions.
In the context of Rust, the bigger problem, IMO, is that things that aren't Mozilla/Firefox driven don't get driven to conclusion/completion. The discussion simply peters out with no resolution and then remains open indefinitely (look at how many issues from Rust 1.0 are still open with no conclusion, discussion or resolution.)
[+] [-] steveklabnik|5 years ago|reply
> (look at how many issues from Rust 1.0 are still open with no conclusion, discussion or resolution.)
Issues for the project are prioritized based on need and ability to complete them, not age.
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamer7|5 years ago|reply
Has anyone used this for their company internal discussions? I'm keen on giving it a try. I've even grabbed the last published HN source code to give this a try.
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djs070|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kinrany|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Haga|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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