Metablog

I just had this idea for a new way to organize discussions. You’d start out normally, with a short essay stating a position with supporting arguments. Then people add comments disagreeing with certain parts of the essay. Disagreements fall into one of two categories: people who disagree with logical steps made in the argument, or people who disagree with the premises of the argument. (Agreeing/expanding, free associating, joking, or topic changes could all be handled like normal comments.)

People’s disagreements would be responded to by expanding upon the original text, either by editing it, or by adding an explanation that’s linked from the original text. (You could also respond in comments, but there are various reasons why that’s less than ideal. If you’re going to use a system like this, you’ll end up learning when to edit and when to comment.) The link would be in a superscript, like Wikipedia’s links to footnotes and references. The linked explanation would be shown in a column to the right of the original, using a bit of fancy javascript or somethin’. Responses to the elucidation could be shown below it in the new column. (This would end up involving some horizontal scrolling, unfortunately. There are some things that could be done to make this less annoying.) Links to elaborations that have responses could be colored differently so that people that want to just read through the various responses could find them. Also, there could be a link at the bottom of each response to the next response, either in document order, or in chronological order.

The disagreements themselves could be moved from the bottom comment area, to a new section linked to from the part of the text they’re disagreeing with. (This would be more or less useful depending on the length of the text.)

The idea of discussion participants trying to modify position statements in response to each other’s changes, instead of commenting back and forth without updating the original statements, is an idea I learned from Robin Hanson, which he called “reflective equilibrium”. I think it has the potential to make discussions more productive and less error-prone, but making it practical for general use is problematic. In general, the implementation would need to be friendly to ad hoc use by mildly interested participants. If it’s complicated, it’s going to scare people off, and people who do participate won’t be as involved as they could have been with a simpler system. If it has a steep or high learning curve, it’s going to shrink the pool of people who will end up being drawn into discussions. Naive implementations just won’t work.

Truth Mapping) is one such implementation. (I’ll set aside the primary weakness of the site, which is that the initial argument must be stated in terms of the logical steps of the argument. That’s not practical for widespread use, and may not even be practical for more specialized use.) It work like this: you see an argument you disagree with, and you add a comment (critique, in its terminology) stating the disagreement. The author of the argument responds with a comment. At that point, you’re out of comments. All further discussion has to take place by editing those two comments. Now, in theory, this ought to work. Any objections made to your reply could be addressed by changing the original reply to address them preemptively (or apparently so, in retrospect). But in practice, this doesn’t happen. At the Truth Mapping site, most of the arguments I saw (which is quite few—the place has been mostly empty for years) took place by appending replies to the bottom of comments, which defeats the purpose of the format pretty soundly.

Why do the participants resist the RE (reflective equilibrium) format? What makes it inconvenient and unnatural? Is is just a lack of familiarity with the format, or is it something about the way people want to have discussions? If so, can these habits be subverted?

My hunch with my latest idea is that there a certain kinds of inquiries that happen in discussions that are awkward and inefficient with pure RE, that are better served by the back-and-forth of normal conversation. One such inquiry happens as follows: I respond to an argument, the arguer responds, I edit my response to address the points made. But the arguer still feels his objections are valid as they stand, despite my attempts to address them. What happens next? With pure RE, the answer isn’t clear. The only obvious thing to do is to ask the person to clarify or expand upon their response to my reply.

If limited in certain ways, this back and forth might not defeat the purpose of using RE in the first place. But there is a danger that it will. I guess the only thing to do is to implement this system and try it out. (I implemented my last system, but it never got used. Let’s hope this one turn out a little better.)

Hey, check it out. 300 comments of people deriding my beliefs and treating me like a lunatic. And all because I dare defend the idea of the singularity.

People can only tell sarcasm from seriousness if they already share the viewpoint and ideology of the speaker. If they are sufficiently separated, ideologically, from the speaker, they won’t be able to tell the difference. Thus, sarcasm in a blog insulates it from outside opinion. It insulates it from anyone who would disagree. You can’t disagree, because if you do, you’re missing the point.

Now, sarcasm can be deployed selectively. For instance, a blog that genuinely tolerates dissent, but only within a limited range, can deploy sarcasm only on commenters that express viewpoints that fall outside that range. When it’s used like this, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But blogs that thrive on sarcasm, like The Poor Man and Sadly, No, pretty much use sarcasm to deride anything outside of the extremely narrow viewpoint of the authors’.

I’m not criticizing these blogs, just elucidating their techniques. Sarcasm has its place. I would criticize them if there weren’t more tolerant blogs. And I think it would be just as well if this type of blog didn’t have comments, because the comments tend not to be interesting. (Fafblog was an exception.)

Majikthise has a good thread on echo chambers.

I think blog reading might be a bad thing for an introvert without any real-life friends. (One who’s recently moved, for instance.) Blogs are such a high-quality form of conversation, that most real-life conversations with random people will seem insipid in comparison. (This effect is even greater the smarter the blogs you hang out on are.) So you’re setting yourself up to get a large and essential part of your socialization needs met by a format that can’t really meet the other large part of your socialization needs, and getting yourself used to a level of conversation that you can only find in real-life after years of adjusting your social circle. This decreases your motivation to go out into the world and find things to do where you meet people.

It’s like if all you ate were some really tasty and addictive food that lacked two or three essential nutrients. Enough to keep you alive, but not healthy.

I chose the name “Metablog” because at the time my main projecty interest was in ways of improving the quality and pleasantness of blogospheric debates, which, of course, is a metablogoshperical-typed task. (ish.) But, as it happened, personal problems and the tides of fate intervened, and my interest and energy waned, and I haven’t made progress on the issue. And this post is not a turning point either. But I do think that, today, I’ve come to understand one thing that was keeping me from working on this more than was necessary.

The project was just too ambitious. I wanted to make it a “Wikipedia of dialectic”, which is to say, something reusable and referencable and incrementally add-to-it-able. But I realize now that it was defining the scope of a very big problem, when there was a much smaller subproblem that was sitting right there with nearly as much urgency and fun to it. I just need to start out with being able to properly model individual debates. I need to dissect them, at microscopic levels. That’s plenty of work, right there, and maybe even something I can accomplish with a little bit of work. Very boring work, perhaps.

Well, maybe even that’s too ambitious. Maybe I should just start with normal, non-contentious discourse. I don’t think I’ll care to analyze humor much, but starting out with things that don’t generate big long flame wars might make the project less overwhelming to begin with. Let me start practicing on the easy things.

If any of you readers have recommendations on books about this, (which I haven’t tried to look for, because I hate looking for this sort of thing, especially when the emphasis and direction I’m giving it has probably never been studied,) please let me know. And please, if you would, provide a synopsis of the author’s approach so I can try to evaluate whether it’s even close to my own, because I’m not willing to try to extract value from it otherwise. My interest in this subject, unlike so many others, isn’t for its own sake. I’m interested in discussion as a performance art, and I only want to model it like a musician would learn anatomy to improve their technique, or a social scientist would use math. (No offense intended to social scientists, honest!)

I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned how cool xkcd is. Well, check this out. If you aren’t reading the comic yet, start.

To answer the question in the comic. If the question of what it all means doesn’t mean anything, why do we keep coming back to it? Simple—depression does that to you. Happy people are people who are able to blithly ignore the question, because people are actually built to ignore the question. It’s only depressed people, broken people (evolutionarily speaking) that ask it. Happiness means not caring. Depression, when it functions normally, is a signal for people to reflect on their life to figure out what’s causing the bad reaction and try to change it. Depression doesn’t actually help them desire the change, only desire to figure out what’s going on. Then once they’ve identified it, the depression lifts and then comes the desire to change. With depressed people, they’re always getting that signal to reflect on things, so the reflections get more and more abstract until they get to the most general of all. For me, they got to that point and turned inside out (like swinging over the top of the swing) and I started focusing on the descriptive, cognitive perspective of the problem.

So what’s the meaning of life? If you want to know, prod me to finish my post on it.

I discuss linguistics in an Unfogged comment thread, where I am graciously tolerated for my foolish, blinkered, and obtuse comments. You, on the other hand, might find them a bit more palatable. I start off trying to establish the inefficiency of linguistic diversity, but then much of the thread is me making the case that the relationship between phonemes and meaning, and phonemes and affect, is arbitrary. Sapir-Whorf is mentioned.

Sara Robinson, at Orcinus, has just posted a list of different frames that people use for evaluating how change happens.

One of the grandest — and most frustrating — things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. […]

You often find these meta-level disconnects at the core of online flame wars. […]

A goodly number of these online disagreements are based in our fundamental assumptions about how change happens. Believe it or not, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what’s likely to happen next. […]

My professors have, over the years, boiled the basic change drivers down to about nine. (There may be others; I’m open to suggestions.) In brief, here are the main assumptions people use to explain why change happens:

1. Progress. Change happens because humans want to improve their condition, and apply ingenuity and good problem-solving to create progress. The people with the best handle on the future are the optimists, though individuals have a lot of control over what will happen. Over the next 20 years, the social and economic conditions of the world will consistently get better, just as they have improved on a ever-rising linear path throughout history.

Her other entries include Development, Technology, Ideas, Markets, Cycles, Conflict, Power, and Evolution. Most people are partial to a few of these, and repulsed by a few. Some of them may be legitimately invalid. But they’re not mutually exclusive, so when two people argue over whether they should use one or another to evaluate the implications of some policy or moral stance, there’s often a neglect of a need to apply both frames in the analysis.

Sara thinks that these frames are behind most of the deep, hard-to-resolve disagreements between people, but I doubt it. I think that these are probably only a subset of all the different frames with that effect. There might be two or three higher-level categories that each contain a dozen basic frames, and this is only one of them. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. Sara is a wonderful writer and an insightful futurist. For more of her writing, see her Cracks in the Wall series, about the psychological roots and sociological roots of authoritarianism (especially religious).

When people in a discussion disagree strongly, I see a tendency for them to get especially exasperated when the discussion gets to the point where both of them are reading a small (e.g. 20–50 word) section of text, and disagreeing on what it says, or what the direct implications of it are. But I think this is exactly the opposite of what the right reaction is. When you find that kind of disagreement, it should be very easy to structure the remainder of the discussion around it to figure out exactly what some of your different assumptions and mental models are, which is very likely to lead to a lot more understanding. So you should be glad to find this sort of disagreement, since you’re lucky to have such a clear example of the nature of your underlying differences.

Unfortunately, people are much too quick to jump to the conclusion, in this situation, that one or the other must be acting in bad faith, even in the uncommon (but commendable) situation where they both remain civil about it. I think this is because people have a very hard time integrating the belief, if they have it at all, that differing assumptions and worldviews can run very deep and influence how we acquire and process information in very substantial and unintuitive ways. And so arguments often end up getting dropped at the very moment where they could begin to be the most fruitful. If people would just understand how deep these differences can run, and that they don’t necessarily make the others’ views illegitimate, then I think they would more easily see these instances in the light I do.

This might be one of the big mechanisms behind the tendency for people to have so much more trouble debating with people the further apart they are ideologically. The likelihood of encountering and disagreeing about a small section of plainly-written text increases proportionally to the magnitude of ideological difference between the participants. If this tendency weren’t there, people would still have a lot of trouble, but at least they wouldn’t end up doubting the other’s sanity.

Unfortunately, I don’t think everyone is capable of working through a disagreement on this level. It takes both an unusual willingness to dig into the argument, and a capacity for detailed philosophical or semantic discussion.

I think I’m going to edit this into my charitability post.