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.)
