What is debate modeling?
For several years, I’ve had a conception of a kind of online forum that could be highly superior to anything we have now. It has three basic principles. One is equality. To the highest extent possible, every contributor is on equal ground. Two is timelessness. Old discussions should not “die”. Very few issues only have lifespans of days. And most interesting issues have lifespans of years or decades. You may recognize these principles–they are the most distinguishing features of Wiki. But my system adds one more principle that I think is both its greatest difficulty, and its greatest advantage over Wiki: Atomicity. As much as possible, every node (called posts, comments, pages, or messages in other systems) should state one and only one idea. Discussion is carried out non-linearly by linking atomic elements to other elements.
I plan to use this blog to conceptually develop this idea. (I’ll use another server if I ever start to programmatically develop it.)
January 10th, 2007 at 22:09
I’ve been thinking for a while about creating a site that automates the process of baysian reasoning in debates… People would fill in hypothesis, logical deductions, etc, and in particular everything that was a premise (from which all the conclusions would ultimately be drawn via the deduction rules; and note that the deduction rules themselves would be considered premises) would be explicitly tagged as such, so that people could agree or disagree on the premises; and if a premise were disagreed upon, it would cease to be a premise, become a hypothesis, and require support; once people could agree on the rules that would lead to that hypothesis being sound, there would be a new set of underlying premises, and so on… So, basically, it would distill all debate down to premises, at which point people would either discover they agree (i.e., learn that they may have drawn illogical conclusions from their own premises before having the process accurately computed for them) or at least they would know exactly what (premises) they disagree about. Would it work? Dunno. Would be fun to try.