I see Anna making the same complaint that you yourself have made a fewtimes: namely, that most online discussions are structured in a way that makes the accumulation of knowledge difficult. (My explanation: no one has an incentive to fix this.)
Is the fact that economists mostly cite each other evidence of “cultish in-group favoring biases”? Probably to some degree. But this hasn’t fatally wounded economics.
“most online discussions are structured in a way that makes the accumulation of knowledge difficult.”
It’s a different kind of conversation, but I’ve been trying to improve on this problem by developing a “debate mapping” website, where conversation is structured in tree form based on claims, and then arguments underneath it which support or oppose each claim recursively.
Glad to see you’re working on this, it looks pretty nice!
I think the bottleneck for efforts like this is typically marketing, not code. (Analogy: If you want to found a city, the first step is not to go off alone in to the wilderness and build a bunch of houses.) I think I’ve seen other argument mapping sites, and it seems like every few months someone announces a new & improved discussion website on SlateStarCodex (then it proceeds to not get traction). I suspect the solution is to form a committee/”human kickstarter” of some kind so that everyone who’s interested in this problem can coordinate to populate the same site simultaneously. For a project like yours that already has code, the best approach might be to try to join forces with a blogger who already has traffic, or a discussion site that already has a demand for a debate map, or something like that.
I see Anna making the same complaint that you yourself have made a few times: namely, that most online discussions are structured in a way that makes the accumulation of knowledge difficult. (My explanation: no one has an incentive to fix this.)
Is the fact that economists mostly cite each other evidence of “cultish in-group favoring biases”? Probably to some degree. But this hasn’t fatally wounded economics.
“most online discussions are structured in a way that makes the accumulation of knowledge difficult.”
It’s a different kind of conversation, but I’ve been trying to improve on this problem by developing a “debate mapping” website, where conversation is structured in tree form based on claims, and then arguments underneath it which support or oppose each claim recursively.
This is the website if you’re interested: https://debatemap.live
Glad to see you’re working on this, it looks pretty nice!
I think the bottleneck for efforts like this is typically marketing, not code. (Analogy: If you want to found a city, the first step is not to go off alone in to the wilderness and build a bunch of houses.) I think I’ve seen other argument mapping sites, and it seems like every few months someone announces a new & improved discussion website on SlateStarCodex (then it proceeds to not get traction). I suspect the solution is to form a committee/”human kickstarter” of some kind so that everyone who’s interested in this problem can coordinate to populate the same site simultaneously. For a project like yours that already has code, the best approach might be to try to join forces with a blogger who already has traffic, or a discussion site that already has a demand for a debate map, or something like that.
Seconded.
The behaviour of the Austrian School certainly is.