I was expecting to write about how I disagreed with this approach… but I actually found the prototype surprisingly delightful. Specifically, voting on a claim, and then seeing how it interacted with the related claims and prompting to further click, was a neat experience. (I wouldn’t turn the related claims red, which I associated with DANGER, but turning them bluish or greenish would work fine)
[edit: I’d misinterpreted what the red claims meant, I’d thought it meant “this is generally related”, and it looks like depending on how you vote on a thing, the related claims turn either green or red, which I haven’t fully parsed yet but makes more sense than my initial interpretation]
My underlying disagreement with this sort of approach is that:
a) the internet is littered with the corpses of things somewhat similar to this, which suggests there’s something hard about it
b) I think part of the issue is that people don’t naturally think and engage with ideas via discrete claims, they’re more likely to engage via conversations, or essays. (This is a not-very-well-supported version of a claim I expect a friend of mine to write a more nuanced essay about soon)
c) relatedly, just seeing the initial claims listed out, even with short descriptions, sort of misses a lot of the context. I think an app like this is a useful tool for people who have already communicated a bunch (or thought about things a lot, if working solo), and are using the tool in realtime to flesh out their confusions and disagreements.
I definitely second all three of these points. That having been said, aside from (a) (which is for sure an important outside-view thing to keep in mind, but also doesn’t directly inform the design and development of such a concept, except insofar as it strengthens the suggestion to do a “lit survey” of prior projects like this), these points seem like they don’t so much suggest not doing the thing, but rather suggest doing it differently, or adding certain features or design elements.
Specifically:
There are ways to place such claims in context (simple hyperlinking goes a long way, and excerpting/transclusion of contextual information goes even further). Could this sufficiently “conversationalize” bare claims, without destroying their atomic nature (which lets them be composed in the way this tool does)? Maybe not, maybe yes. It seems worth trying out.
If the app turns out to be useless for the general public but useful for existing groups or communities, then that’s certainly a failure of the design intent, but possibly still a success more broadly speaking.
Perhaps these considerations make the concept not worth developing; that seems possible, but not necessarily so.
Well then, the prototype did have some usefulness.
c) Yes, a shared context and precise definitions are definitely needed. Even then, I worry that there exist important debates that for some fundamental reason would not fit the format. Though I don’t have examples in mind.
b) Just think of it as rationalist twitter (I’m joking). Alternatively, perhaps there could be some additional tool that would help extract a graph of reasoning from text and conversation.
I was expecting to write about how I disagreed with this approach… but I actually found the prototype surprisingly delightful. Specifically, voting on a claim, and then seeing how it interacted with the related claims and prompting to further click, was a neat experience. (I wouldn’t turn the related claims red, which I associated with DANGER, but turning them bluish or greenish would work fine)
[edit: I’d misinterpreted what the red claims meant, I’d thought it meant “this is generally related”, and it looks like depending on how you vote on a thing, the related claims turn either green or red, which I haven’t fully parsed yet but makes more sense than my initial interpretation]
My underlying disagreement with this sort of approach is that:
a) the internet is littered with the corpses of things somewhat similar to this, which suggests there’s something hard about it
b) I think part of the issue is that people don’t naturally think and engage with ideas via discrete claims, they’re more likely to engage via conversations, or essays. (This is a not-very-well-supported version of a claim I expect a friend of mine to write a more nuanced essay about soon)
c) relatedly, just seeing the initial claims listed out, even with short descriptions, sort of misses a lot of the context. I think an app like this is a useful tool for people who have already communicated a bunch (or thought about things a lot, if working solo), and are using the tool in realtime to flesh out their confusions and disagreements.
I definitely second all three of these points. That having been said, aside from (a) (which is for sure an important outside-view thing to keep in mind, but also doesn’t directly inform the design and development of such a concept, except insofar as it strengthens the suggestion to do a “lit survey” of prior projects like this), these points seem like they don’t so much suggest not doing the thing, but rather suggest doing it differently, or adding certain features or design elements.
Specifically:
There are ways to place such claims in context (simple hyperlinking goes a long way, and excerpting/transclusion of contextual information goes even further). Could this sufficiently “conversationalize” bare claims, without destroying their atomic nature (which lets them be composed in the way this tool does)? Maybe not, maybe yes. It seems worth trying out.
If the app turns out to be useless for the general public but useful for existing groups or communities, then that’s certainly a failure of the design intent, but possibly still a success more broadly speaking.
Perhaps these considerations make the concept not worth developing; that seems possible, but not necessarily so.
Well then, the prototype did have some usefulness.
c) Yes, a shared context and precise definitions are definitely needed. Even then, I worry that there exist important debates that for some fundamental reason would not fit the format. Though I don’t have examples in mind.
b) Just think of it as rationalist twitter (I’m joking). Alternatively, perhaps there could be some additional tool that would help extract a graph of reasoning from text and conversation.
a) Do you have examples?