I think one issue is that comment trees are just not the ideal format for conversation. It’s pretty common that someone will make a comment with four different claims, and then ten different comments of which two make similar objections to one, and then a couple other objections, and those will be responded to, and it’s all very ad-hoc. Structure doesn’t spontaneously emerge, and having to scan through a whole disordered tree to understand the current state of the argument makes it hard for bystanders to join.
Having a section for posts-for-the-month (or “Ongoing Discussions”?) would help people that want long-running discussions so they would all be in the same place, over only a few threads. But the comment thread discussion format is not great.
This would be a large engineering effort, but support for argument maps could help record the structure of an argument, and also help discussion continue, as each new node could be a new post, and having a visual of the state of an argument could help keep things organized, compared to comment trees?
https://kialo.com has an online implementation of these. I tried it out for a while. It was definitely interesting, but I think this is the wrong format for rational conversation. It was too focused on scoring debate points, at the expense of finding out what is true. It succeeded in being entertaining, but probably doesn’t change anyone’s mind very often.
Something more like collaborative Bayesian nets seems like a better approach for us, but if the software exists, I haven’t found it yet.
Structure doesn’t spontaneously emerge, and having to scan through a whole disordered tree to understand the current state of the argument makes it hard for bystanders to join.
I agree that this is a pretty big problem. However:
I suspect that the solution is moreso about having humans periodically take the time to distill/organize the current state of the conversation. Argument maps are a cool idea, but my sense is that the structure they impose would make things awkward.
I don’t get the sense that this problem is the major obstacle. It isn’t as frequent as I think it should be, but people do successfully have long running discussions despite this obstacle.
I think one issue is that comment trees are just not the ideal format for conversation. It’s pretty common that someone will make a comment with four different claims, and then ten different comments of which two make similar objections to one, and then a couple other objections, and those will be responded to, and it’s all very ad-hoc. Structure doesn’t spontaneously emerge, and having to scan through a whole disordered tree to understand the current state of the argument makes it hard for bystanders to join.
Having a section for posts-for-the-month (or “Ongoing Discussions”?) would help people that want long-running discussions so they would all be in the same place, over only a few threads. But the comment thread discussion format is not great.
This would be a large engineering effort, but support for argument maps could help record the structure of an argument, and also help discussion continue, as each new node could be a new post, and having a visual of the state of an argument could help keep things organized, compared to comment trees?
https://kialo.com has an online implementation of these. I tried it out for a while. It was definitely interesting, but I think this is the wrong format for rational conversation. It was too focused on scoring debate points, at the expense of finding out what is true. It succeeded in being entertaining, but probably doesn’t change anyone’s mind very often.
Something more like collaborative Bayesian nets seems like a better approach for us, but if the software exists, I haven’t found it yet.
Maybe Guesstimate is a solid proxy for this?
Ah, much better name! Thanks!
I agree that this is a pretty big problem. However:
I suspect that the solution is moreso about having humans periodically take the time to distill/organize the current state of the conversation. Argument maps are a cool idea, but my sense is that the structure they impose would make things awkward.
I don’t get the sense that this problem is the major obstacle. It isn’t as frequent as I think it should be, but people do successfully have long running discussions despite this obstacle.