I think that the major problem with the software is that it assumes that things are true/false. In the real world shades of gray are much more common.
Well, actually, green means that "consensus exists that the statement is true" and red means that "no consensus exists that the statement is true or false", i.e. red does not mean false. I think the software takes care of the "grayness" issue very well - you have to craft your statements in such a way that they properly illustrate the "gray areas" of the real world - otherwise, they get refuted and turn red.
There seems to be no way to have things that oppose something and other things that boost it.
Refute is really all you need. To oppose, you refute. To support, you do nothing - or, you refute other statements that contradict the statement you want to support. So, if someone refutes statement X with "Why?", you can refute "Why?" with an explanation that supports X.
I'm also very unconvinced by the percentages, they seem to be pseudo-information rather than anything meaningful. Possibly using averages of values assigned by people might be a better approach or something.
You're correct about that - any kind of score, percentage, etc. suffers from the same problem - they average the opinions of many people, each having only a subset of all the facts (something that averaging "values assigned by people" isn't immune from).
And since the project is rather young, the percentages don't really mean much yet. But if you have a million people working away on a statement, the percentages will start to offer a more useful insight into the lean of the population. Tell me if you think the percentages should be hidden for now.
www.thegraph.org
Ok, got rid of the percentages (thegraph.org). Now we put a checkmark next to statements that have been continuously green for the past 24 hours (just to signify which statements appear to have consensus). Percentages can still be viewed by hovering over statements. Thanks for the feedback!
On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 1:30 AM, Peter Tesler vptes1@gmail.com wrote:
I think that the major problem with the software is that it assumes that things are true/false. In the real world shades of gray are much more common.
Well, actually, green means that "consensus exists that the statement is true" and red means that "no consensus exists that the statement is true or false", i.e. red does not mean false. I think the software takes care of the "grayness" issue very well - you have to craft your statements in such a way that they properly illustrate the "gray areas" of the real world - otherwise, they get refuted and turn red.
There seems to be no way to have things that oppose something and other things that boost it.
Refute is really all you need. To oppose, you refute. To support, you do nothing - or, you refute other statements that contradict the statement you want to support. So, if someone refutes statement X with "Why?", you can refute "Why?" with an explanation that supports X.
I'm also very unconvinced by the percentages, they seem to be pseudo-information rather than anything meaningful. Possibly using averages of values assigned by people might be a better approach or something.
You're correct about that - any kind of score, percentage, etc. suffers from the same problem - they average the opinions of many people, each having only a subset of all the facts (something that averaging "values assigned by people" isn't immune from).
And since the project is rather young, the percentages don't really mean much yet. But if you have a million people working away on a statement, the percentages will start to offer a more useful insight into the lean of the population. Tell me if you think the percentages should be hidden for now.
www.thegraph.org