A design for a debate tool - Wikitech-l

1 Apr 2006


      Hello, everyone.  I'm writing to this group because Wayne Saewyc tells me
that you might be interested in what I'm trying to present.  My name is
Robert Rapplean, and I'm a software engineer and political analyst.  You can
understand that I've spent an immense amount of time attempting to get ideas
across in the massively multiuser asynchronous world of the Internet.  Over
the years I've developed a detailed understanding of the problems inherent
in trying to persue a logical argument in this kind of environment, and I've
used that understanding to design a tool that addresses these problems.
I am a Wikipedia user, and make it a point to contribute to the articles
when I find I have more expertise than those who have already presented
information.  After spending quite a bit of time unwinding the sometimes
barely comprehensible dialogs that have occured on the discussion pages of
the articles, I've concluded that this particular environment would benefit
greatly from the implemenation of exactly the kind of tool that I've
designed.
With that in mind, I'm going to attempt to describe the idea to you.  The
remains of this email is a short description of the design of the tool and
its reason for being structured the way it is.
In my examination of online debates, I've noted a small bestiary of bad
debating habits, almost all of which fall under the categories of "casual
debater" or "hostile debater".  Casual debaters are those that don't take
the time to paruse the previous debate that has occured on a topic.  They
tend to re-submit points that have already been debated ad-nausum and
require re-iteration of important talking points.  Everyone starts out in
this category, but the casual debater gets bored before they get beyond that
point.  Because online debating tools are very poor at organizing previous
information, it quickly becomes a prodigious effort to get up to speed on a
debate.  This means that any forum which has enough contributors to form a
decent consensus also has a steady stream of neophytes clogging the
communication streams with off-the-cuff comments and other distractions.
An unfortunate side effect of this is that many of the good debaters get to
the point where they're tired of re-arguing the same points over and over
again.  When the debate follows those lines yet again, they tend to quit
contributing, and may leave the forum entirely.
Hostile debaters are those who aren't there to exchange ideas so much as to
spout them.  In other words, they're all mouth and no ears.  They don't want
to find the truth, they want everyone to accept their personal truth.  Their
entire purpose on the forum is to get a personal thrill from defeating the
opposition through wit, strategy, and tactics.  As a result, they persue an
argument via the well-worn tactics of attacking where the enemy is weak and
retreating where the enemy is strong.  If they can't win a particular point,
they'll shift the topic to something that they think the opponent might be
less strong on.  They'll continue stringing their opponents on a line of
topics until they can find one that the opponent isn't as well versed on,
and then stand on it like a bastion of safety, insisting that it's the only
valid perspective from which to view the concept.  If they can't find a weak
point, they'll circle back around to the original topic hoping for a second
try or resort to standard logic errors like ad-hominen attacks or faulty
analogies.
Although the design of the tool addresses many other issues (like ballot box
stuffing and squeaky wheel effects), these should be adequate to understand
the reasoning behind the basic structure I'm about to explain.  As I go
along, I'm going to compare my design to existing online collaborative
tools, like wikis and forums.
In order to deal with a lot of the tactics of the hostile debater, I started
by removing the linear nature of wikis and forums.  You can't lead a person
in circles if you're glued to the spot.  With this in mind, the base unit of
this tool is a conjecture, something like "alcoholism is a disease".  Each
person may (not must) make one statement about the conjecture.  They can
change the statement any time that they like, but that one statement must be
a summation of their entire opinion on that conjecture.  Then everyone gets
to vote on the statement that best matches their personal opinion.  If none
of them match closely enough, they can make their own statement.
Statements are ranked based on popularity.  Additionally, the writer of the
statement indicates the bias of their statement.  A bias states that the
conjecture is:
1. factual (based on repeatable phenomena)
2. true (not based on repeatable phenomena, but enough evidence exists)
3. unproven (enough evidence does not exist one way or the other)
4. unprovable (the conjecture requires evidence that is not obtainable)
5. unsupported (the evidence suggests that the conjecture is not true)
6. false (repeatable phenomena disproves the conjecture conclusively)
For the purposes of determining the validity of a conjecture, all statements
with 1 & 2 add their votes together, all with 3 & 4 go together, and all
with 5 & 6 go together.  This creates a distinct identification of the
participant's current consensus on the matter.
Since people need a place to ask questions and discuss ideas, a standard
message list should be matched with the conjecture, but it is strongly
suggested that all messages on the list group expire and vanish after 30
days or so to encourage the participants to embody their ideas in their
statements, not in their messages.
There's a further aspect of this.  Every conjecture debated tends to result
in child conjectures, for instance "a disease is anything which effects the
wellness of an individual".  These become their own conjectures, with their
own statements and (importantly) its own message list.  It is voted on to
determine its individual validity, and it gets linked to the parent
conjecture.  Participants in the parent conjecture can then rate the
relevance of the child conjecture to the parent conjecture, and take into
account the most relevant child conjectures when voting on a statement.
Taking this a step further, the conjectures can then be all reused.  For
instance, a conjecture like "the will of god is unknowable" could be used
again and again, being attached to a very wide range of parent conjectures
without having to re-create it and re-argue it every time.
The final result would be that, for each conjecture, all of the reasoning
behind the current decision would be laid out in a readily examinable
format, ordered by relevance.  This makes things much, much easier for the
casual arguer.  The modular format also makes it extremely easy to slap a
"logic foul" conjecture on anyone who presents falacious arguments.  The
non-linear format totally wrecks topic-shifting tactics, and the voting
system indicates not just how people feel about something, but how firmly
they feel about it.
I think that'll do it for an introduction.  If this is interesting to you,
please let me know and I can provide you with more details.
Yours,
Robert Rapplean