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