Am I really the only person who thinks it’s a bit crazy that we use this blobby comment thread as if it’s the best way we have to organize disagreement/argumentation for audiences? I feel like we could almost certainly improve by using, e.g., a horizontal flow as is relatively standard in debate.[1]
With a generic example below:
To be clear, the commentary could still incorporate non-block/prose text.
Alternatively, people could use something like Kialo.com. But surely there has to be something better than this comment thread, in terms of 1) ease of determining where points go unrefuted, 2) ease of quickly tracing all responses in specific branches (rather than having to skim through the entire blob to find any related responses), and 3) seeing claims side-by-side, rather than having to scroll back and forth to see the full text. (Quoting definitely helps with this, though!)
How hard do you suppose it might be to use an AI to scrub the comments and generate something like this? It may be worth doing manually for some threads, even, but it’s easier to get people to adopt if the debate already exists and only needs tweaking. There may even already exist software that accepts text as input and outputs a Kialo-like debate map (thank you for alerting me that Kialo exists, it’s neat).
Over the past few months I have occasionally tried getting LLMs to do some tasks related to argument mapping, but I actually don’t think I’ve tried that specifically, and probably should. I’ll make a note to myself to try here.
But I don’t think we could have predicted people would die into the comments like this. Usually comments have minimal engagement. There’s a lesswrong debate format for posts but that’s usually with a moderator and such. This seems spontaneous.
Are your referring to this format on LessWrong? If so I can’t say I’m particularly impressed, as it still seems to suffer from the problems of linear dialogue vs. a branching structure (e.g., it is hard to see where points have been dropped, it is harder to trace specific lines of argument). But I don’t recall seeing this, so thanks for the flag.
As for “I don’t think we could have predicted people…”, that’s missing my point(s). I’m partially saying “this comment thread seems like it should be a lesson/example of how text-blob comment-threads are inefficient in general.” However, even in this specific case Paul knew that he was laying out a multi-pronged criticism, and if the flow format existed he could have presented his claims that way, to make following the debate easier—assuming Ted would reply.
Ultimately, it just seems to me like it would be really logical to have a horizontal flow UI,[1] although I recognize I am a bit biased by my familiarity with such note taking methods from competitive debate.
In theory it need not be as strictly horizontal as I lay out; it could be a series of vertically nested claims, kept largely within one column—where the idea is that instead of replying to the entire comment you can just reply to specific blocks in the original comment (e.g., accessible in a drop down at the end of a specific argument block rather than the end of the entire comment).
I don’t know. As someone who was/still is quite good at debating and connected to debating communities I would find a flow-centric comment thread bothersome and unhelpful for reading the dialogues. I quite like internet comments as is in this UI.
I find this strange/curious. Is your preference more a matter of “Traditional interfaces have good features that a flowing interface would lack“ (or some other disadvantage to switching) or “The benefits of switching to a flowing interface would be relatively minor”?
For example on the latter, do you not find it more difficult with the traditional UI to identify dropped arguments? Or suppose you are fairly knowledgeable about most of the topics but there’s just one specific branch of arguments you want to follow: do you find it easy to do that? (And more on the less-obvious side, do you think the current structure disincentivizes authors from deeply expanding on branches?)
On the former, I do think that there are benefits to having less-structured text (e.g., introductions/summaries and conclusions) and that most argument mapping is way too formal/rigid with its structure, but I think these issues could be addressed in the format I have in mind.
I asked other debaters/EAs intersecting and they agreed with my line of reasoning that it would be contrived and lead to poorly structured arguments. I can elaborate if you really want but I hesitate spending time to write this out because I’m behind on work and don’t think it’ll have any impact on anything to be honest.
Am I really the only person who thinks it’s a bit crazy that we use this blobby comment thread as if it’s the best way we have to organize disagreement/argumentation for audiences? I feel like we could almost certainly improve by using, e.g., a horizontal flow as is relatively standard in debate.[1]
With a generic example below:
To be clear, the commentary could still incorporate non-block/prose text.
Alternatively, people could use something like Kialo.com. But surely there has to be something better than this comment thread, in terms of 1) ease of determining where points go unrefuted, 2) ease of quickly tracing all responses in specific branches (rather than having to skim through the entire blob to find any related responses), and 3) seeing claims side-by-side, rather than having to scroll back and forth to see the full text. (Quoting definitely helps with this, though!)
(Depending on the format: this is definitely standard in many policy debate leagues.)
How hard do you suppose it might be to use an AI to scrub the comments and generate something like this? It may be worth doing manually for some threads, even, but it’s easier to get people to adopt if the debate already exists and only needs tweaking. There may even already exist software that accepts text as input and outputs a Kialo-like debate map (thank you for alerting me that Kialo exists, it’s neat).
Over the past few months I have occasionally tried getting LLMs to do some tasks related to argument mapping, but I actually don’t think I’ve tried that specifically, and probably should. I’ll make a note to myself to try here.
But I don’t think we could have predicted people would die into the comments like this. Usually comments have minimal engagement. There’s a lesswrong debate format for posts but that’s usually with a moderator and such. This seems spontaneous.
Are your referring to this format on LessWrong? If so I can’t say I’m particularly impressed, as it still seems to suffer from the problems of linear dialogue vs. a branching structure (e.g., it is hard to see where points have been dropped, it is harder to trace specific lines of argument). But I don’t recall seeing this, so thanks for the flag.
As for “I don’t think we could have predicted people…”, that’s missing my point(s). I’m partially saying “this comment thread seems like it should be a lesson/example of how text-blob comment-threads are inefficient in general.” However, even in this specific case Paul knew that he was laying out a multi-pronged criticism, and if the flow format existed he could have presented his claims that way, to make following the debate easier—assuming Ted would reply.
Ultimately, it just seems to me like it would be really logical to have a horizontal flow UI,[1] although I recognize I am a bit biased by my familiarity with such note taking methods from competitive debate.
In theory it need not be as strictly horizontal as I lay out; it could be a series of vertically nested claims, kept largely within one column—where the idea is that instead of replying to the entire comment you can just reply to specific blocks in the original comment (e.g., accessible in a drop down at the end of a specific argument block rather than the end of the entire comment).
I don’t know. As someone who was/still is quite good at debating and connected to debating communities I would find a flow-centric comment thread bothersome and unhelpful for reading the dialogues. I quite like internet comments as is in this UI.
I find this strange/curious. Is your preference more a matter of “Traditional interfaces have good features that a flowing interface would lack“ (or some other disadvantage to switching) or “The benefits of switching to a flowing interface would be relatively minor”?
For example on the latter, do you not find it more difficult with the traditional UI to identify dropped arguments? Or suppose you are fairly knowledgeable about most of the topics but there’s just one specific branch of arguments you want to follow: do you find it easy to do that? (And more on the less-obvious side, do you think the current structure disincentivizes authors from deeply expanding on branches?)
On the former, I do think that there are benefits to having less-structured text (e.g., introductions/summaries and conclusions) and that most argument mapping is way too formal/rigid with its structure, but I think these issues could be addressed in the format I have in mind.
I asked other debaters/EAs intersecting and they agreed with my line of reasoning that it would be contrived and lead to poorly structured arguments. I can elaborate if you really want but I hesitate spending time to write this out because I’m behind on work and don’t think it’ll have any impact on anything to be honest.