Johnicholas comments on Debate tools: an experience report - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Morendil 05 February 2010 02:47PM

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Comment author: Morendil 05 February 2010 06:42:14PM 3 points [-]

From professional experience (I've been a programmer since the 80's and was paid for it from the 90's onward) I agree with you entirely re. graphical representation. That doesn't keep generation after generation of tool vendors crowing that thanks to their new insight, programming will finally be made easy thanks to "visual this, that or the other". UML being the latest such to have a significant impact.

You have me pondering what we might gain from whipping up a Domain-Specific Language (say, in a DSL-friendly base language such as Ruby) to represent arguments in. It couldn't be too hard to bake some basics of Bayesian inference into that.

Comment author: Johnicholas 06 February 2010 03:11:14PM *  4 points [-]

I strongly support the notion of whipping up a DSL for argumention targeted at LessWrong readers. Philosophy and law argumentation tools seem to be targeting users without any math or logic who demand a graphical interface as the primary means of creating argument. My guess is that LessWrong readers would be more tolerant of Bayesian math and formal logic, the necessity of learning a little syntax, and only exporting a graphical representation.

Features might include:

  • Compose in ordinary ASCII or UTF-8
  • Compose primarily a running-text argument, indicating the formal structure with annotations
  • Export as a prettified document, still mostly running text (html and LaTeX)
  • Export as a diagram (automatically layed out, perhaps by graphviz)
  • Export as a bayes net (in possibly several bayes net formats)
  • Export as a machine-checkable proof (in possibly several formats)

I'm currently learning noweb, the literate programming tool by Norman Ramsey.

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