Comment on Woo!

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:29:56 GMT

On quotes:
Quotes are by their nature vulnerable to being taken out of context. Any author who quotes an expert, or attributes a viewpoint to an expert, makes some effort to do so accurately and fairly. If they overly misrepresent people, they risk damaging their reputation. The same holds true for TakeOnIt. I should note that TakeOnIt, unlike other quote websites, always provides a source to help guard against that.

On deconstructing arguments:
An issue can be broken down into several sub-issues, where each issue has its own dedicated question on TakeOnIt. That way, you can see not only a summary of the expert's opinion on a particular issue, but also their opinions on more specific issues that lead them to their main conclusion. For example, here's Roy Spencer, a climate skeptic's opinions:

http://www.takeonit.com/expert/238.aspx

You can see not only his opinion on whether AGW is true, but also his specific opinions that lead him to that (in this case, negative feedback loops).

On collating an expert's arguments:
I was toying with the idea of displaying links to the quotes to sub-issues directly below the quotes for high-level issues. When I think about it, I'm not sure why I haven't coded up that feature...

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