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Emile comments on Software tools for community truth-seeking - Less Wrong
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Comments (13)
TruthMapper scares me, for the same reason Objectivists I used to know who thought they knew a formal deductive proof going from "A is A" to "Taxation is slavery", justifying each step with an inference rule scared me.
See for example the proof that commercialization of fine art hurts society.
I'm not sure whether TruthMapper encourages people to be sloppy, or whether it's such a good tool that the sloppiness is just much more obvious than it would be on a message board.
But I'm inclined to lay a bit of the blame on the site itself. For one thing, the video claims that it lets people make all assumptions explicit, which I take to mean that the company behind it believes that. For another, the entire philosophy seems to be that argument should work like an Aristotelian syllogism, and that's part of the problem. For a third, I can't take them seriously with that logo. Did they pay the designer per Photoshop layer effect used?
Debategraph looks like a mind map kind of thing. I suppose if that's the way you like seeing your information organized, it could be useful. I'm just wary of the whole concept of formalizing debate too much (by formal, I mean formal as in official, not formal as in formal systems). Once you start thinking like a high school kid at Debate Club, you've already lost, and I worry these sites could encourage that mode.
The idea of truth-seeking software is a good one, but there's got to be a way to avoid aiming it at the lowest common denominator.
I used to be quite interested in that kind of technology, I had even set up a few experiments on wiki, though they never went that far ... I used to argue that those could be a good way of creating information on divisive issues, as an alternative to having both sides set up their own resources and avoid linking to good arguments from the other side.
I guess now I've lost interest about those, and don't think they're that useful. Someday I'll have to go back and try all the "high-tech debate" sites that have sprunt up, but I'm more skeptical about the benefit of those kinds of "debate technology". (one red flag is I don't feel that inclined to participate in them, at least, much less than I would in forums or blog comments)
I think having publicly edited "chains of reasoning" could be interesting, because they could help show someone where others might disagree with his logic. Like, if the objectivists you mention had their formal proofs laid out for public criticism, they'd probably be forced to admit that it isn't as strong as what they thought.
In other words, I don't think "pyramids of logic" have much value, but these sites might help point out the weaknesses of pyramids of logic to those who rely on them too much (Blaise Pascal, I'm looking at you).