My name's Lars. I'm from Melbourne, Australia

Welcome Lars. There are quite a bunch of us from Melbourne.

Writing is definitely better, but I wonder, is it the endpoint? Has anyone had much success with argument mapping tools, or other alternative ways of expressing reasoning and evidence?

That's an excellent question. I haven't, but would be interested in exploring this if you have a preferred tool.

I've gotten some benefit when talking about complex issues from introducing formalisms such as labeling key entities and using those labels rather than vague pronouns, or being precise about "there exists an X" vs "for all X", and stuff like that. That said, there are signalling difficulties with doing that in most communities.

Hi all,

My name's Lars. I'm from Melbourne, Australia, and have a background in software/mathematics/languages. I've also tutored classes in logic and artificial intelligence. Like a lot of folks commenting here, I've been reading articles on LessWrong for a while, but now I'm keen to understand the community around it a bit more.

I've been interested in rationality for some years. One of my favourite posts so far is "Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-contrarianism". It helped me notice signalling in arguments, and reduce greatly the amount I do it myself.

I think people struggle to keep track of all the different aspects of big societal issues, so I'm very interested in tools to help people share their arguments, evidence and understanding better. I notice when we talk about issues, our short term memory severely limits the depth of what we can discuss. Writing is definitely better, but I wonder, is it the endpoint? Has anyone had much success with argument mapping tools, or other alternative ways of expressing reasoning and evidence?