I've tried Rationale before (http://rationale.austhink.com/), but unfortunately it's not free. It's good at organising evidence and counter-evidence, teasing out premises, and trying to ground each one.
With larger arguments, it helps a lot in keeping track of all the parts -- better than writing. Where it fell down was in comparing the relative weight of different pieces of evidence, or in general handling uncertainty.
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?
Thank you. I understand there was a meetup last week. Do they run regularly?