I did everyone a benifit by opening the holy war: <a href="https://www.kialo.com/tabs-vs-spaces-16646/16646.0=16646.1" rel="nofollow">https://www.kialo.com/tabs-vs-spaces-16646/16646.0=16646.1</a><p>I'm surprised this was not yet posted on the platform.<p>As for the platform it was very easy to use. The UI is simple and it makes you flesh out both sides of the argument to the best of your ability before it is publicly visible. This dynamic is very interesting as even before the topic is visible it will appear as if there is considerable participation in the topic's discussion. I bet that will definitely drive participation.<p>I'm very interested in seeing how this shapes up. Love the idea and the implementation!
I like the idea but found it a little hard to follow the arguments. Especially difficult if you follow down the cons thread, because a con of a con is a pro of the original point.<p>I worry that it won’t really result in more rational outcome but I do wish it luck. Is there anyway to downvote the points for being, for example, strawman arguments?<p>Edit: maybe I’d parse it better if they were labelled “agree” and “disagree”?
Hi HN!<p>9 months after launch we make it to the frontpage :)<p>Happy to answer any questions! More info about us and our mission can be found in this interview with our founder:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/FT/status/956126468635004928" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/FT/status/956126468635004928</a>
One observation I made about this tool: the questions are often framed with bias themselves, usually by introducing some hidden assumption. That can start a whole discussion on a tilt, and would take some serious work to curate and sculpt.
I'm not quite sure what the authors of this site mean by "reason" and "rational." Its design promotes the arguments that are most popular, not the ones with the most intrinsic validity or soundness. Furthermore, it's by no means obvious that rationality alone is sufficient to resolve moral and ethical questions; other virtues may also be required.
I have 2 issues, first is that it looks more like a popularity contest. Popupar points of view get propelled at the top where they get more exposure and get all the discussion and votes, like on any other discussion site with threads.<p>Second, there is not "yes, but ..." answer, you are forced to take sides, for example to the hypothetical question "should drugs be legalized ?", I'd probably want to aswer "yes, but regulated". Not sure how to express that.
I love the idea and added a topic here<p><a href="https://www.kialo.com/macos-and-windows-should-sandbox-all-apps-16655/16655.0=16655.1" rel="nofollow">https://www.kialo.com/macos-and-windows-should-sandbox-all-a...</a><p>Some comments:<p>The site seems designed for desktop first. The fancy radial graph doesn't seem to appear on mobile. That would seem like a pretty big barrier to popularity. I have lots of friends who's only access to the net is their phone.<p>It's not at all clear to me which link to share with people. Was the one above correct? It's not showing the radial graph in my topic so I assumed it was the wrong link since links to other topics show a graph. Clicking the "share" button is not helpful with providing a link<p>It's entirely unclear whether to respond pro or con on 2nd level topics. It feels intuitively to me that it should be green vs orange for the entire discussion. All green is pro the original topic, all orange is con the original topic. But that is not how others are using it. The comment for "con" of sub topic says "attack the parent ...." What's the parent here? The parent to this comment? The parent to this sub-topic so if it's sub-sub-topic that's what?<p>Whatever Kialo want's it to be it needs to made 1000x clearer. Even the help is unhelpful. It shows topic->pro->con which is uncontroversial. It needs to show topic->con->con or topic->con->pro. But of course most people won't click to the help so the actual form needs to make this far clearer.
People often think that if only everyone understood logic, we’d solve all the world’s problems.<p>But let’s say I’m a billionaire that made my fortune in the fossil fuel industry. You’re not going to reason me out of opposing any sort of carbon tax or cap. I simply don’t give a fuck if the world burns because my wealth depends on burning it. You’re not going to reason me out of that position.<p>And of course, I can’t get my candidates to win on a ‘fuck the planet’ platform so I do political science research and public policy polling so I can figure out how to cobble together a political coalition that can win, while having a ‘fuck the planet’ as a side effect. You have your pro-life people, your anti-immigration people, etc, all of whom are voting for different motivations and all of whom are using logic and reason to decide who to vote for in pursuit of those motivations.<p>Politics is about power and wealth and any attempt to improve ‘public debate’ that doesn’t recognize that is doomed to failure.
A subreddit with a similar idea: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/steelmanning/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/steelmanning/</a><p>Note that it is different from /r/CMV. Unlike CMV, Steelmanning wants to bring out the best form of either sides of an argument. The goal is not to change OP's views, but just to lay down the best arguments for lurkers to inform themselves with. It's more like /r/neutralpolitics but without the restriction to politics.
I started something like this a couple years ago, but it allowed hierarchy in the argument for either side, so that particular points could have 'justifications,' and the justifications could have their own, recursively—but a particular reader just dives as deep as they need to satisfy their personal curiosity. (There are shared justifications that you can link into your argument so you people aren't always wasting time justifying the same things; or you can share from just your own arguments you've written in the past). The debate format required that one proposition be addressed at a time, and the result of a debate is a reconciled hierarchy of claims/justifications. You could ask for critique on personal beliefs, have private debates, or public debates.<p>This looks like the closest thing I've come across since, and I like it, though I'm still curious about the format I was tinkering with...<p>(Also: funny side story: I e-mailed Leslie Lamport about the idea when I was still working on it [because of how I saw it relating to some ideas of his about writing proofs]. Out of respect for his privacy I won't say much about his reply other than that he was... not optimistic that folks would actually use it. I was also surprised by his generosity in reading about my idea and replying to me.)
This is an idea that I (like many many other technical folks, I'm sure!) have given some thought it. I believe, this implementation, in it's current form, will not take off for the following reasons:<p>1) Most issues don't fall on a binary - and are not conducive to the pro/con, positive/negative, yes/no binary.<p>2) Most individual positions are not reached at one end of the spectrum. They start of near center gradually oscillate and deviate the more someone studies a subject. As such, a UX that places pros/cons front and center robs the reader of the actual learning/oscillating phase. I ask that you to find the source of any opinion you hold and try to reach back to it's source. You'll rarely find that it was a table that you studied and picked a side on.<p>4) Discussions should not center around individual issues. Rather it should be communities around a certain topic, where the discussions evolve and debates arise. The OP only does the latter -- which perhaps makes sense if say some communities like sub-reddits use it.<p>3) Expertise is not up for debate. An expert's opinion should not be moderated, or weighed, in the same way as a layman's opinion. you can argue for pure meritocracy, but an expert will simply not indulge in an environment when they have to prove their expertise day-in-and-day-out. The platform needs to acknowledge the parallels with how debates and opinions are shaped AFK.<p>(note above is purely for matters-of-opinions, not for matters-of-fact.)<p>Overall, what you don't need (and what's been done many times) is a table with all positions listed down. What you instead need is to solve for the larger problem, or handling moderation, reputation and expertise, because consensus and debates actually do care about the above. This does not mean anonymous/pseudonymous discussion is not possible, just that the framework has to allow for it in an integrated manner.<p>I have tried multiple implementations of above (not public-ally available), but none satisfactorily handled the above -- it is a hard problem to solve, so I commend and wish all the best to the Kialo team.
I feel after a brief initial read of the landing page that Kialo might be trying to do too much... It seeks to have debates over hot-topics in the public, but also wants to be a tool for private debates, or just for "private discussion?"<p>Then there's also a catering towards this being used in enterprises? I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a product, but the entrepreneur in me screams "too large of a scope!"
I wish the venture good luck and hope its users gain.<p>I decided not to use it for various reasons including:
1. The situations I deal with cannot be reasoned through the skein of a boolean network.
2. The core of a useful discussion, in my mind, is talking with a few people who, in general, are each smarter / more knowledgeable in part of the discussion space, than I.<p>I didn't see provision for such things in Kialo.
@kialo requires 8 pros/cons for a discussion to be discoverable. That sounds like a draconian requirement that likely to damage the platform more, than it'll benefit it. I understand they are trying to keep the quality high, but if users cant discover new content daily, they wont be able to engage with it and will just churn…<p>Hope you guys will lower this limit, as the idea is truly great and Internet need a well-structured discussion platform!
Have you considered fading the text of low score claims?<p>Currently my attention is drawn to good and bad claims equally. Only after reading do I check the score and realize the claim is incorrect.<p>It wastes my time reading bad claims and the thought will stay with me regardless of quality.
Seems like a good platform. Layout looks quite nice. The sidebar opening transition is kind of choppy. Haven't written CSS in a while, but there seems to be quite a bit of layout re-calc happening when everything on the page shifts over.
This is great. I thought i'd use this platform to discuss the most important topic of this week — whether Kylie Jenner's wealth is self-made or not:<p><a href="https://www.kialo.com/kylie-jenners-fortune-is-self-made-16807" rel="nofollow">https://www.kialo.com/kylie-jenners-fortune-is-self-made-168...</a><p>;)
This is VERY similar to a site I helped write back in 2009 called RiledUp.com. Unfortunately it never took off.<p>I hope this platform has better luck.
Symbolic logic is the flow of premise interacting with another premise to form a conclusion. And radial fan-out does not allow premises that are at the edge of the fan-out to correlate with each other for additional but new conclusion.
Unfortunately, Kialo does not have any features for <i>structural</i> reasoning, where the logical connections between arguments are completely formalized and precise. It relies on a human element to check each argument.<p>Edit: How to do this formally? Look at <i>formal systems</i> for hints of how to do it in the 1900s, or <i>category theory</i> for how to do it in the modern day. [0][1]<p>[0] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889v2" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889v2</a><p>[1] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526</a>
Reminds me of arguman.org : <a href="http://en.arguman.org/capitalism-is-not-the-best-system-for-economic-organisation" rel="nofollow">http://en.arguman.org/capitalism-is-not-the-best-system-for-...</a>