Sorry for the navel-gazing, but I thought I’d repost this brain-dump of mine, from April 2009, which currently exists only as a Facebook note. It’s interesting in a way, because it put me on the path to discovering Debategraph, and to using many of the ideas in formulating Poblish in June and July 2009 (here‘s what I boiled down – and developed – the ideas into).
Problems with blogging:
Reading and writing are easy; listening, comprehending, adapting, and acting are optional, and hard.
Quality and ‘level of thought’ are independent.
Disembodied, fragmentary, duplicated, rhetorical, inconsistent.
Arguments die out, rather than resolve. Boredom? Multiple ‘roots’ to the solution?
Current blog-commenting methodology has identical problems. That’s why it’s dissatisfying for bloggers, and often unhelpful, policy-wise.Who learns? Who wins the argument, and how? Sheer weight of numbers on one side? ConservativeHome will choose differently from LabourHome, come what may. Best argument might win, but perhaps only best on its own terms?
Against partisanship? Probably. Against ideology? Not necessarily.
We want policy made, actions taken, but where’s the connection between our words, our arguments, our agreements, and implementation – nationally, or far closer to home. A binding contract for politicians? Gap between entering into a debate and taking responsibility/ paying for implementation is the ‘irresponsibility’ gap that plagues online debate, and the alienation gap for casual politicos.
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Imagine a network/tree of arguments (agreements?), evidence, and contexts/environments. How can these be seen as a network – visually. Can every argument be reduced to this format, to political concepts/’atoms’, and plotted? Could this be done by volunteers, or via an algorithm? A manual mapping project? People do this every time they comment on, or respond to an argument, but the decentralisation / duplication of blogs, and use of the English language, means that ‘revelations’ can be missed.
Why a network, or tree? Because all ‘successful’ arguments – leaves/nodes on the tree – must be consistent with one another / branched to another.
Can this technique identify logical inconsistencies, stripping them out? And deliberate misdirection?
Surely we will have an infinity of trees (‘policy spaces’?), each one based around irreducible, mutually inconsistent ‘atoms’, but as the society / polity decides upon its atoms, the number of possible ‘policy-spaces’ reduces until one remains, and a fully consistent policy-map remains.
This might partly be how policy is currently made, and definitely how it’s implemented, but all this goes on behind closed doors.
Only a temporary equilibrium: any ‘fact’ or argument could break it.
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‘Evidence’: how can this be weighed against (any consistent) argument without an external ‘value’ system. Well, how is it now?
The key points for me are, still:
- Reading and writing are easy; listening, comprehending, adapting, and acting are optional, and hard.
- Arguments die out, rather than resolve.
- Gap between entering into a debate and taking responsibility/ paying for implementation is the ‘irresponsibility’ gap that plagues online debate [...]
I’m not sure why there’s been so little interest in addressing these problems. Actually, no, I’m pretty sure I do know why, but aren’t the consequences of not dealing with them obvious enough?
