Skip to content

Social Media Discussions

Jump to bottom
Nathan Broadbent edited this page Jul 28, 2019 · 9 revisions

Hacker News

  • Argdown discussion on Hacker News

    • (This is what motivated me to start working on the project!)

    • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20476888

      I abandoned Kialo with a conclusion that pro/con trees don't map well to reality; we need graphs of facts and their relationships. (Also, my gut feeling is that when you're talking about "arguments" instead of "facts", "evidence" and probabilities, you're in business of convincing, not truth seeking).

    • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20478870

      No, I'm not aware of better tools. I'm beginning to feel like I should start prototyping one. I though about this topic a bit on numerous occasions, and I keep feeling that trees don't map well to this use case. I still think a directed graph is necessary, and likely one supporting cycles. The structure will be imposed by reality itself. Anything less than a directed graph will fail to capture causal relationships between entities. yEd... well, I spent a lot of hours with yEd Live recently, and I have complaints :). Like, where's the ability to simply place a piece of text on a diagram as a node?! It's ironic, but it seems to me that in 2019, there still isn't a good tool implementing the simple concept of infinite, pannable, zoomable canvas for typing on it and building arbitrary directed graphs on it.

    • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20476012

      I agree. But this is half the solution. The other half is an authoritative source that tracks the arguments and evidence for various hypotheses and theories. So a layperson can understand the basic argument and the strength of the evidence for or against it in about 15 minutes, but fractal in nature so that one can descend all the way down to the raw data if they choose. Something like Wikipedia, except for hypotheses and theories about how existence works. Then we can just link people to a source that outlines the flaws in their pet theories. Side note: I think diet advocates and climate enthusiasts would be in for a bit of a shock from such a resource when they have to deal with the fact that epidemiology and model building are some of the weakest forms of evidence. But I digress.

    • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20480438

      Feedback loops. I don't think modelling "from argument X follows argument Y" is productive; what's productive is modelling that observable phenomenon X is correlated with Y, or causes Y, or has this-and-that impact on Y. At this level, things can be stuck in feedback loops, either positive or negative.

      Will increase in coal exports of Poland increase Poland's CO₂ footprint? Let's try to model it the way I think about it:

     Coal exports
          ^
          | [provides Z coal to]
          |
          |     [needs α*X = A kWh for coal]
     Mining coal <---------------------\
          |                            |
          | [provides X coal to]       |
          v                            |
   Coal power plants                   |
    |     |                            |
    |     | [γ*X = Y kWh burning coal] |
    |     v                            |
    |  Electricity --------------------/
    |
    | [burned coal into β*X = N kg of CO₂]
    v
  CO₂ emissions

You have a cycle there: Mining coal -> Coal power plants -> Electricity -> Mining coal. Given A < Y, it's a negative feedback loop. It's a cycle that exists in real life (and the basis of the concept of EROI)! If this were a reactive model, you could tweak the value of Z to see how X, Y, A and ultimately N change. But even without reactivity, you can clearly see that the answer to original question is "yes, increasing coal exports will increase Poland's carbon footprint". And there's little left open to interpretation or accusations of subjectivity.

If you don't like the answer that the model gives, it also makes some alternative strategies apparent! In this case: can we find a way to reduce α or β to compensate? Or increase γ? Or maybe add an alternative CO₂ sink for the Coal power plants -> CO₂ emissions edge? Note that these alternative strategies involve manipulating reality, not your argument.

I think we should be doing more of this kind of modelling. Building more accurate maps of the world, and reasoning straight from them, instead of trying to build complicated webs of arguments.

Twitter

  • Tweet from @jessfraz

    How would you automate ensuring a social platform only hosted content that was a source of knowledge with accurate references, kinda like a machine learning model for genuineness?

Clone this wiki locally