I am actually not sure I would call Kialo debates, debates, they seem to me more like argument maps, coupled with Wikipedia. Also, they aren't antagonistic and there isn't really a winner.
I have gotten plenty of claims rejected because they were already in the debate.
I think the most important aspect of an ideal platform is that its users are not encouraged to write outrageous statements that then garner the most likes / upvotes, as is often the case on Twitter and Reddit.
At HN I am actually frequently surprised that things stay as civil as they do, though, as you write, they often go round and round and are a bit confusing for readers, which isn't HN's fault but just the nature of threaded commenting forums.
On Kialo the sources in the arguments are normally discussed in pros and cons underneath the argument they are in, or in the comments of a claim, sort of a meta discussion where folks discuss how to best formulate a claim. Some of their argument trees nest 10 levels deep.
Very much agree, let's not forget that this kind of thinking is most likely the reason Steve Jobs is not anymore among us. Rational reasoning does certainly not always lead to the best outcome, but on average, it does.
> What else than rationality would be better? Gut feelings? Emotional arguments?
I have heard that Twitter is working on something like this. The hard part of course being the detection of what is an argument and what is commentary or anecdote sharing.
>As an aside, I wonder how good grammar checkers have become since the Word 97 days? My grammar is utterly terrible and I wish I could get it proofread before I make comments.
Try it for free, Google Docs added it recently for English. Otherwise, perhaps one of these dedicated sites or use their browser extensions, will be of interest:
> Argument mapping is not just about pro/con trees; but pro/con trees are a nearly-lossless way to capture how people actually debate things, so they’re a good “ingested primary source” format to keep around and refer back to when you’re trying to summarize and judge a debate (rather than having to listen to the audio transcript over and over, or read through a linear stream of debate text.)
We have used Kialo for exactly this. The parties that we suspect to start quarrelling about a decision have to capture their reasoning in a Kialo and send it to everybody before the actual meeting. And then we use the Kialo tree as a source document during the meeting. And if new arguments are brought up, the person taking notes just adds them.
Or if a heated debate ensues, one person starts mapping the arguments in Kialo, for later reference.
One problem we ran into though, is that older management folks seem to prefer traditional meeting notes, instead of hipster pro/con trees. Also, argument trees don't allow for nice print outs.
They actually do have linking[0] and map creators are usually quite anal about only having one instance of each argument in a map. So instead of accepting your suggestion they will just link the already present one there, which can be a bit annoying.
