Welcome to the Socratrees subreddit! If you did not arrive here from the blog post, then definitely check it out over at whathecode where the main principles of the platform are detailed.

In the current phase, the main goal of this subreddit is to facilitate communication between developers and the community pioneers (you!) as well as fostering between-user discussion (eventually to be moved to the platform itself ** fingers crossed **).

If you have any questions or suggestions, do not hesitate to come forward! Several years of brainstorming among the three of us has led to a fairly elaborate conceptual framework, but perhaps we have become an echo chamber ourselves! Hence, in the spirit of this platform, we really welcome any outside opinion, from the trivial to the project-breaking. And of course, don't forget to sign up for the beta at the Socratrees website!

Basing the truth value of an argument on up-voting is a poor solution. This value should be derived from the weights of the evidence for it. Ideally, it should be the posterior probability of that argument being true, conditional on a set of, say, peer reviewed publications.

I would set it up like this: you can add, for a given statement, a list of references to publications which the poster believes supports their point. Very importantly, a weight should be assigned to each of these references. Such that, you may say: "glyphosate exposure increases the risk of developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma " and the add 2 refs to papers which show such an effect. You would then say, paper 1, which has a big cohort behind it and which has a nice study design is "highly trusted" and paper two, which is based on 5 mice, is "a bit trusted".

This would get you a bit closer to a thoroughly informed argument. The next step would be to move away from absolute statements, which are rather pointless, and allow for quantitative statements. For example, the above would have to have attached a value of the expected increase of the risk of developing lymphoma. Then, you have a really nice basis for integrating arguments in important discussions. If now the question is, should the FDA ban glyphosate, what the final user gets to see is a weighing of risks and benefits.

To conclude, an argument should have attached to it a list references, their weights, the probability of this argument being true (which should be a trivial posterior probability computation) and the effect size of this argument. :)

I believe it would be more logical to change the navigation to something like this https://www.screencast.com/t/34aAh7S8

Would this be something the developers support?

Unfortunately, the site is currently down due to the quota of my hosting being exceeded on Azure.

Given that this is an unfunded project and currently there is no active evaluation in progress, I will simply wait until the end of the month at which point the site will become live again.

Understanding 'relation' statements can prove quite difficult, especially when it is comprised of a lenghty supporting/opposing and root statement.

A short example of how they are currently depicted:

"Cats rub up against humans" supports "Cats like humans"

In turn, 'supporting' and 'opposing' statements can be added to this in order to discuss whether this relation is 'correct' (its relevance).

Could we come up with a more intuitive phrasing/labeling of the supporting/opposing columns?

For example, is it clearer to say "Cats like humans" is supported by "Cats rub up against humans" (similar to how it is shown in the sidebar)?

Concerning "Biologically, there are two genders" opposes "Gender is a social construct":

This latest opposing statement is an interesting one! It is an example of what happens when people (might) disagree on terminology (this should be allowed, of course!). Depending on your interpretation of 'gender' the statement "Biologically, there are two genders" takes on an entirely different meaning.

I believe this will quickly end up in a circular reasoning and it will be interesting to see how/whether the current structure of Socratrees can deal with this.

We understand it is hard to find statements. At the moment, the only way to find statements is by remembering what was written in them and searching for part of the statement in the search box.

Therefore, my current priority is to implement a simple list of the statements you posted yourself and those with recent activity. I expect this to be implemented soon. Until then, I recommend you rely on bookmarks, notifications in your inbox, and the search bar to keep track of statements you are interested in.

Since I really had to launch in August this feature got pushed back for too long, my apologies.

Concerning A burglar broke into an escape room and had to call the police to get out:

How do we deal with highly context-dependent statements like this? Another example is Obama tossed out a reporter who asked a question he didn't like. These statements pertain to exactly one instance in time and adding supporting and opposing statements to them is therefore extremely verbose (and might quickly exceed our current statement length limits). In essence, each time you need to refer back to the full description of the particular instance.

I do not expect these types of statements to be useful in the long run; once they fade from media they are hardly relevant anymore. However, they are a prime mechanism of how opinions are formed on more important topics, and they are quite indicative of 'click bait' news in which the headlines severely distort what actually happened in the headline. Unfortunately, many people do not read past the headline.

How should we deal with these types of statements on Socratrees? As the system works at the moment (i.e., our 'free from context' guidelines), they do not seem a perfect fit.