From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 10 2003 - 12:06:52 MDT
On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 10:35:33AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> I think it may have been Earthweb or David's Sling. It was written
> by one of the Drexleristas anyway.
Didn't Marc Stiegler write both of those books? Didn't know he was a
Drexlerista. (Didn't know there were...)
> There was some kind of auditorium, I think with live debaters, and people
> could add comments in text which would appear on screens, they could
> fact-check each other and revise their opinions. Highly rated questions
> would get highlighted and float to the top of the screens where they
> would be posed to the experts arguing the two sides, all in real time.
> I think it was supposed to be a depiction of the idea of a Science Court.
I remember this description, so it's probably from David's Sling.
> with online? I think our recent terrible failure to achieve anything
> more than name-calling in political debate here demands a new approach.
"It's not the process, it's the people." Well, maybe. But populations seem
to matter. I'm on mailing lists for Lois Bujold and Steven Brust. Both have
a lot of intelligent people on them, and some variety of opinions. But the
Brust one had a really long religious discussion which totally failed to blow
up, and I'm sure the Bujold one would have done so in a tenth as many
messages. I've been told in past years the Bujold list could have managed
such things, but it's become more flammable.
If you've got a population inclined to name-calling or to paranoid judgements,
or to throw out conflicting data as flawed and biased (a common feature in
political arguments since a lot of statistics all around are flawed), I think
it'd be difficult to make progress.
-xx- Damien X-)
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