QED
Ads on the internet are almost as good as the ones in Harper's. Either they're ads for products nobody could possibly want (hands up if you've ever bought something off a website other than e-Bay or Amazon), or they're the information superhighway equivalent of vanity publishing, someone with cash deciding his ideas won't sell themselves on the merits.
This doesn't mean that all internet ads are worthless. It just means that the websites advertised are owned by people with low self-esteem, but also a lot of nerve.
I mention this because -- why else? -- I came across an ad today for this website, Honestargument.com. It's pretty neat, the idea being that nested trees will solve all our current argumentative woes. From now on, debates will be conducted in a LIFO, depth-first rhetorical style. From some inexorable principle embedded in graph theory, we can conclude that misunderstandings, flame wars, imperfect analogies and hypocrisy will be utterly expunged. And if only Socrates had been born after Euler, they might not have killed him.
It's a new website, but it's working already. Look:
You heard it here first: Rush Limbaugh has little standing to question others' morality. It's a tidy proof, and I expect it to completely baffle the "Rush Limbaugh has plenty of standing to question others' morality" crowd. He'll be off the air by 2007. Good work, Honestargument.com!
This doesn't mean that all internet ads are worthless. It just means that the websites advertised are owned by people with low self-esteem, but also a lot of nerve.
I mention this because -- why else? -- I came across an ad today for this website, Honestargument.com. It's pretty neat, the idea being that nested trees will solve all our current argumentative woes. From now on, debates will be conducted in a LIFO, depth-first rhetorical style. From some inexorable principle embedded in graph theory, we can conclude that misunderstandings, flame wars, imperfect analogies and hypocrisy will be utterly expunged. And if only Socrates had been born after Euler, they might not have killed him.
It's a new website, but it's working already. Look:
 Rush Limbaugh has little standing to question others morality |
 He has been divorced three times |
| He has had multiple run-ins with the law involving drugs |
| He is a hypocrite |
You heard it here first: Rush Limbaugh has little standing to question others' morality. It's a tidy proof, and I expect it to completely baffle the "Rush Limbaugh has plenty of standing to question others' morality" crowd. He'll be off the air by 2007. Good work, Honestargument.com!
posted by apk01004 at 7:32 PM
2 Comments:
Hey there, HonestArgument.com is my site.
While the argument you point out may seem a little cheesy, there's no question that Limbaugh and many other deeply flawed conservatives spend a lot of time moralizing and denouncing the lifestyles of others. (Of course, you get a lot of it on the other side, too, from members of Greenpeace, PETA, etc. But this particular argument is about Limbaugh)
Second, I make no claim that it or any other argument on the site is complete. The point of the site, as I note both on the home page and in my ads, is the discovery process, the mapping out of all sides. And (as of this past Saturday) anyone willing to register is able to add nodes to any argument. (Whereas before the argument's Moderator was responsible for adding nodes based on user comments)
I hope one day to figure out an algorithmic way to "score" arguments, but until then each reader is free to interpret the result set in their own way. But they have to do so without ignoring inconvenient facts, or assertions that fail to fit into their belief systems
As I note on my site news blog, "At their best, blogs and other forums (fora) on the net serve as individual nodes in a great and widespread conversation. However, these media inherently suffer from multiple flaws, the most important of which is that you rarely see an attempt at cataloguing the entirety of an argument. In the few cases where this is laid out, it is almost always done so in a simplistic list of assertions for and against the argument."
Simply put, HonestArgument.com imposes structure and completeness on an argument.
Moving on, I'd like to point out the NSA Warrantless Wiretapping argument which shows a lot more of the potential for the site.
http://honestargument.com/arg/8
Oh for heaven's sake... It's turning into a trackback jamboree here.
I was just funnin' ya. I actually think your website is pretty cool.
Although without any kind of function allowing an argument to refute its parent node, nothing will ever be proven. I wish I could offer suggestions on how to determine when an argument is proven, but my algorithmic days are long over. Until somone comes up with a solution, the arguments on Honestargument.com are going to have to remain "vast and trunkless legs of stone, standing in a desert." Look upon my NSA-legality tree, ye mighty, and despair!
But on the other hand, I am always one for nested trees, whatever they may be in service of. So rock on, Mr. Berman.
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