Comment by Fellshard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fellshard | Hacker News Reader

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Usually the question embeds an initial assumption that one answer or the other is the 'default' state, so anchor bias is introduced in the very consideration of the question.

Visiting the page, I'm seeing fewer anchor issues than I'd seen previously, but still seeing some like the following:

'Students Keep "No Platforming" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?'

'Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?'

'Is Science Political?'

Some of these can't be phrased any other way, but a little tuning might help: the latter, for example, has a subtle bias towards science being apolitical, and introduces a new claim: that science may be political. Rephrasing the question 'Is science political or apolitical?' would leave you with only an ordering anchor bias - a slight weighting towards the first item in the list.

This also seems to be a factor in the foundational claim made in each question: it usually picks one side or the other, and all arguments and counterarguments are then firmly grounded in that claim. Perhaps expressing each claim as both a positive and negative claim would make a difference.

For example, in the 'no-platforming' question, the foundational claim is 'Social justice movements should abandon the use of no-platforming at universities'. If there were a way to present both claims as foundational - 'should abandon' vs. 'should embrace', e.g. - you would get a more fleshed-out debate, as the arguments for and against the one are not necessarily arguments against and for the other, respectively.

EDIT: I do see you've added what you call 'multi-thesis debates', this seems to tackle the latter half of this post fairly directly.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

It's something we have been thinking about a lot. As you write, there is no real good way of dealing with this. Stating both options will make theses read convoluted.

Writing the thesis as a question doesn't help much either and confuses some people. (We have tried.)

We think that the best place to correct for anchoring and setting up the stage for a discussion is the discussion info, the popup that appears the first time you load a discussion.

Regarding the "should abandon" and "should embrace", what kind of new claims do you think would arise, compared to a single thesis "should abandon"? We normally were able to fit all claims of two theses multis in comparative single thesis debates, sometimes though not at the first level as they require an implicit assumption to be stated as a parent pro or con.

We leave it to users, but consider comparative single thesis debates much easier to write than multis with a lot of linking. If there are more than two options though, multis are required.

We see most multis in team situations, not public discussions, e.g. us discussing which framework, library or design to choose.

It's a very good point that presenting two polar positions does not necessarily mean bias is removed, and may indeed remove more nuanced positions from view.

Perhaps my reticence comes more from the fairly dual nature of Kialo's discussions: an initial premise, and then points strictly for or against that premise, which makes it difficult to discuss, say, middle or nuanced positions. But that may not be the role of the platform to fit all those nuances into one discussion, either; that could easily be a use case for spinning up a new discussion, instead.

Glad to see you trying to set this kind of ground for discussion, regardless. I do hope it becomes a useful tool for people to dissect these discussions and gain an accurate understanding of arguments instead of a distorted one; I think that may be one of the most valuable aspects of this tool, by a long shot.

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