I would say that this very common phenomenon of people rhetorically/cognitively framing disagreements between people as "both sides", which seems to be commonly interpreted (and I assume, intended) as something like "the 'wrong' side is asserting that these things are 'equivalent/identically equal', which is obviously not true, and therefore their entire argument can be dismissed" is poisoning reality.

I think that approaches like this website are a not yet a perfect solution [1], but it feels like a step in the right direction. An improved implementation would have some clever means of allowing a crowd-sourced decomposition of the issue into it's constituent entities and behaviors, graphically displayed in some magical way to maximize the likelihood of everyone seeing the big picture free from misunderstanding, which "all" parties could agree upon (no agreement means more refinement is needed) and refer to in their arguments (so we're all talking about the same thing), and arguments/thinking could take place with precision (attached to the the specific entities and behaviors where the true disagreement resides).

A lot of people may have a strong aversion to this approach as it would turn easy argumentation into a painstakingly laborious & pedantic process, which is a natural consequence of using slow but accurate cognitive processing, rather than fast but unreliable heuristic processing (the root problem in the first place). Arguments under such a methodology would also more closely resemble the scientific method, or systems analysis in software (where one does not simply throw together an analysis and insist that it is 100% free of material flaws).

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903747 The First result for me (https://www.trophi.com/page/600eb2036c0b5800157eb041) is proof why this idea of "all opinions are equal and should be given equal opportunity to be heard" is bunk.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903962 I don't see the point of this platform being to coddle inferior points of view by elevating them to faux equal footing.

This logically flawed "both sides" heuristic has become extremely broadly distributed through the system. It very commonly makes an explicit appearance in culture war arguments, and it is surely invisibly participating in cognitive processing even where it does not make a visible appearance.

I wonder how many of these bug-ridden heuristics are out there in the wild (there are several others present in this thread already, with only 36 comments), messing up execution for reasons that are not apparent from the UI perspective? If you think of reality as a system (which it technically is) that you had been hired to debug and fix, how might one go about locating all/most instances of such bugs, and then how would you fix them, considering we do not have direct access to the source code, but rather can only "write" to it via the api's that have been made available to us?

[1] Someone points out that a sub-component of a more elaborate platform already exists:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904525

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map

I expect most of the necessary components already exist as features embedded in other platforms, if they could all be mashed up together into a new "Collective Cognition" platform of some sort, I think we'd have something really useful on our hands.

The biggest missing piece that I can see is a means (a user interface for) decomposing complex problem spaces, and then (more difficultly), a way to visually(?) represent this high dimensional space that is understandable to a very broad cross-section of people (in the shorter run, even something that only "smarter" people could understand would be a good start).

Does anyone know of any existing systems out there for the "visual" representation of highly dimensional spaces, in a manner that makes it easy/easier to understand for teams? UML, sequence diagrams, etc are the only approaches I have any awareness of.