# A medium for more rational discussion

It would be cool if online discussions allowed you to 1) declare your claims, 2) declare how your claims depend on each other (ie. make a dependency tree), 3) discuss the claims, and 4) update the status of the claim by saying whether or not you agree with it, and using something like the [text shorthand for uncertainty](/r/discussion/lw/iv0/creating_a_text_shorthand_for_uncertainty/) to say how confident you are in your agreement/disagreement.

I think that mapping out these things visually would allow for more productive conversation. And it would also allow newcomers to the discussion to quickly and easily get up to date, rather than having to sift through tons of comments. On this note, there should also probably be something like an [answer wiki](http://www.quora.com/Quora-Answer-Wikis-Feature/What-is-an-Answer-Wiki-on-Quora) for each claim to summarize the arguments and say what the consensus is.

I get the feeling that it should be flexible though. That probably means that it should be accompanied by the normal commenting system. Sometimes you don't actually know what your claims are, but need to "talk it out" in order to figure out what they are. Sometimes you don't really know how they depend on each other. And sometimes you have something tangential to say (on that note, there should probably be an area for tangential comments, or at least a way to flag them as tangential).

As far who would be interested in this, obviously this Less Wrong community would be interested, and I think that there are definitely some other online communities that would (Hacker News, some subreddits...).

Also, this may be speculating, but I would hope that it would develop a reputation for the most effective way to have a productive discussion. So much so that people would start saying, "go outline your argument on \[name\]". Maybe there'd even be pressure for politicians to do this. If so, then I think this could put pressure on society to be more rational.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: If anyone is actually interested in building this, you definitely have my permission (don't worry about "stealing the idea"). I want to build it, but 1) I don't think I'm a good enough programmer yet, and 2) I'm busy with my startup.

EDIT: Another idea: if you think that a statement commits an established fallacy, then you should be able to flag it (like [this](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1180/0*ZbM17O_TeidBxbVM.gif)). And if enough other people agree, then the statement is underlined or highlighted or something. The advantage to this is that it makes the discussion less "bulky". A simple version of this would be flagging things as [less than DH6](http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). But there are obviously a bunch of other things worth flagging that Eliezer has talked about in the sequences that are pretty non-controversial.

EDIT: Here is a [rough mockup](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wisoy2og4rb4zps/rationalmedium.pdf) of how it would look. Notes: 

\- The claims should show how many votes of agreement/disagreement they got. Probably using [text shorthand for uncertainty](/r/discussion/lw/iv0/creating_a_text_shorthand_for_uncertainty/).

\- The claims should be colored green if there is a lot of agreement, and red if there is a lot of disagreement.

\- See edit above. Commenting in the discussion should be like [this](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1180/0*ZbM17O_TeidBxbVM.gif). And you should be able to flag statements as fallacious in a similar way. If there is enough agreement about the flag, the statement should be underlined in red or something.