Giving Weight To Online Words

It seems to me that political debates nowadays are a waste of time. Two people come together to debate an issue and wind up either talking about different things or don’t address what the other person is saying, much less provide concrete support for their arguments. There’s just too many tricks to fudge your way out of really committing to something and sticking to it. I blame the dependence of our electoral process on audio/video media. You can’t slow down what they’re saying and pick apart their words, weigh their meanings, and make reasoned judgments if their words are flying past you at the speed of speech. One candidate speaks, and the others have to scribble quickly on a paper pad to remember what to say in their rebuttal five minutes later. There’s no provision for going back at leisure and examining the merit of every spoken word. This isn’t just a disadvantage for candidates, it’s a detriment to the electoral process: it diminishes our ability to correctly choose the best candidate.

What we need is a shift from audio/video media to written text and an emphasis on constructing and critiquing arguments using logic and verifiable facts. No more hand raising. No more thirty-second answers to loaded questions. No more Jack Johnson versus John Jackson (see Futurama). In order to participate in the electoral process, candidates should have to present formal arguments on a range of precisely-defined topics. Then all the other candidates can take turns inspecting and critiquing each premise and argue whether their argument is valid and sound. It is only through a system like this that you can really get down to the heart of things.

I think a cool experiment would be to build a computer system, maybe a web site, that could facilitate arguments like these. It wouldn’t need to be used solely by electoral candidates. If you could guarantee that only real people contributed to the arguments and critiques in the system, then judgments made in that system could have real logical and political significance. Imagine if the system was very popular and many people read it, contributed to it, and deferred to it. Judgments made in this system could have an impact on real-world decisions.

I would pair this system with a public forum that facilitated interesting and relevant political discussions, where posted articles may be rated somehow by quality of their content, and highly-rated authors may rise to prominence and be heard by the rest of us. I’m not aware of any other such system.