Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
The Dunning-Kruger effect is an interesting open question on "how to talk about the unknown." This is significantly easier if the unknown in question is known to at least one participant in the conversation. Even so, it requires a great deal of skill to engage a mind that is mostly interested in, whether by necessity or modern distraction, the pursuit of something else. Insert notification here.
Regarding the "big theory" of internet discussions: I agree with the sentiment that more "scientific conference" would be better. However, "watercooler" and "debate team" are just as necessary. "Watercooler" talk is the often enjoyable commentary which builds the human relationship necessary to engage in the more strenuous "scientific conference" mode. The "debate team" mode is a necessary pre- and post-requisite to the conversation so that the results may be useful in a democracy (wherein rhetoric reigns supreme). At the beginning, it conveys the need for a discussion and clearly defined terms, and so on. At the end of a dialectic conversation, the results must then be repacked into "debate team" form and then conveyed to the proper authorities or otherwise published for future use. If this last step is skipped, the conversation was without any social meaning beyond that which the individuals partaking in it decided to take away from it. This is the underlying significance behind the phrase "actionable information."
That being said, I find your observation potentially useful as a means of filtering social media streams by way of these three categories of conversation. Certainly the "scientific conference" would be the primary view, in the sense of the substance and technical interest, though the translation from and to "debate team" vernacular could preface the discussion and follow consensus, respectively. The "water cooler" commentary may be embedded as perhaps an invisible side note until hovered over the relevant information. FWIW, Knuth just puts his straight in the main text. I would be interested in seeing something like this implemented.
Some commentary for social networks regarding moderation and information curation:
For me, Slashdot was the first network to really hit and reward the "scientific conference" mode. The moderation tactics were generally useful. Though, as effective as it was, even Slashdot suffered from the peer-reviewed group-think and the associated biases against new ideas (or the unknown) that we see in science today. Even today some IT discussions there are good, though the popularity seems to have waned a bit.
HN and Reddit are essentially equivalent to the original digg (democratized peer review) with different target demographics.
Stack Overflow is a competently run moderation system (even if frustratingly anti-newbie) for a very narrow kind of information.
Google+ had a higher standard of posts at the beginning. Some circles seem to fair well in terms of the pursuit of truth, though it still does not filter to the content of interest. For instance, I may like when someone posts something technical or dialectic, though the other 98% of the cat-loving meme-commenting stream is a series of highly effective thought-destroying mental cul-de-sacs. Most social media streams seem to suffer from this.
ResearchGate appears to have been created to address this sort of review-article commentary need. I wish it looked more like HN. =)
Back to work. Cheers!
Joe
Mar 21, 2016, 1:54:39 PM