Strange Aeons

There are a series of interesting posts over at Jean Goodwin's blog that looks at the process of debate and the tactics used therein, using the debate between Marc Morano and Mark Maslin as an exemplar.

The tactics discussed are:

1. Civility - How do the speakers interact? Do they interact directly with each other or via the interviewer (in this case). Do the speakers maintain the appearance of civility all the way through? How do they address each other? Does this change during the debate? How do the speakers characterise each other? Are the speakers having fun? Are they irritated? Are the speakers engaging each other or are they dismissive?
2. Hedging & Asserting - Hedging is using words or phrases to limit the amount of imposition on the other party. Whilst debate is, by its nature, about disgreement, hedging backs away from open disagreement by using phrases like "I think" or "I believe" out of a desire to avoid a confrontation. Asserting sets up a confrontational position and hedging generally weakens such a position.
3. What's the issue? - What are the speaker's arguing about? Why are they arguing about this issue? Have they been influenced or coerced into the debate? Has the motivating issue changed from the original issue? Did one of the speaker's manage to shift the issue from the originating issue to something else that is easier to win?
4. Bringing the arguments home - Assess the arguments made during the debate. Have the speakers managed to persuasively link their supporting data to their conclusions? Are all the steps in the argument explicit or are there gaps? Are these gaps because there is no evidence? or are they rhetorical? or both?    
5. The adverse witness - Do both speakers quote the same data or sources? Are these used to draw different conclusions? Do the speakers try to use their opponents quoted data or sources against them?
6. The appeal to authority, by the numbers - Sometimes we have to trust what the experts say? Are we being asked to look at the evidence and draw our own conclusions or are we being asked to trust the experts who have already done this for us. Goodwin makes an interesting point about the role of appeals to authority in the modern world:
   

   Appropriate appeals to authority were taken off the list of fallacies long ago. For good reason: we couldn’t survive without others’ expertise. We’re everywhere dependent on knowledges divided up into disciplines far more minutely than the work in Adam Smith’s old pin factory. In some cases our very lives may hang on the specialized knowledge that went into the design of a car’s floor mat or a factory’s system for washing spinach–although we’re only likely to remember it when the design goes bad.

7. Scientific Consensus - How do consensus claims work? Goodwin refers to one of her own projects which investigates this question. An interesting aspect is depicted called "rising above" which can turn the audience if they perceive that you are being condescending or arrogant. This is of course a risk if you are presenting yourself as the expert or amongst the experts as it could lead your opponent, or the audience, to perceive that you believe them to somehow be beneath you or not sufficiently educated to understand for themselves.

8. Repeating oneself all over again (Argument Craftsmanship) - Is the speaker taking a general idea, that has been expressed many times before, and adapting it to the current situation? Has the idea been formulated and refined in such a way as to provide a logically strong position, but no stronger? In this case, Goodwin suggests the use of topoi in the form of small but forceful chunks of domain knowledge that you can organise and assert as required to support your position or attack your opponents position.    

9. Take advantage of your opponents' commitments - Do the speakers each build their case based on the commitments incurred by their opponent? This approach was introduced in the adverse witness post where it was noted that in order to debate where there are numerous constrictions, e.g. issue complexity, limited audience knowledge, limited debate time, using shared concessions is a good way to make progress. Essentially, one of the most basic and powerful tactics for winning a debate is being able to take the things that your opponent has said and turn them around, use them against your opponent.

All in all a good analysis of the debate from a rhetorical perspective. Analysing those aspects of the debate that can be separated from the specific things that were said and the specific effect that they had on speakers and audience, and can be more generally identified as tactics for winning the debate.

This post, "Forbes' Rich List of Nonsense" over at Real Climate talks about some of the tactics used by arguers in the climate change debate. These tactics are introduced in a commentary that picks apart a Forbes magazine article "Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts".

One argumentative technique that is quite interesting is the so called Gish Gallop in which an arguer raises many obscure and marginal points in order to make their opponents position appear to be doubtful and unsupported. This relies on the complexity of the domain under discussion, and the fact that an adequately prepared attacker can raise a barrage of points that the defender cannot hope to address in sufficient depth in real time. These points are used to persuade the audience of the instability of the argued position whilst the attacker, by appearing to know more than the defender or at least appearing to pick holes in the argument that on the surface appear to unravel it entirely, gains a temporarily strong position. This is what makes the Gish Gallop so devastating, the attacker only has to raise doubts, they do not have to support their attacking position, whilst the defender has to raise a defeating counter argument against each point raised to keep their audience. This suggests a fundamental imbalance in that the attacking party need not support their countering assertions they merely need raise them.

In one sense this is not such a terrible thing, if I want to convince you of something then I should be able to assemble a supporting argument and successfully repel any attacks. Without reason to reject my position, a rationale person should accept my justified conclusions until a successful counter-argument is found. The problem is that many arguments in scientific domains rely on a level of background knowledge that the audience to the dialogue may not have. To address each of the points raised by the attacker may take a lot of time, perhaps more than is available during a debate,

There are two factors that make the Gish Gallop so devastating:

1. An audience to be swayed
2. A real time debate

Well lets look at when this kind of technique is used. This kind of technique is very useful when the issue at stake is decided in the public arena, or at least where the public has a lot of input into the final decision making process. It is not about persuading your opponent but about persuading persons other than your opponent. This is the first aspect that has to be recognised. Many of us, especially those with a scientific background, naturally argue against our opponent because we relish the engagements with our ideas, but quite often, especially within certain domains, we don't recognise that there is an associated public interest and that our attacker may not care about arguing with us but may care more about being seen to argue with us. So we have to recognise that the aim of the argument may be to persuade an audience rather than our opponent, and that persuading an audience is different to persuading an individual.

Given sufficient time to fully address each point, the Gish Gallop is not a devastating technique. It is only when the time factor is included that it is harmful. Therefore, as an arguer you have to recognise when it is being used against you and meet the technique head on. A potential defence against the Gallop is suggested above. The audience naturally assumes that the defender must defend against all attacks and the attacker need only make the attack and sit back whilst the defender addresses every point. I agree, a defender must address each relevent point raised against their position if only as a matter of due diligence in ensuring that you can defend against each potential attack should they be raised again in the future. That said, because of the constraints of the dialogues in the kind of situations where the Gallop is used, it can be difficult to respond to every point. One technique to use to mitigate the destructiveness of the Gallop is to reflect the attack back onto the attacker. Instead of immediately responding to the attack by defending against it, ensure that for each attacking point made, the defender can establish how that attack is relevant and why it should be defended against. It is easy for the attacker to wield a shallow knowledge of the domain to make an argument appear weak and easily attacked but if the attacker is vigorously engaged and made to spell out clearly how the attack is valid and relevant then they need more knowledge than just a bulleted list of attacks, they need a broad, holistic knowledge of the domain. Given that this kind of attack is played out in the public arena, and works because it is intended to sway the audience rather than the opponent, the counter works because it is also directed towards the audience and rebalances the dialogue. If the defender must adequately defend against all attacks then it is reasonable to make the attacker first establish that those attacks are actually relevant and have a bearing on the dialoge. Otherwise we are just looking at a relation of the Chewbacca defence.

Wow, where did the last month go? I am recently back from the second Argument Interchange Format (AIF) meeting which was held at the Dalmunzie Hotel in rural Scotland. The list of delegates to this meeting read like a who's who of online argumentation researchers - people who are developing argumentative tools which, in some way, communicate argumentative information between themselves and to their users. All in all the meeting went well. We achieved the aim of writing a first draft of a specification for the second AIF which includes fixes for many of the problems we have discovered since the original format was specified and introduces some new elements that many of us have noticed were glaringly omitted from the original. In terms of running and organising the event, there were some things that went really well such as:

• Ensuring that all delegates prepared a position statement beforehand so that rather than meeting and starting with "what are we going to talk about" we got straight to the job of discussing the next version of AIF.
• The first night over dinner we all wrote questions onto post it notes that framed the sorts of things that we were interested in. These were used to create a number of topic/discussion groups (which later became major organising elements of the paper draft) and whittle the 23 delegates into a manageable number of working groups with shared interests.

Other things of course worked less well, for example,

• 23 computer scientists using Google Docs to collaboratively edit documents is fine. Except when you are in rural Scotland where your internet feed is provided via two-way satellite communications which are very quickly saturated, and suffer from fairly high latency anyhow.

Some lessons learned:

• Google Docs works quite well for collaboratively editing documents. Who knew? It even works well if you are using it to collaboratively edit LaTeX source, although obviously you don't get to compile it to anything useful or check source errors within Google Docs.
• Make sure that people aren't editing offline then copy-pasting into the Google Doc, as each time they do this they reintroduce the same errors that you just got finished fixing. (This one caused both myself and John to swear quite a bit)
• If you are working with LaTeX then don't forget to install it onto your laptop before you go as you then have to shell into a remote server which has a working LaTeX environment in order to compile the aforementioned LaTeX source into a PDF.
• Set up a local network using a small wireless access point and make some shared directories available on a small server such as a mac mini so that you are not transmitting all that data over the hotel's network all the time. We caused the Hotel to have to reset their router several times over the course of the meeting.
• Investigate collaborative software, such as Gobby, or a versioning system such as Mercurial that can run on the local server to keep track of the collaborative edits rather than relying on Google Docs. Although Google worked reasonable well I still had to go through the following steps to get a PDF generated:

1. Download the document from Google Docs as a txt file & save it as .tex file
2. Run the tex file through dos2unix
3. Get rid of any final non-printable ascii characters using the following:

   $ tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' < file-with-binary-chars > clean-file

4. Compile as usual.

My favourite element of the new specification is the inclusion of support for dynamic argumentation. I had attended the meeting with a clear personal plan to ensure that the AIF2.0 include support for dialogue and I was assigned to the working group on dialogue with Bart Verheij, Raquel Mochales , and David Glasspool. One of the things that quickly became apparent was that thinking of the AIF in terms of monologic and dialogic argument was quite limiting and that other researchers had quite clear needs which wouldn't covered by an AIF which accounted for just arguments and dialogues. Instead what we developed was a model that saw the core AIF, version 1.0, as a model of static arguments and AIF2.0 as including both this as well as dynamic extensions that enable us to model not just dialogue but also other aspects of dynamic argument such as representing the order of argument elements for when analysing rhetorical and presentational aspects of an argument (thanks Raquel) and the history of the construction of an argument (thanks David).

or authority versus involvement as Alan Rusbridger describes it in his recent Hugh Cudlipp lecture in which he asks Does Journalism Exist? The us versus them refers to the idea that in the past information was held or restricted to certain authorities who controlled how that information was presented, consumed, and reused. More recently, this order has changed and the consumers are now as likely to also be the creators, the reader is no longer solely a passive consumer, but lives in

"a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgements; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority."

This struck me as interesting and succinctly defines one of my more recent research activities which has revolved around designing interactions, and associated software infrastructure, to support online argumentation. By this I mean the necessary software and infrastructure to provide support for those people who want to:

• exercise their own judgement,
• create their own content,
• articulate their own views, and
• learn from their peers

just as Alan mentioned in his lecture. Although many of these activities can already be performed by those who are sufficiently able and motivated, the supporting technology is still rudimentary. Just as we are still trying to develop the best persuasive interfaces to influence behaviour, we are still trying to develop the best interfaces to support online argumentative interaction and thereby improve critical literacy. There are at least two approaches that we can take. One approach is via education, for example, my introductory undergraduate module in problem solving and critical thinking is exactly the kind of introductory course that should be a prerequisite for anybody who wants to be able to say that they have had an education. Not that my module is perfect, far from it, just that the nature of the module; teaching students how to discover the structure of arguments, to see where there are holes or errors in the reasoning, to recognise when a rhetorical trick is begin used against them; these are all the kinds of skills that members of a knowledge society should possess. At the moment this is also the kind of topic that is left to a kind of inate ability, some people are just good at arguing, and others are good at being mislead by those in the know. However education doesn't solve the problem of lack of explicit support in the infrastructure that we use to communicate. This leads directly to my second approach: building the tools that support online argument, enabling people to create their content, whilst also guiding and supporting the process of articulating viewpoints and exercising judgements. My initial prototype for an argublogging system was outlined in a CMNA workshop paper last summer and uses nothing more than the web simpliciter, some browser situated javascript, and an aggregation server, to begin the process of supporting web users who have just read something online that they agree or disagree with and want to respond. Of course it is easy to respond online, anyone can set up a blog in minutes and link back to the original. The problem is that ordinary links carry very little information other than the fact that one place links unidirectionally to another. Much of the contextual information about how you are responding is lost, for example, to know whether I am supportive or antagonistic with respect to the quote above from Rusbridger's lecture requires a reader to read and understand this post. Wouldn't it be nicer if that relationship was recorded? Even better, wouldn't it be great if you could see whether anybody else had responded to any aspects of this post elsewhere on the web? Ideally you would structure all of those quotes and responses into a single dialogue, gatherered from all of their locations across the web, possibly you might even want to visualise this dialogue, seeing the structure of the various arguments that make up the dialogue. Essentially this is what my argument blogging system does, enables web users to harvest textual quotes and respond to them within a structured dialogue. This structure is captured and stored in a web-accessible database (AIFDB), in an RDF language that reifies the Argument Interchange Format, and thus becomes a Semantic Web data source, ripe with all of the potential that that entails.

As we are looking at rhetorical devices and ways to win an argument this, American Rhetoric is a great resource for finding out more about rhetoric in the real world, particularly political, religious, and entertainment related speeches. I particularly like the audio and visual resources that give a real sense of the impact that a well presented and timely use of rhetoric can have on the positions of an audience, who are, after all, the real persuadee's in this kind of situation.

To give you more of an idea of the kinds of ways that argumentation is being used, and one of the potential career paths available to computing students with an awareness of computational argumentation, the following job on the IMPACT (Integrated Method for Policy making using Argument modelling and Computer assisted Text analysis ) Project has recently been advertised at the University of Leeds working with Professor Ann Macintosh:

Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications The Centre for Digital Citizenship, Institute of Communications Studies (ICS)

Integrated Method for Policy making using Argument modelling and Computer assisted Text analysis

(Full-time, fixed term to December 2012, subject to Ethical Review approval and the annual review procedure of the European Commission)

This position is now available to develop advanced models of policy discourse and associated argument visualisation tools. You will work under the direction of Professor Ann Macintosh, and will be expected to have a good first degree in a relevant area, a PhD in Computer Science or related area and a sound grounding in hypermedia, computer supported argument visualisation, or a closely related discipline, and to have associated software development skills.

I found this blog run by the Future of Persuasion: Future as Persuasion project at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Persuading others is just one way that we make use of argumentation in order to achieve specific goals in the real world. This IFTF project proposes the following core research questions:

• What are the new directions of change in persuasive tech? In particular, we will track RT data/activity streams, modeling/simulation, augmented reality, video, haptic interfaces, mobile supercomputing with the cloud, and the cognitive web.
•  What are the new directions of change in the science and art of persuasion?  We’ll look at behavioral psychology and economics, social networking, design thinking, neuroscience, and game theory.
• How is what we are persuading for changing? What new values and norms will emerge over the next decade that could change what we want to be persuaded about, or how others want to persuade us?  These could be as large as the concept of sustainability, or more narrow, such as the emergence of new parenting norms in the U.S.
• How are the agents of persuasion changing? The crowd and the individual are both agents gaining the power to persuade.  How will this change over the next decade and what will the new agents be?
• How is persuasive power being redistributed? Who is likely to gain more persuasive power, and who to lose it, over next decade?
• What might be new obstacles to persuasion?
• What are the implications of these changes for 5 important domains of persuasion in the next decade?
  
  • Learning,
  • Marketing/Advertising,
  • Working/Belonging to an organization,
  • Health, and,
  • Governance/Politics.

As software developers & technologists we can also look to how persuasive elements of interfaces can be designed in order to influence behaviour.

For example, visual feedback to the driver of a car indicating their fuel consumption can persuade the driver to modify their driving technique, influencing their behaviour for the better (the picture above illustrates the Ford Fusion dashboard in which a vine, on the right hand side, withers or thrives depending upon how economically the car is driven).

Similarly, visual interfaces that give feedback on home energy consumption can be made to make user feel worse about consuming more energy, and better about reducing our energy consumption, again influencing our behaviour as researchers at the Eindhoven Institute for Technology have done using the Phillips iCat:

One place to find out more about this is the AISB symposium’s on persuasive technology [2008, 2009] that have run over the last couple of years which have drawn together interface designers, interaction designers, and, persuasion, dialogue, and argumentation researchers to present work and discuss both how to build persuasive systems, and how to use them responsibly. I presented papers at both of these symposium’s, the first on MAgtALO, an agent-based dialogue system used to perform knowledge elicitation about the opinions held by real people on real subjects, and a paper on mapping the outputs from dialogue software, like InterLoc, onto argument structures represented in the Argument Interchange Format (AIF).

As I continue to develop argument blogging software to support online argumentation, I believe that persuasion will take a more central theme. At the surface level of the argument web, users will primarily attempt to persuade each other to accept the other’s standpoint, but there will come a time when we have sufficiently good corpora of structured argument and opinion that we also start to reuse argument oriented software to influence people to make the correct decisions.

To give you a little bit more of an idea of why argumentation is important, I found this blog run by the Future of Persuasion: Future as Persuasion project at the Institute for the Future. Persuading others is just one way that we make use of argumentation in order to achieve specific goals in the real world. As computer software developers we can also look to how persuasive elements of interfaces can be designed in order to influence behaviour. For example, visual feedback to the driver of a car indicating their fuel consumption can persuade the driver to modify their driving technique, influencing their behaviour for the better (the picture above illustrates the Ford Fusion dashboard in which a vine, on the right hand side, withers or thrives depending upon how economically the car is driven). Similarly, visual interfaces that give feedback on home energy consumption can be made to make use feel worse about consuming more energy, and better about reducing our energy consumption, again influencing our behaviour. One place to find out more about this is the AISB symposium's on persuasive technology [2008, 2009] that have run over the last couple of years which have drawn together interface designers, interaction designers, and, persuasion, dialogue, and argumentation researchers to present work and discuss both how to build persuasive systems, and how to use them responsibly.

The Dialogue Academy is a Wellcome Trust supported training scheme that deals with dialogue and debate in science communication. It has been running since September 2009 and provides free training to help professional science communicators to develop ideas, tools, skills, and techniques for using dialogue and debate as a way to engage audiences in contemporary science issues.

The following topics are covered:

• Why engage audiences with dialogue
• Facilitation skills
• A dialogue activity marketplace
• Dialogue with different audiences
• Dialogue and fundraising
• What makes a good dialogue topic
• Planning your own dialogue activity
• Embedding dialogue in everyday practice

The idea is that participants plan a science communication small scale event and use the first two day workshop to learn about dialogue and debate and how to integrate these into their event. They then trial their event and give feedback to the other participants at a final workshop.

The definition of dialogue being used by the dialogue academy is as follows:

“A process of communication in which two or more participants engage in an open exploration of issues and relationships on an equitable basis. Dialogue is the exchange of ideas, opinions, beliefs, and feelings between participants – both speakers and audience. It is listening with respect to others and being able to express one’s own views with confidence. Dialogue is not silence, chaos or one person or faction monopolising the session.”

Which unsurprisingly is pretty much identical to the basic definition that I use in my argumentation and critical thinking classes on dialogue at Dundee University. Although I have to be a little more careful about using more loaded words such as beliefs which have a specific philosophical meaning as used in computer science, the basic idea of multiple speakers exchanging ideas, opinions, and establishing positions is what dialogue is all about. My Ph.D thesis was all about how to formalise these interactions into protocols that computer software, called intelligent agents, can use, the intuition being that real world dialogue enables us to interact with each other in a flexible, efficient, and robust manner and that there are two core benefits to enabling computer software to do the same:

1. Firstly, that those same benefits that humans enjoy, flexibility, efficiency, and robustness, should also be core factors in the development of computer communications, and
2. Secondly, that computer software should have available to it models of human computer interaction that are closer to those that we use in human to human interaction.

I raised a titter (excuse the pun) at the AISB symposium on Persuasive Technology when I suggested that after the nipple, one of the next most natural interfaces that humans use, and in one sense use quite well, is dialogue and argument. We take positions, argue the toss, and in an everyday sense, we get things done. We might not necessarily argue well, and we might not always manage to resolve those big arguments, but the day to day stuff gets achieved. It is this aspect of argumentative dialogue that is intriguing to me as a model for how people could better interact with computers, and how computers could better interact with each other.

Most of us experience that moment of having forgotten all of the good arguments that we need to respond to a given point raised during a discussion. Moments after conceding the point it all come flooding back, but too late. To the rescue comes the Skeptical Science iPhone app, well to the rescue of iPhoners anyway. This was covered over at the Boing and I quite liked this comment:

The thing is, there are a LOT of people out there who are just confused and want to know more and don't realize that the common critiques have been addressed by scientists...they're just not experts, or even wanna-be experts and they're a bit lost on things. This could help them

Sometimes people just take a side in an argument that fits with what they know, which might not be much. Once that position is taken it can be very difficult for them to change, especially if it might suggest some ignorance on their part. Tools like this app will at least provide one more way for people to be exposed to the common arguments against climate change and see that those arguments have generally already been thoroughly addressed.