Argument clinic

Intro

I was inspired to start this project when I realised how much I miss the spirit of debate on the common social media. It’s full of echo chambers and people stubbornly set in their ways. I hoped I could make an interesting platform for those who love to explore different arguments, their aspects, possible rebuttals, and more generally enjoy broadening their perspective.

My approach is somewhat experimental when it comes to features and UI in an attempt to capture a specific view of thought processes and representing information. It’s in early phases of development (especially the frontend!), the functionality for v1 is well fleshed out so it’s just a matter of finding time to work on it.

Overview

The main concept is to capture a debate within a graph, with replies and lines of questioning branching off of each argument. It’s a bit of a challenge to figure out how to let the user traverse through the graph and how to display portions of it in a sleek manner. I’m currently keeping to a simple tree structure but that may change in the future.

Another key idea of this project is that the debates here are meant to be expansive and explorative, capturing as many possible paths of argumentation without proclaiming ‘a winner’. The idea is more to fragmentise the argument and try to understand what holds up different parts of it. Arguments are meant to be entities standing on their own, who originally made them is irrelevant.

There is functionality to express agreement with arguments made and how strongly you feel about your ‘ruling’ – it’s possible to play devil’s advocate and make arguments you don’t agree with. A kind of a map is then created of different user’s sentiments towards the different lines of argumentation.

Lastly it’s possible to call out logical fallacies in arguments. This aspect makes me very curious in the sense of questioning how far can we take formalising argumentation, is there an attainable level of objectivity?

I’m having a lot of fun with this project and I’m looking forward to releasing the first version! :)

Tech stack

Frontend: React with Typescript
Backend: Express.js with Typescript
MongoDB, Mongoose, Apollo