This is the way to Flow - Original Dream Vision

[vtempest]

Plan: The debate community of student research teams should share disclosing research for a dataset of debate evidence to train ChatGPT to recommend arguments and to reason through logical assumptions.

Alex Gulakov 2009, writing in visionary idea essay to develop original paperless high school and college debate, "Debate Without Walls: Technology In Debate." published on The3NR, published on Global Debate by Alfred Charles Snider, https://web.archive.org/web/20090831195709/http://www.the3nr.com/2009/07/29/guest-post-alex-gulakov/
http://globaldebateblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/using-new-technology-in-policy-debate.html (original idea essay envisioning early paperless debate software)

There would be a very important ancillary benefit to a public, or “open” garden. Information on the internet is organized pretty poorly now – pages related to a given webpage can only be found through a search engine, not through “browsing” or “surfing” the web more into that area (hyperlinks are the start of a solution, but obviously the author chooses which links to include and they do not update as new sources are found.) Debaters could perform an important service by organizing that information a) based on logical associations and b) based on article or webpage snippets as opposed to linking to the entire document. Knowledge would be organized by argument or idea instead of by webpage. After the season, some schools might chose to open their gardens by merging it with the public one. Whatever the debate topic was – there would be a great resource to anyone interested in developing their personal stance on it. It would resemble Wikipedia in some ways, but would have a much greater variety or arguments associated for and against that viewpoint. Wikipedia tries for a neutral point of view, whereas an open debate garden could provide all points of view so that people can understand the most popular and most “round winning” arguments against their personal beliefs. I think many people today have lost faith in the existence unbiased media sources or the authority of field experts; the neutral stance is only possible through presenting every ideology available. Today, when most people are provided an opposing point of view they’re usually only given a reductionist strawperson argument; this service would provide an easy way to view what’s actually the best and most reasoned argument for the other side so that people have a chance to understand what those opposed to them truly believe, in their own unfiltered words.

Returning to how a debate round might look like, debaters would likely “flow” the speech of their opponent by entering the keywords of that argument as the center bubble in the argument web. From that, the most relevant associations from the root you’ve assembled in your reading on the topic will pop-up and you can pick and drop analytics and “cards” you find relevant to form your own speech. These wouldn’t really be cards in the format we use today. They would not be taken or “cut” from their original source in any way. The root could also change dynamically as the source on the internet might be updated. This way, you could browse the source your opponent used, and maybe make a contextual indict of that. This note would be tagged on to that article so that everyone using the same garden as you would instantly have that indict visible as well. Your research would be “cutting for” every part of the topic at once, since you wouldn’t be researching files with a narrow topic but reading good articles overall and tagging paragraphs and sentences that might be relevant to this or that in the future. Much like online social bookmaking, multiple users could tag part of an article and you might be suggested the most popular tags or related article snippets. You could browse forward to what others have suggested you read and tag on that topic, as well as generally popular articles in that area. This system would enable you to research many, many times fasters than in today’s system, and you would be able to find relevant snippets in online articles for responses immediately after hearing their argument; no longer would research and argumentation phases be split.

This system would be designed to aid you in organizing your response; and it would also reward closer listening to their argument. The closer you listen, the more specific the response snippets can be – you might have less of the paragraph highlighted if their argument was a shortened version, for example. Debate rounds would look like the concept of debate was imagined in the original sense, and the technology would work only in the background to assist you in the argumentation and response, but without creating new needs to be met and without changing the way you approach listening and responding. You wouldn’t listen to a speech as “frontlines” or “offcase” but as keywords of the main argument their source is making. The strategism of debate has compartamentalized arguments into positions, so the focus now is more on refuting the position as a whole as opposed to the specific nuances of the argument. This is in part because the files are static and organized into responses before the round and before listening to the different arguments of that position. If a team emphasizes more on a particular argumentative point of a position, with the new system that would represent a larger argument bubble and have more response snippets and more highlighted versions of snippets of that webpage (since the entirety of the source is stored locally) associated to it.

Obviously all this would be done on a computer, but there’d be just the one window open where you are flowing – and at the same time, you are picking the best out of what’s displayed as a likely response. The responses you find or make on the spot would be added to your root, and the ones that you extend, go for, or win on would be given more chance of showing up again. This mimics how if you win on an argument, you’re more likely to repeat it. In essence, all the gathered snippets of knowledge from web pages, databases, articles and books would be stored right behind your flow and show up when needed – this imitates the way the mind stores all the knowledge you’ve amassed on a topic and makes mental associations when you hear a related argument. This close parallelism means the needs created by citing authoritative sources to support your argument is less likely to create additional needs, norms, or practices that for policy debaters get in the way or alter the idea of debate as thought of by most people. This concept would also have the ancillary benefit of creating a more logically-fluent storage and browsing model for information, and maybe influencing future generations to make other things – like internet websites, newspapers, and books – less separated into different files, or “walled-in,” and instead more dynamically oriented.

This is the way.