The Ongoing Debate
A not-so funny thing happens in politics (more so than other kinds of debates, anecdotally). Discussions lose their relevance very quickly over time, even before they've actually been settled.
For example, anyone remember the power failures in Texas in the Winter of 2021? I know that the people living in Texas at the time do. I have only a vague memory myself. At the time, there was debate as to the reasons this was allowed to happen. Some, including top politicians, placed at least some of the blame on the move to renewable energy sources. Many disagreed, of course.
Public discourse is messy. A debate like this can have many implications, some more important, others less. Some are evergreen:
Does the use of renewable energy sources make the supply of energy to a large population less reliable?
Others, possibly less so:
Was Texas Governor Greg Abbot acting in good faith when he used the outages to attack the Green New Deal?
While politics moves on, science grinds on ahead. A new study was recently released in Nature.com revisiting this question. But who heard about it? And does anyone still care?
Disconnects
Unless it's your actual job, or you've put automated alerts on new stories, you are unlikely to receive new information as it comes along. And yet the repercussions of the earlier debate might play forward into future decisions you make. I've already discussed at length on the problems of a fragmented information landscape, so I won't add anything here, except to say that one dimension of this fragmentation is temporal: How do we deal with the problem of missing information, and how do we know when new information is available and relevant?
Reconnecting
The Canonical Debate was designed with the idea that "debates" (defined in the system as Claims with which we are engaging in order to determine our level of agreement) never need to end. Claims are never closed to the addition of new Arguments, to the extent that new unique arguments may still be added (for those new to The Canonical Debate, one of its main features is de-duplication of Claims and Arguments). Whenever there is a new study related to the Claim, or new information comes to light, it may (and should!) be added to the debate.
What then? While we haven't fully discussed the solution, we have talked about the possibilities:
- Anyone that has interacted with the Claim in the past may be informed that new information is available, and invited to review their past opinions
- Users may set up specific alerts for Claims with which they are particularly involved
- It would even be possible to track (and alert about) changes in collective opinions regarding a Claim, possibly due to a new Argument (imagine a debate about the culpability of someone in jail, and the introduction of new DNA evidence that exonerates them!)
The Canonical Debate design allows people to not only become more completely informed about a controversial topic… it can provide the mechanisms for them to stay informed, and update their opinions as our collective knowledge advances.
