Justification for Structured Dialog

Introduction

Communications in modern society have reached a breaking point. When addressing complex issues, modern society’s ability to investigate and resolve issues has essentially come to a standstill. In world governments, for example, it is referred to as “gridlock”. In the general society, it is referred to as “polarization”. Sure, complex issues are “debated” all the time on TV and the internet in the form of media interviews of “experts” or “flame wars” on Twitter, Facebook or other social media. The results, however, don’t usually result in any significant changes is social views. Because the prolonged stagnation is leading to more and more violence, the breakdown is far more serious than most people recognize.

So, what is the primary cause of this breakdown? Research into this problem points to one primary issue: the inability of human brains, refined by evolution for survival in primitive natural environments, to deal with the complexity of modern technological culture. Humans essentially still have Stone Age Brains (1). Those brains, which take many seconds to process even simple sentences, are totally incompatible with electronic devices that can transmit such sentences in a billionth of a second! Of course, the human can control the rate they process such information. What they can’t control, however, is the rate at which new information comes in, nor the amount of information that is needed to fully understand a complex issue.

To make using communications equipment acceptable to “humans”, even those with very advanced academic skills, most applications have been designed to mimic the pre-technology world. Information is formatted to look like traditional printed media. When it is transmitted, it is formatted to appear like traditional “communications”: individual to individual discussion, speaker to audience presentations, traditional postal mail, or the earliest forms of television. The major problem with all of these approaches is the use of “stream of consciousness” information transfer.

For example, one person sends information to a second person by “email” or “imessage”. The person receiving the information thinks about the information and then, based on availability, sends a reply. While such a message many now be sent across the planet in an instant, what controls the rate that the information is processed is the ability of the humans on each end.

For sure, one person can also send information to many people at the same time. This is often called a “post and comment format. With an application like Twitter, the message could go out to hundreds of thousands of people in a second. But what happens if all of those recipients then try to reply to the message?

Most people take these formats for granted. They think they are the only way it can be done. So, the “status quo” continues. The grand promise of the internet is lost. The result is, most internet information is never processed, and lands up in the “internet landfill”. This is a major Internet disaster.

Let’s take one step further with this example. Let’s say a group of people in a town are discussing a problem with their school system. At some point, an issue is raised for resolution. A coordinator sends a message to 200 people. How long can they expect it will take to get answers from all of these people? This is not a question about the speed of the internet. It’s a question about the complexity of people’s lives. Some people will be on vacation, some will be sick, some will be burdened by family or legal problems, most will have to do research on the issue. So the expectation of an all-inclusive reply is easily many days. What happens then, if the coordinator doesn’t provide sufficient time and sends a second question out before the first is answered? The result is the coordinator being bombarded by “out of sync” replies. What if some of those replies are requests for more information? The information exchange quickly falls apart.

This example only touches on 3 variables in the problem. This document first expands the depth of the problem to make a case for how truly extensive it is. It then introduces a minimal set of needed but available elements that if properly combined have been shown through empirical testing to greatly improve discussion outcomes.

Reasons for a new approach

Why do “stream of consciousness”, post and comment discussions fail? To address complex issues, the following communication interaction elements are typically needed:

1. Many subtopics and details need to be included and addressed.
2. The subtopics and details often interrelate in complex, overlapping ways.
3. It takes a lot of time to review all the details.
4. Understanding the details requires involved thinking.
5. Understanding and interpreting the details requires specialized backgrounds.
6. Verifying the accuracy of details often requires references to external sources.
7. Recognizing novel interrelationships among many details requires creative skills.
8. Judging the logical interrelationships of details requires philosophical skills.
9. Recognizing hidden questions or mistakes requires critical thinking skills.
10. Organizing the flow of discussion information requires system skills.
11. Organizing the process of discussion requires management skills.

What tools does the internet provide to address all of these issues during communications? Current formats include: email, chat sites, articles and blogs with comments, forum discussions, and bulletin boards. In short, none of these formats address the elements listed above. All of the current formats are designed to provide time-limited, stream-of-consciousness response interactions, which perform poorly for all of the elements listed.

Now, add into the process the wide range of human variability. The internet is aimed at a very wide audience. That brings many different personalities and logistics issues into the discussion. They include:

1. Personal Availability
2. Personal Background
3. Personal discussion style
4. Ability to envision and analyze broad issues
5. Willingness to do research and organize their findings and thoughts
6. Social styles
7. Writing styles
8. Purposes for participating in the discussion
9. Value of time: patience and tolerance of other people’s differences
10. Error handling
11. Supposition handling: interest and ability to look at many alternatives
12. Complexity due to overlapping information

Because of the wide range of these parameters in a large audience, all of these issues can be expected to be present, simultaneously, most the time. Here are brief explanations for each of these variables:

Personal Availability

Most participants will not be available all the time. This includes discussion moderators. They can enter and leave the discussion at any time. Some may check in a few minutes a day. Others only once a week. Most users will be pulled away at times for trips, events or to do in-depth research. This means few, if any, will see and follow the full discussion. So, when they reenter the discussion, they will have missed issues, comments, conclusions reached and the give-and-take of the process.
Complex issues often require a lot of reading and research outside of dialog writing time. Participants vary extensively in the amount of time they have or are willing to contribute.

Personal Background

Participants will have extremely different backgrounds. For each subtopic or detail, they will range from expert, to novice, to clueless. They will have a widely varying range of experience, knowledge, and vocabulary about each detail. This means they will each also interpret the dialog differently and contribute in very different ways.

Personal discussion style

Personal styles vary widely in a number of dimensions. For example:

Outlook: Some can understand and envision broad issues. They can quickly grasp interactions between proposed point and aim related discussion towards the target issue. They want the discussion to stay focused and avoid issues that detract from the stated objective. Others are driven to deal with narrow elements of any issue put in front of them. They only want to react to the last statements made. They are easily diverted to side issues and comfortable leaving issues incomplete.

Preparation: Some are willing to review previous comments to understand the larger issue. They are willing to do extensive outside research. Others won’t commit the time to review past information or do external reading. For very complex issues, discussions may include hundreds or thousands of comments, thereby making it impractical for any participants to review the entire discussion.

Social style: Some are supportive and try to contribute ideas to make another person’s view work. Others are critical and like to poke holes in what others say. Some like to resolve debates; others like to stir up debates.

Writing style: Some tend to write long discussions; some write with sound bytes. Some write prolifically based on memory and intuition, even through it may lack adequate research and thought, or overly generalizing issues. Others focus whole articles on very narrow issues, providing bibliographies that exceed the length of the article.

Purpose: Some focus on discussion as group knowledge gathering of vetted content. They believe that statements they make should convey established knowledge. Others see discussion as group exploration; as a way to explore options and alternatives, or to voice intuitive personal opinions. Still others see discussion as a personal growth activity, and purposely attack issues as a way of indirectly learning the deeper meanings of the issue.

Value of time: The range of patience and tolerance of people varies widely.

 

Personal issues are further complicated by process issues:

Error handling: When misinformation enters the discussion, either intentionally or accidently, it can cause serious problems. Identifying and correcting misinformation is very difficult, especially when an individual internalizes the correction with their personal esteem.

Supposition handling: When new concepts are being investigated, participants may have to propose hypothetical or “straw man” models for debate or discussion. These require participants to create complex visualizations in their minds of what the models look like, how the parts interrelate, and how implementation of the model might affect external environments. Not many people can do this well without support tools like graphics or reference documents.

Complexity due overlapping information: In most discussions, while the number of users who have stated an interest in the discussion can be large, only a handful of people will be active at any time. Depending on the current participants, all of the discussion variables will change continuously going from one extreme to the other. When extremes of style are involved simultaneously, and the styles are not clearly acknowledged, the discussion can easily ramble and get tangled in personal disputes with users just focused on the latest posts.

 

The result is that, for complex issues, these formats essentially result in what communications specialists call the “Internet knowledge landfill”. The landfill analogy applies because most discussions fail to reach new conclusions with significant new knowledge. Eventually, the discussion is forgotten and joins the huge pile of earlier posts filling up Iron Mountain’s archive computers that contain so many posts they are almost impossible to access in any practical way. Any gems of wisdom in the posts are essentially lost.

The discussion of issues in society is a very complex topic. All of the problems listed above directly apply. There are few examples of any process on the internet that handles this or any academic topic well. The only format that goes beyond dialog with even moderate success is Wikipedia. But Wikipedia’s moderate success is still a failure for moving important social issues forward because it fails completely to address the many strong disagreements, errors, and misinterpretation in the main stream doctrine.

Empirical Background

The impetus for researching this problem came from participation in the Systems Thinking World group on Linkedin in 2012. At the time it was the largest Linkedin group with over 15,000 members. Despite this large membership, it typically had less than 50 members simultaneously participating in the active discussion. The problem of “trolls” was constant. Most participants were new members. They only stayed in the conversation for a short time. The oppression by the trolls and the constant rambling of the discussion “burned them out”. I was one of them. With so much potential, turning away was a huge disappointment.

In 2014, I developed a new discussion structure to support an academic program that was struggling to address how to change social thinking to address the climate crisis. Their discussions, which were using the available conventional methods, had been going on for 4 years. They were stalled. Using only communication elements that already existed applied in new ways – simple discussion outlining and attention to reference material – the discussion was brought to a “conclusion” in 2 months! By conclusion, I’m not implying it reached its goals. It didn’t. What was “concluded” was that the team did not have a sufficiently deep knowledge base to answer the questions it was addressing. The entire approach needed to be changed.

In another example in 2016, members of a scientific society were continuing a years long debate about the legitimacy of Einstein relativity. I tracked their activity over an 8 month period. During that time, a combined effort of over 1,000 effort hours posted over 2,000 emails. No “publishable” knowledge gains emerged. Many very good insights that did fleetingly arise were lost to the internet landfill because no mechanism was in place to capture them. Working with professor Mark Klein at MIT, I applied his “Deliberatorium” software to automate the outlining and referencing approach I developed earlier. Because that software was only an “academic study”, another approach was needed to make it accessible to the Einstein study. This led to the organization of formal academic projects to address basic principles that the outline exposed. Those projects were structured directly from the discussion outlines. But the projects also needed discussion support tools. A special discussion forum was developed to work seamlessly with the outline method. The current GKF is the next stage of that development.

An Alternate Approach

The outcome of the experiences described above was the creation, not only of the GKF, but also the entire Structured Discussion model, of which the GKF is a component. Understanding what each of the elements are and how they work together as a system, is the KEY to understanding how the new process works. The “Structured Discussion” system includes the following four elements:

1. A typical FORUM DISCUSSION format. This is like a conventional forum with minimal moderation. It is open to “invited” members who have experience related to the topic to interact to discuss scientific and social questions. The change is a set of rules that focus members on specific TOPICS, how they manage information, and how they interact with each other.

2. An associated TRACKING forum. This associated forum is editable only by moderators. It has the same base name as its related topic forum with the added suffix – “tracking”. The purpose of the tracking forum is to “guide” the discussion toward a specific discovery GOAL.

3. A KNOWLEDGE MAP. This is a knowledge repository which can be opened for reference in parallel with the forum. The knowledge map captures significant statements and references made in the forum discussion, and presents them in an organized OUTLINE for quick access.

4. A REFERENCE INDEX. This is a conveniently available bibliography of reference material related to the information on the MAP.

USING THIS STRUCTURE CREATES A PARADIGM SHIFTING FRAMEWORK FOR CONDUCTING SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL DISCUSSIONS.

References:

(1) Nappi, Bruce as an article: Complexity and Stone Age Brains ; as a book chapter: Collapse 2020 Vol. 1: Fall of the First Global Civilization