Arbital needs a mechanism for defining terms

7f6.json

https://arbital.com/p/7f6

by Andrea Gallagher Jan 14 2017

Much of the discussion in claims seems to be about defining terms, which is a foundational part of rhetoric. There should be a "Term" primitive similar to a "Claim" primitive, and discussion that allows people to create precise alternates when there is lack of clarity.

Comments

Eric Bruylant

Making a page and greenlinking to it (with comments / edits / splits available) seems fine to me?

Andrea Gallagher

Sounds right, but this "page" you speak of is new to me. I assume it's the base structure of the math explanation incarnation of Arbital, and could be brought back to the surface to make it more discoverable. I see value in having a feed/domain/repository just of terms, so they can be explored differently than you would a claim or a post.

Also, what are splits?

Did you know that XX% of user requests are for features that already exist that users can't find? :-)

Eric Bruylant

Yep, that is what I meant. Create new page is less exposed now we've moved the Arbital math home. It's accessible via the hamburger menu in the top right still, and you can link to it like this, but that's not particularly easy to find. I'm pretty sure we'll want to improve that, and generally make it easier to navigate between the wiki and discussion areas of Arbital.

Yep, I think when we've got good support for browsing by tag we'll be able to tag things with #term or #definition, and it'll work?

By splits I just meant if people disagree they could make alternate terms, maybe crosslinking with "maybe you want this term"? No special features.

Andrea Gallagher

Let me experiment with using a Page for this purpose, and see what seems like it's missing.

I think Jim's suggestions below are good:

  • Terms should have summaries
  • Let the summary show as a tool tip or roll-over, so the reader doesn't have to leave the flow of the article
  • make it really easy to mark a word as a term (and perhaps even auto suggest if a term page is available for a string of a given length).

Eric Bruylant

Seems like greenlinking to the term gets you that, minus auto-suggest which seems like it'd get unwieldy as we expand to lots of topics?

Jim Babcock

A little while back, the Cambridge (MA) LessWrong group discussed building a site called Braintropes, specifically focused around defining rationality jargon; essentially, something like the LessWrong Wiki but optimized for causing tabsplosions. The idea was that a large vocabulary of concepts is an incredibly powerful thinking tool, and increasing the size of vocabulary the community could use would make it more effective. That project failed to take off (because of the amount of content-creation work required), but I still think it'd be valuable, and I'd be quite happy if Arbital ended up filling that role.

In practice, most jargon enters the lexicon through a canonical blog post which shares its name. If this is optimized for being a reference (rather than a tabsploder), Terms should in most cases consist of a link and an optional summary. It would also help if the creation of links to Terms was partially automated.

Andrea Gallagher

Nice. Did Braintropes see the tabsplosions as a good thing or a bad thing?

Jim Babcock

Good thing, but also as a challenging thing to successfully cause (because getting a high link-fanout would require a lot of content creation work).