Rationale for Gumshoes

Had a spare half-day in New York today before heading out to the airport for the long trip home. Spent part of it meeting folks at a firm of private investigators. They showed me a complex box-and-arrow diagram they’d produced about relationships between people and companies in a case they’d worked on. (They’d previously had this diagram available on their website.) It was essentially a “link analysis” diagram. They’d done it “by hand” using Visio. Surprisingly, they weren’t aware that there are good dedicated tools such as Analyst’s Notebook which make this kind of task much easier.

The diagram was fine as far as it went, but like all link analysis diagrams, it didn’t do the main thing which all people who produce link diagrams ultimately have to do, which is present conclusions backed up by evidence to their clients. All the evidence was there, but the conclusions weren’t, and therefore the connections between the evidence and the conclusions weren’t there either. This stuff they do in their heads. And, as my contact there pointed out, what is in the head on one day is no longer there a few days later, when you’re dealing with lots of complex cases. Forgetting how the details stacked up to support your conclusions is a serious problem – one that can be addressed by having a permanent, easily-surveyable record of those relationships.

So here was a classic case of where argument mapping software such as Rationale complements link analysis diagrams such as are widely used in intelligence, police work, and (now I realise) in private investigation work. Argument mapping is the “missing link” between the detailed evidence-marshalling work they do and the endpoint of their assignment.

So it looks like private investigation is another important potential market for Rationale.

[Gate 46 lounge, JFK]

Argument mapping talkfest

This is day 1 of the Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings conference in New York. Probably never before have so many argument mapping aficionadoes been gathered at one place before. It is only a small conference – maybe 75 people total – but the concentration of interest is remarkable. I’d only met two of these people before, and then only briefly, but “knew” dozens of them in varying degrees by internet association or being otherwise acquainted with their work. In addition to the academics there are a number of lawyers and others coming from a more commercial direction, and their presence/interest is an indication of how structured argumentation, argument visualisation, etc., are starting to get traction outside of narrow academic niches. There’s a good chance that in 10-20 years it will turn out that this conference was a pivotal moment in the field of argument mapping – a bit like the 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence workshop.

My talk in the second session today was “Rationale – A Generic Argument Mapping Tool.” I gave an overview of Rationale, and discussed some of the issues surrounding its design. In the day or two leading up the presentation, I figured out that there were three main points to be made:

• In considering what is a good visualisation of evidence, we must attend at least as much to the nature of users and their tasks as we do to the nature of the domain itself.
• A good visualisation is one which supports interaction as much as comprehension.
• We should think of ourselves as builders of thinking support systems based on interactive diagrams rather than as argument diagrammers.

I also emphasised the importance, to us, of the market – our customers and clients – as constraints on what we develop. In other words, Rationale is the way it is, in a great many aspects, because of our sense that it has to be that way to be commercially successful.

A key development in today’s talk was that I used Rationale itself as the presentation tool, rather than using (e.g.) PowerPoint. This might be the first time somebody has done that. Over the past few weeks, even in last day or two before I set off for New York, the technical team was looking at this issue and adding some new features (such as an animated zoom-to-map) which helped make it possible to use Rationale this way. I started out with a view of the entire workspace with various grouping and argument maps ready for the presentation:

and zoomed in and out, and panned around, as required.  I also did some “on the fly” argument mapping, dragging and dropping claims from the browser window.   Somebody came up afterwards and asked if we’d considered using Rationale to plan a whole book, since all the pieces of it could be on the same infinite workspace.

The talk seemed to go over well and generally people seemed impressed with Rationale. It was a great feeling to be “showing off” such a quality tool. I was (of course) proud of Rationale, and of the Austhink team who’ve been creating it over the past year or more.

Consciousness the idiot manager

Itzy Sabo is the creator an excellent Outlook plugin which lets you file emails quickly and easily. I don’t use it anymore since I switched to Gmail, where there’s no longer any need to file emails away. However I still keep an eye on Itzy’s blog, Email Overloaded, which often has interesting posts about coping with information and task overload.

He’s had a couple of posts recently about unconscious problem solving, and while he makes some good points, it seems to me he makes the common error of thinking that problem solving is either conscious or unconscious, which is a false dichotomy, and then the consequent error of thinking that to solve problems more effectively you should try to rely on your unconscious by e.g. sleeping on it. I replied on his blog as follows:

The odd thing about this discussion is the idea that when we’re consciously thinking about some problem, it is the conscious thinking which solves the problem. In fact, even when consciously thinking about the problem, the real “heavy lifting” is happening unconsciously; consciousness is a kind of haphazard window or commentary on that unconscious activity. Sometimes problems get solved when we’re sleeping, or otherwise unattending to the problem, because the mind is just doing its thing; indeed it might be doing so more effectively because conscious thought is not interfering. Consciousness is like some idiot manager who has been imported into an organisation in some domain the manager doesn’t really know anything about, and who tries to direct people who know much better than he does what needs to be done. However the lesson of all this if we want to think more effectively is not to just “sleep on it”, i.e., [not to] not consciously think about it at all. Sometimes we’re lucky and we find that our unconscious mind comes up with a solution, but often it doesn’t, and just hoping for a good outcome is hardly an effective problem solving technique. (People who talk up the wonders of “sleeping on it” etc. tend to be committing the classic fallacy of noting hits and ignoring misses.) The way to think more effectively is to deliberately (note – not “consciously”) harness the great power of our unconscious thinking to external structured representations and procedures. I’ve written about this in two blog entries here: http://rtnl.wordpress.com/tag/cognition/

[It does feel a bit odd taking a comment on someone else's blog and making it an entry on your own blog. Double dipping in the blogosphere? But I'm putting it here because the stats for this blog indicate that the posts on the role of conciousness in problem solving are particularly popular, and I'm guessing that readers of this blog interested in that topic are unlikely to be reading Email Overloaded.]

What metaphors do for us

In his recently-posted review of Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, Joel Spolsky writes:

The way you make users understand your program model is with metaphors. When you make things look, feel, and most importantly, behave like things in the real world, users are more likely to figure out how to use the program, and the app will be easier to use.

Rationale is riddled with metaphors. Many we’ve just adopted because they are the standard currency for applications of this type. The metaphors are not even all consistent with each other, but because they are generally accepted and occur in distinct contexts, this doesn’t matter too much.

The dominant metaphor, one that’s highly visible even though it is not “in your face”, is the notion of a block. Rationale (like Reason!Able before it) helps people deal with abstract notions like argumentation through the metaphor of building blocks in the kindergarten. It is saying, in effect: think of a complex argument as like a pile of blocks. Each claim in the argument is a block. Blocks lower down in the pile support blocks higher in the pile. There’s one block sitting at the very top. There are green blocks and red blocks, and in fact these are themselves made up of blocks (analysis mode). Blocks can be moved around, and they basically stay where they’re put, except when they are pushed aside by other blocks (auto-layout).

Building blocks are very basic as metaphors – more basic than, say, files and folders (within folders within…). We think that our use of the blocks metaphor is part of why Rationale is so easy to use. (Another part is that our team includes people who obsess about making things easy to use.) But in adopting the blocks metaphor, we weren’t trying to make Rationale easy to use. Rather, our intent was to make arguments easy to use, so to speak. We were trying to make complex reasoning and argumentation easier to understand, and the corresponding skills easier to master.

So metaphors can play at least two different kinds of roles in software, and sometimes they will play both roles simultaneously. They can help users figure out how to use the software, and they can help users figure out the domain. It may be especially true that the dominant metaphors are simultaneously playing both roles in software, like Rationale, which has as a primary purpose helping people understand the domain, as opposed to software which assumes people understand the domain and just want to help people do work in that domain.

What The Thinker is really thinking

Watch Le Grand Content - a short, well-produced and very entertaining video.  I’m not sure what it is meant to be – some kind of graphical poetry?  But it strikes me as an excellent portrayal of how conscious thought unfolds when one is trying to think about something.  Moments of structure mixed with free associations; occasional patches of sense but the whole thing amounts to an incoherent ramble.   Conscious thought is not very good at staying on topic and organising itself into structures which “hang together” in some useful way.  This is why we can generally think more effectively when conscious thought is paired with external representations which do sit relatively still and maintain their structure.  It is also why Rodin’s classic Thinker

is such a misleading picture of thinking, even though it is almost always the first think people think of if you ask them to picture thinking in their minds.  If you could see inside Rodin’s Thinker’s mind, you’d probably be watching something like Le Grand Content. 

Here’s a much better picture of thinking:

Stickier notes

Version 1.2 of Rationale will be appearing by mid-February.  One change is that sticky notes are now “stickier” than they were before. Previously you could stick a note to the workspace, and it would (as you’d expect) stay exactly where you put it. Now, you can attach a note to a box (e.g. a claim box, or a reason). A dotted line with arrow head indicates that a note is attached to a given box rather than to the workspace. For example,

If the box to which a note is attached moves, the note will move with it instead of staying stuck to the workspace.  However you can move the sticky without moving the box to which it is attached.

Stickier stickies may not seem like a big deal, but we’re quietly excited about it.

First, because this is a remarkably useful feature.  Using attached sticky notes, you can rapidly assemble diagrams which are much more informative than just having the bare-bones argument structure.  Uses include:

• creating instructional graphics where people can see the point at a glance.  (The graphic above is taken from a page in online argument mapping tutorials, the first place we’ve publicly made use of the new feature.)
• making comments on somebody else’s map (e.g., giving feedback to a student)

Second, because the feature is implemented in a simple, intuitive way.  It took quite a bit of time exploring various possibilities until we had something which worked pretty much as you’d expect and in such a simple way that just about any user could use the feature straight away without any instruction.

Along the way, I was reminded of some basic truths of software development:

• A seemingly trivial, isolated idea (“Why can’t I just attach a sticky note to a box?”) can give rise to so many unforeseen issues that implementing the idea can turn out to be a major task.
• More generally, it can take a lot of effort to produce something really simple and intuitive.
• However, small generic features can turn out to be very powerful and useful.

Well, what did you expect?

Ask a philosopher why one should study philosophy, and you’re likely to get an answer only a philosopher would pretend to understand:

“If you ought to philosophize you ought to philosophize; and if you ought not to philosophize you ought to philosophize: therefore, in any case you ought to philosophize. For if philosophy exists, we certainly ought to philosophize, since it exists; and if it does not exist, in that case too we ought to inquire why philosophy does not exist — and by inquiring we philosophize; for inquiry is the cause of philosophy.”

- Aristotle, allegedly.

What rubbish.

Blog Tag – 5 Things About Me

(First entry after a hiatus of a few weeks, while taking a holiday over the Xmas-NY period.)

Sheryle Bolton tagged me in a kind of blog-network pyramid scheme: relate five things about yourself that others may not know, then tag five others.  So here goes:

1. Born in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
2. First words were in Mandarin.  At the time we lived in Malaya and had a Chinese housekeeper.
3. First publication was in arms control/deterrence theory.
4. Country boy at heart.  My idea of recreation is to go to one of our country blocks (Flinders Island, or South Gippsland) and work all day.  Plus, my musical taste runs to “anything bordering country.”
5. Main hobby or side-interest is sustainable living and farming. 

Now tagged:

1. Paul Monk  (Paul, time to revive your blog…)
2. Dan Prager
3. Jef Clark
4. Richard de Rozario
5. Peter Tillers