The three kinds of judgement

[originally posted to BlogCisive]

To a first approximation, all deliberative judgements (i.e., those that turn on to-some-degree careful consideration of the relevant arguments) can be usefully sorted into three kinds.

These are the three Ds of judgement.

1. Decision

Decision is a matter of choosing from among options, particularly where those options are possible actions.  The question here is “What should I (we) do?”

2. Diagnosis

Diagnostic judgements concern what is going on.   The question is “What is happening?” or “What’s the situation?”  The term diagnosis has medical connotations, but here I’m widening its use to include various kinds of investigation, hypothesis testing,  and problem-solving.  All diagnostic judgements involve hypotheses (conjectures) as to what is actually happening.  A good example of diagnostic judgement in this sense is the assessment in intelligence analysis.

3. Deliberation

Deliberation is trying to determine the truth of some proposition by considering the arguments for or against it.  The question is “Is it true?”

Austhink has two products – Rationale, and bCisive.  Rationale, the argument mapping tool, supports deliberation.  bCisive, the business decision mapping tool, has been positioned as supporting decision.  We haven’t had a tool for diagnosis, and have tended to recommend that people wanting to make diagnostic judgements use some variant of the “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” (ACH) method.

However, just as argument mapping supports deliberation, and business decision mapping supports decision, so “hypothesis mapping,” an alternative to ACH, supports diagnosis.  Further, hypothesis mapping is quite easily handled in bCisive as it stands. 

Austhink is currently working on a “Pro” version of bCisive which will include crucial features needed for supporting both deliberation and diagnosis. 

This means that one tool will help users map the thinking behind all three major kinds of deliberative judgement. 

The tool should be available in a few months.

Rationale documentary on YouTube

 Check it out…

Got Code got prize

Tonight Andy Bulka (our software architect) and I went to the “ICT Panorama” event at the University of Melbourne Computer Science and Software Engineering Department.

Each year, 4th year students in the department are divided into teams who work on innovative projects for “real world” clients.  Austhink Software was assigned a team, code-named “Got Code.”  Over the past 6 months or so the team has been working on a “Web 2.0″ version of Rationale.  This consisted of a simple Flash version of the product (“Rationale Lite”) and an associated Flickr-type website for sharing Rationale maps, called Bickr.  A nice feature is that in Bickr you can edit maps online using Bickr (imagine if, in Flickr, you could edit an image using a stripped-down Photoshop). 

Other projects included a 3D Tetris, a neural-networks based system for predicting foreign exchange rates, and a system for playing a kind of ping-pong (using a real table) with a remote opponent. 

At the ICT Panorama event, all the teams display their projects.  They are judged not only on the quality of their work but also on how professionally they present it.  Three judges observe all projects, without giving away to the teams that they are judges.

A prize is awarded to the best project.  Got Code won…  Congratulations to the team, but also to Andy who managed them pretty closely.

We’ll be making Rationale Lite and/or Bickr available just as soon as we feasibly can. 

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Age & SMH appearance

Brief mention of Austhink Software in The States or Bust in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald today.  (Don’t be scared off by the ugly visages.)

How long does it take to map an argument?

At a number of universities around the world, people are now setting up studies to help determine the extent to which argument maps, or Rationale use, can help build skills or improve performance on difficult tasks.

One such person asked in an email:  “What is the average time for an adult learner to complete the building of an argument in Rationale?”

Unfortunately there is no simple answer to that question.  The time needed can vary enormously, depending on factors such as:

• how complex is the argument?
• are they coming up with their own argument (easier) or trying to map out an argument from a text written by somebody else (generally quite hard)?
• how exhaustive and correct should the maps be?  Should all principles of argument mapping properly observed?  Or is “anything which looks good enough to them” acceptable?

On one hand, a simple argument of their own, done sloppily, should take only a minute or two.  But mapping an argument from, say, a journal article or opinion piece, and doing it properly, can take hours, even for somebody highly skilled.  And at the other extreme, mapping a truly complex body of argumentation can take months, even years.  Austhink is just completing an argument mapping assignment for a government department, looking at all the arguments surrounding a controversial major equipment purchase.  This has taken about four months with two people working on it.  Consider also the “mother of all maps,” Robert Horn’s Can Computers Think? series of maps, which took a team of people a number of years.

In practice, most non-specialists have only a finite appetite for mapping arguments, and limited capacity to apprehend deficiencies in their own work, and so are unlikely to spend more than, say, 1/2 an hour on any given task.  So, returning to the original question, here’s a very rough guess:

• Simple tasks (e.g., coming up with one, single-reason argument for a claim) – allow a few minutes per task
• Complex tasks – allow around half an hour, or more

“One especially ambitious new offering…”

The eminent journalist and author James Fallows writes an influential technology column, and in the latest one has discussed Rationale, in the context of software tools to help people “develop, refine, and express ideas”.

I didn’t realise it upon first reading, but buried in the article is an account of the various kinds and levels of intellectual work. By implication, at the peak of this intellectual pyramid is… deliberative thinking of the kind supported by Rationale.

Some quotes:

    “Do computers make us smarter? Probably not. But they can reduce the burden of some largely mechanical processes through which we develop, refine, and express ideas—which is a lot of what it means to think… In a surprisingly wide range of other ways, the simple, brainless efficiencies offered by computers can assist in the tasks that make up intellectual work. Before considering one especially ambitious new offering of this sort, it’s worth reviewing the practical, chore-like components of high-level modern work and the corresponding programs that, in my view, handle each chore best…”

“An elementary step is capturing thoughts—ideas, obligations, possibilities—when and where they occur to you…The next largely mechanical task is saving material you come across in your work, whether it is something unexpected on the Internet or the result of more purposeful research…The next practical task involved in thinking is finding things when you want them—the right citation for your legal argument, the right chronology to remind you who said what when…Next is sorting, the important and subtle task of grouping items according to similarities and differences. In a sense, this kind of pattern recognition is the highest level of human intelligence… Both sorting and the next step, outlining, take us closer to the point where mechanical processes merge with intellectual ones. Assigning something to a category inevitably affects our conception of that category, and arraying ideas visually, as in an outline, inevitably affects our view of how the ideas fit…”

“This leads to the newest ambitious entry: Rationale, an “argument processor” from a start-up company in Melbourne, Australia, called Austhink…”

“In operation, the Rationale program is quite simple. You state a main contention you are trying to test—I should buy a new house, we should invade Iran—and then systematically list each of the supporting claims for it. Then you list the objections to each claim, and the rebuttals to those objections, and so on until you’re down to first principles—all of which are shown as connected boxes on a map…”

“The more factors there are to weigh in making a decision—and, especially, the more views there are to reconcile when more than one person is involved in a choice—the more helpful this logic map can be.”

You need to be a subscriber to Atlantic Monthly to access Fallows’ full column online. (In the US, everyone should be a subscriber, because it is such a great magazine and subscriptions cost almost nothing.) Non-subscribers can email me, and I’ll email you a link from the magazine website which should work for three days.

Rationale 1.2 now available

 We’ve just released an update to Rationale.  No dramatic changes, but a bunch of enhancements aimed at improving the “user experience” and the general usefulness of the software. 

• Annotate maps by attaching sticky notes
• View maps in full-screen mode
• Present maps using improved layout options
• Enjoy animated zooming
• Keep workspace organised using auto-spacing of maps
• Open files faster
• Save preferences

Also, we’ve taken the interesting step of reducing the trial period from 30 to 14 days.  There were various pros and cons about doing this, and as with so many business decisions for a small, new software venture, we had limited information and no real way to know, within practical time and resource limits, what the best choice is.  So we have some informal deliberation in the team, and go with our collective hunches. 

[BTW the new 14 day trial period is available to anyone, even if you previously had a trial version which expired.]

We’re happy to be releasing 1.2.  With additional features and various “under the hood” improvements and fixes, it is a substantially improved product.  Naturally we’re very keen to know how it goes down with our community of actual and potential users, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please let us know.

Download from www.austhink.com/download  

Like Western Mass., only more so

Bill Bither of Atalasoft has an interesting post on the pros and cons of “Starting a software company outside a startup hub.”

“Outside,” for him, means an hour and a half drive away from the centre of gravity, which in his case is Boston.

There is no software startup hub remotely comparable to Silicon Valley or Boston in Australia. So, if an hour and a half drive is a real issue, we may as well be on another planet. The nearest real hub is thousands of miles and a very long flight away.

Yet, it does sometimes seem there are some compensatory advantages of being well outside where it is “all happening.” Bither mentions a number of possibilities, some of which apply to being in Melbourne. Another is, I suspect, that you have a little more space to be independent and original in your thinking.  Whether you can take advantage of that to produce a genuinely fresh innovation is of course another matter.

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.