Kialo

Contents

Kialo Inc.

Applications and adoption

Adopted applications

• Teachers and professors, especially in high schools – including the universities Harvard and Princeton, are using Kialo for class discussions and exercises in critical thinking and reasoning, as consolidating understanding of materials covered in recent classes, more useful and engaging learning experiences, for remote/e-learning, for clearing up misconceptions, teaching logical fallacies and rational argumentation, for academic dialogue, teaching media literacy, and for teaching to sufficiently reflect or research before posting online. Like for debaters of the main site, access for schools and universities is free. is the custom version of Kialo specifically designed for classroom use where debates are private and locked to invited students.
• *Kialo allows teachers to provide feedback to students on their ideas, argument structure, and research quality while it is left to other students to rate the impacts of their peers' arguments.
• *Students can be allowed to contribute anonymously which may be useful for controversial issues as well as for safeguarding privacy in education.
• *Students are or can be encouraged to back up their claims with evidence which can foster digital literacy and research skills.
• *Students and teachers can use it to arrange their thoughts when structuring an essay or project.
• The site's name was decided on internally using the software.

  Prototypical and theoretical applications

• Improving critical thinking skills of society at large as well as facilitating deep or efficient thinking and deepening research and debates where e.g. discussions are less shallow and the well-known or many arguments have already been made and in many cases aren't unreasonably over- or underrated.
• * Pitsos claimed that "we're training students to be very good test-takers instead of critical thinkers", suggesting teaching people to think things through may be more important or neglected compared to essay writing skills.
• Many young people and adults are "submerged into a sea of dispersed information", "rowsing and engaging in superficial thinking activities". Kialo could counteract this issue and help people develop good sane reasoning.

• Three scholars from three prestigious U.S. universities outlined possible benefits in this domain, including applications beyond higher education such as for academic communication. They suggest the debate platform could be used for structuring the communication of open peer-review by helping those giving feedback to "hone in on core arguments and pieces of evidence in an even more direct way" than annotated commenting.
• It could be used to evaluate extracted argument structures and sequences from raw texts, as in a Semantic Web for arguments. Such "argument mining", to which Kialo is the largest structured source so far, could e.g. be used to assess the completeness and effectiveness of an argumentative discussion or to augment it.
• A security studies paper suggested it could be used for "managing arguments more effectively than traditional paragraph/bullet-point approaches". It claims that "complexity demands adaptation" but also notes that "Kialo's simplicity does pose some weaknesses and limitations, and in general current systems cannot reliably automate analysis or synthesis of arguments in the same way that statistical packages can automate analysis of data".
• The site could be used by companies and government organizations as "intuitive debate software for internal discussions and decision-making".
• It could aid in the search for the best policies and course of action, including for 'wicked problems' and issues where there is a large polarization. This may include "experiments of deliberative democracy inside local governments".
• With a platform like Kialo, users provide "both data on what they see is in the landscape of relevant arguments but also some indication of what they think is important in determining their policy preferences" and "also shows which arguments the individual did not find persuasive, and possibly which rebuttals to a particular argument used to discard it." Current functionality of the site may still be insufficient for the latter outside of experiments.
• It could increase efficiency in knowledge acquisition, including concerning information overload on social media.
• Policy-makers and scientists could use platforms and debates like these to engage with each other as well as the public if they were aware of it and used it. Considering only argument trees beneath theses, its arguments-crowdsourcing and revision principles are not or less vulnerable to framing-issues, intentionally placed attackable segments, weak or missing arguments, straw man points, oversimplification, agenda-setting and other issues that may be common in contemporary public political debates.
• The debate trees can be used to identify arguments that are seen as most credible, as well as reveal which areas of argumentation lack support, precedent, or evidence, which may be useful for subsequent work or more efficient and useful science.

• Writers in general, as well as possibly major other opinion leaders, could populate a Kialo debate with their arguments and release it alongside the traditional linear written format, albeit such would mean the arguments would be open to scrutiny, with such being more accessible than large and fans-dominated unstructured comment sections or may already be part of an existing debate tree. They could also use the site in other ways such as for selecting questions to pose to interviewees or for selecting unexplored questions to investigate and report on.
• It could be used for legal cases.
• Websites could embed read-only argument trees from the site.
• More broadly, the site's content could be used for reflective brainstorming, and as a crowdsourcing resource for points to use in other media. It enables detailed exploration of some theses or topics as the visual reasoning through tree-based structure allows for many levels of depth and for follow-up questions in the discussion tab of each claim. The founder stated that "The public debates are basically supposed to become a site where people can go and inform themselves. If a debate has over 2,000 unique arguments, it's going to be hard to find an argument that's not in there already. You can go there, similar to Wikipedia, and read."