Related
Does aid create poverty and has the US kidnapped Haiti? Questions that make Yoomoot my obsession-of-obsessions
Categorised in:
A recent discussion on Twitter about the value of international aid
reminds me of why I co-founded Yoomoot in the first place. I frequently
come across well-argued points of view that throw my own worldview into
disarray. This article http://lordsoftheblog.net/2010/02/07/the-arrogance-of-aid/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter is one example. This article claiming that the http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/02/haiti-pilger-obama-venezuela is another. I don't know how to ignore these kinds of articles. They
are bombs exploding how I perceive the world and I don't know enough to
rebutt them. So how can can I just forget about them and blithely
continue believing my original, settled worldview?
I think that's a good thing: I consciously try to be open-minded and to doubt my own views. However I don't actually enjoy the consequent disorientation of not knowing whether my worldview is in need of drastic readjustment. The tension of not-knowing grates on me and trying to resolve it can easily become an obsession.
The good thing is that many of these big questions are resolveable: some arguments are better than others. The difficult part is getting to a point where I can accurately assess all the competing arguments, and also put out my own views in a way that can be criticized by others. That takes time; too much time. Partly that's because of the deficiencies of existing social media tools.
That's where Yoomoot comes in: it's designed as a place where you can rapidly get a logically-structured overview of a big conversation. By requiring everything to be worded in questions and answers Yoomoot forces people to think about the focus of what they're saying and allows their thoughts to be visually organized by those focuses. This is a key part of what makes Yoomoot conversations much more useful than standard online conversations: a logically-organized tree of questions is much easier to consume than pages of entirely unstructured text.
Unfortunately we've discovered that this mental paradigm shift of rewording everything as a Q&A is a stumbling block for newcomers. It's not surprising because the advantages of rewording your thoughts as Q&A are only visible after the conversation has gotten big. When you're actually trying to express your thoughts, it just seems cumbersome and unnatural (at least until you've got used to it). I see it as Yoomoot's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. If yoomoot fails it will be because people don't the see the point of, or can't be bothered to deal with, having to reword their thoughts as Q&As.
I'll delete this if ever we try to raise funding but I honestly don't particularly care if Yoomoot fails to make lots of money. If a community of only 100 diverse, thoughtful people regularly use Yoomoot I will still be committed to it when I'm 90. I am obsessed with Yoomoot because I am obsessed with unanswered questions. Not the one-off, isolated questions which can be answered on Yahoo! Answers or Stack Overflow and their clones. Certainly not questions that can be answered in 140 characters. I'm obsessed with the questions that can only be answered by asking other questions: questions leading to questions leading to questions. The questions which have answers on which, consciously or unconsciously, we found our whole lives.
I think that's a good thing: I consciously try to be open-minded and to doubt my own views. However I don't actually enjoy the consequent disorientation of not knowing whether my worldview is in need of drastic readjustment. The tension of not-knowing grates on me and trying to resolve it can easily become an obsession.
The good thing is that many of these big questions are resolveable: some arguments are better than others. The difficult part is getting to a point where I can accurately assess all the competing arguments, and also put out my own views in a way that can be criticized by others. That takes time; too much time. Partly that's because of the deficiencies of existing social media tools.
That's where Yoomoot comes in: it's designed as a place where you can rapidly get a logically-structured overview of a big conversation. By requiring everything to be worded in questions and answers Yoomoot forces people to think about the focus of what they're saying and allows their thoughts to be visually organized by those focuses. This is a key part of what makes Yoomoot conversations much more useful than standard online conversations: a logically-organized tree of questions is much easier to consume than pages of entirely unstructured text.
Unfortunately we've discovered that this mental paradigm shift of rewording everything as a Q&A is a stumbling block for newcomers. It's not surprising because the advantages of rewording your thoughts as Q&A are only visible after the conversation has gotten big. When you're actually trying to express your thoughts, it just seems cumbersome and unnatural (at least until you've got used to it). I see it as Yoomoot's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. If yoomoot fails it will be because people don't the see the point of, or can't be bothered to deal with, having to reword their thoughts as Q&As.
I'll delete this if ever we try to raise funding but I honestly don't particularly care if Yoomoot fails to make lots of money. If a community of only 100 diverse, thoughtful people regularly use Yoomoot I will still be committed to it when I'm 90. I am obsessed with Yoomoot because I am obsessed with unanswered questions. Not the one-off, isolated questions which can be answered on Yahoo! Answers or Stack Overflow and their clones. Certainly not questions that can be answered in 140 characters. I'm obsessed with the questions that can only be answered by asking other questions: questions leading to questions leading to questions. The questions which have answers on which, consciously or unconsciously, we found our whole lives.