Babble Patterns

We work together in making social decisions on actions, language, and values constantly. It happens at work, with friends, with family, at school, everywhere we go. Those decisions often become part of who we are, sometimes in small ways, sometimes large.

The questions here are... Do we use the right tools to make those decisions? Are we setting up our babble to give us helpful results?

Well, let's look at some of ways we set up those discussions...

Debates
In a debate, differing opinions are displayed and played off each other in a contrasting way. The benefit of a debate is primarily to the audience, rather than to the participants. The audience gains information from each opinion set on display, and can blend the pieces however they like. Debates are best at providing this benefit when they are intended for an audience, when there are clear end-points, agreed ground to cover, and no strong impetus to 'win' by bludgeoning participants or to subvert the process. Good debates are often moderated. Many of the most common forms of debate ignore one or more of these guides. Political debates are often bludgeoning matches where each side actually aims to start a cascade (see below). Common arguments often break all the guides, and produce very little benefit.

Echoes
An echo is an exchange of information where participants focus heavily on saying things that they know, or believe, that they already agree on. Unlike debates, which go sideways fairly regularly, echoes are incredibly easy to shift into, whether or not they're desired. Echoing reaffirms the ideas of the group, but doesn't bring up many, if any, new ideas. Groups whose beliefs are a minority in larger society keep those beliefs solid by echoing; so do groups that wnt to prevent deviation. Religious and political groups spend time echoing. So do persecuted minorities attempting to hang together. So do some corporate policy meetings. Some echoes start cascades; some are intended to.

Cascades
A cascade is a place where, shortly after an issue is raised in a group, one or more early solutions (which might or might not be particularly good) attract adherents, and rapidly become the norm. In business, whenever a new field of product opens up, the goal for companies is to get a cascade running as quickly as possible. Cascades also happen in 'brainstorming sessions' as often as not. When heavy news hits a stock market, people may have different answers as to what that means to various values, creating bubbles and crashes - differing forms of cascade. Cascades are excellent in situations where everyone should be using the same solution, and the group just needs a 'good enough' solution fairly quickly. They're also good when all of the available options are pretty good, and one simply needs to be chosen.
- A fun book that's largely about cascades by a different name is The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Or just google up "Information cascades"

Aggregators
An aggregator is an artifically-built interaction, meant to unify or rank disparate opinions and produce a definite result. Wikipedia is an aggregator. Voting is an aggregator; most democratic governments are stuructured as whole systems of aggregators. The method Google uses to rank pages in search is an aggregator. Most markets serve this function, and most betting pools. Getting such a device to produce results that clarify, rather than muddle, requires that the opinions aggregated be: Diverse (all opinions in the group should have access), Independent (not heavily influenced by others), and Tabulated (measured, counted, or otherwise put together through some basically impersonal and impartial mechanism).
-A great book on aggregators is The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki; the above paragraph is a terrifically mangled version of some highlights.

...And There Are More.
Each of these is an enormous class, with huge variation and deeply fuzzy boundaries. But there are many more that aren't even touched on here; these are simply the ones that I could quantify enough to have an opinion on.