Comparisons

There are a few tools that have overlapping goals with Ameliorate, but generally have some significant differences.

Ameliorate’s core design involves:

1. creating a visual breakdown of a problem,
2. enabling nuance (intuition, reasoning, unknowns) to be contextualized within the breakdown,
3. explicitly distinguishing types of information.

These three things together allow Ameliorate to have useful features for organizing, navigating, and viewing all of the information relevant to a problem.

Argument Tools

E.g. https://www.kialo.com/ (list/column format), https://debatemap.app/ (diagram format)

Overlap:

• organize arguments in a structured manner
• allow contextualizing arguments to a problem

Differences:

• focus more on reasoning
• problem is in the form of a question or position, not further broken down

Free-form Diagram Tools

E.g. https://miro.com/

Overlap:

• create visual breakdowns of problems

Differences:

• not specific to problems
• kinds of information aren’t distinguished, so can’t help much with organizing/navigating all the details