[ExI] The answer to tireless stupidity

[Dan]

I've "observed" people changing their minds on this -- mostly from being 
skeptical to anthropogenic global warming to believing in it. (I'm not going to 
say these people saw the light or they were duped -- or whether they were just 
going with the flow.* I don't know enough about their thought processes to say.)

Regarding, though, you view of setting these chatbots up to eventually reach a 
consensus, this is the ideal of rhetoric: to get people to argue by going back 
to premises (which can include "actual scientific data and mathematical models") 
and eventually deciding on which conclusions are correct. This is seen with the 
typical use of enthymemes. Recall, an enthymeme is basically a syllogism where 
there's an unstated premise. In rhetoric, the person offering up the enthymeme 
in good faith is assuming that his interlocutors accept the unstated premise. If 
they don't, then the premise, to argue in good faith, is made explicit. 
Eventually, it's hope that the process will terminate for any debate -- as 
eventually all participants reach premises which they all agree on and then can 
move forward to the conclusion. Again, if they argue in good faith, the 
conclusion should be acceptable to all and this resolves the difference 
in opinions.

Regards,

Dan

* How many people really need to have an opinion on this? Why is it that, like 
so many issues, people must take a side rather than just admit that they don't 
know and are not really capable, at their current state of knowledge and skill, 
of vetting the arguments on this?

----- Original Message ----
From: spike <spike66 at att.net>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Wed, November 3, 2010 2:50:49 PM
Subject: Re: [ExI] The answer to tireless stupidity

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Davis
...

>Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

>http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/?nlid=3722

>Best, Jeff Davis

The immediate problem I see with this is that both sides can set up a
chatbot, which then chatter away tirelessly about inane trivia through the
night.  But other than that, the chatbots are not like their human
counterparts. 

On the subject of global warming, there is no need to have humans in that
loop. So impervious are the participants on both sides to actual scientific
data and mathematical models, it would soon become impossible to distinguish
between the chat generated by this means vs the human input, so mired is
this particular topic in culture, politics and even religion.

I can think of a possible criterion to distinguish between human and
mechanical conversation: as soon either side actually changes its views on
global warming or even demonstrates it has actually learned, we know for
sure that is a chatbot, for humans have never been observed to change their
views on this topic.

spike