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Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

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Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#141

Post by ewjordan »

lotharbot wrote: post #114
philwelch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never had the patience to argue with climate skeptics because I figure once in a lifetime is enough and I wasted my youth arguing with creationists. It would be trivial, given a database of counterarguments to creationist talking points, to write a chatbot to argue with creationists. There are only so many times you can explain to people that the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply to the earth because the e…

Pick any religious, political, or philosophical position. Chances are, most holders of that position make similar statements about it most of the time, and detractors give pretty similar critical responses. It would be trivial to write a chat bot, either pro or con, for a lot of topics. Replacing yourself with a chat bot is just like arguing in person, except that it doesn't try your patience or waste your time, only…

Replacing yourself with a chat bot is just like arguing in person, except that it doesn't try your patience or waste your time, only the other guy's, and it doesn't give you any opportunity to learn or be exposed to novel ideas.

I don't see any problem with this, as long as you're actually right when you do it. It's never a waste of time to truthfully tell someone that they're wrong, as long as you give them the information that's necessary for them to realize why.

And in my experience, most of the "novel ideas" that the anti-evolution folks have to offer while discussing evolution are very much worth skipping.

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#142

Post by ewjordan »

lzw wrote: post #73
JabavuAdams wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, you didn't understand it correctly. The bot provides citations. Suppose that human-caused global warming is false. It would still be possible (and common) to make erroneous arguments about how humans aren't causing global warming. Skepticism is great, but most people's pro-X or anti-X nonsense isn't thoughtful skepticism. It's noise. This is a way of injecting signal back into the noise.

You realize that you're defending a bot which provides random citations base on key phrases found in twitter posts on the claim that "most people's ... nonsense isn't ...skepticism, It's noise"? Here is someone providing no thought and adding nothing to the discussion, by definition, he is providing noise. Just because you disagree with someone, doesn't mean what they say is nonsense. The primary attribute of the glo…

Here is someone providing no thought and adding nothing to the discussion, by definition, he is providing noise.

No. In theory, he's responding to noise by providing signal that addresses it.

There's a big difference there, though whether it's justified depends quite crucially on the quality of the signal that he's spewing in response to the noise...

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#143

Post by olefoo »

nervechannel wrote: post #102
olefoo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Although I was riffing off a long tradition of geeky humor ripping on clippy. On a more serious note; a marketing service that put it's customers brands in front of people who didn't yet know that those products were what they were looking for would be an awesome startup from a business perspective and a somewhat creepy one from a human perspective.

Isn't that how a lot of internet advertising works anyway? e.g. You're talking about medical condition X, therefore I shall try to sell you drug Y even if you don't mention Y or drugs at all in your search terms/blog post/etc. And I don't care if you even knew that drugs for X existed.

Looking at it now, it seems I described Google AdSense fairly well. Although I was thinking more along the lines of something that would insert itself into your social interactions, like Twitter sponsored tweets.

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#144

Post by buster »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #8

Let me see if I understand this correctly. Some programmer assumes that he is right and others are wrong, so he writes a bot to chase down people he might disagree with and bombard them with one-liners. And Technology Review thinks this is behavior worth promoting? I suspect the reason is that they agree with the programmer. Try it out for a bit with the roles reversed. Doesn't feel quite the same, huh? ADD: The assu…

Being told by companies/lobbies, media and social networks that global warming doesn't exist although there is clear scientific evidence that it is, that's what is wrong here.

How would you educate people that are driven to false conclusions by greedy companies?

First of all this topic is important to address, because it effects us and, above all, our children. Second, this is no topic of "believe" or "taste", it's a topic of marketing campaigns and manipulated statistics versus clear scientific data and common sense. You just need to look at chinas and the U.S. pollution of the environment[1]. Do you really think this has no impact whatsoever?

Every twitter post into the direction of anti-global-warming is just another little push in the wrong direction.

Also: Being tolerant is great! Ignoring the wrong in the name of tolerance is wrong.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CO2-by-country--1990-2025....

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#146

Post by Robin_Message »

rimantas wrote: post #131
Robin_Message wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would downvote you, but I want people to see this response: http://royalsociety.org/The-Science-of-Climate-Change-report... Yes, that's right, the Royal Society , which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with science, is the oldest scientific organisation in the world, agrees with the IPCC reports, which I would cite as the secondary scientific evidence. For the primary evidence, just read all the articles cited…

So Royal Society agrees that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035?

Let's be clear what you are talking about here: In section 10.6.2 of the 2007 "Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability" IPCC report, someone put in an incorrect figure for glacier melting. That's one mistake, after years of scrutiny, in the IPCC report that talks about the impact of climate change, which is not even the report that shows climate change is real. To imply you think that undermines the case for climate change beggars belief.

Now, you're not wrong in saying that quoting the WWF in a scientific report seems to be a bit of a screw-up. It shouldn't have happened, and the reports need to be reviewed more carefully to stop it happening again — except careful review did find this mistake, it was corrected, and the rest of the report, all 976 pages, still stands.

Additionally, as I alluded to above, this is not the "The Physical Science Basis" of climate change report, which weighs in at 996 pages and no-one to my knowledge has found any mistakes even as bad as the glacier example.

You cannot disregard that particular IPCC report for one mistake; that would be absurd.

And even if the whole of the "Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability" was hogwash, you still cannot claim climate change is not happening, as it is the "The Physical Science Basis" that gives (funnily enough) the scientific basis to climate change.

Bringing up the Himalayan glaciers shows a basic misunderstanding of the IPCC process, the scientific process and the magnitude of the error compared to the weight of scientific evidence for climate change. Please provide a peer-reviewed, or even non-peer reviewed, paper showing mistakes in the accepted literature and we'll talk.

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#147

Post by cabalamat »

I think this can be an ethical thing to do, provided some circumstances hold. Consider the sides to be S and T, then the circumstances are:

1. S are in the wrong

2. the debate matters, i.e. if S wins, bad things will happen (e.g. creationism will be taught in schools as science)

3. the chatbot will suck up more time from S than T (e.g. because T people are more likely to recognise it as being a chatbot).

Note that each of these is likely to be true if another circumstance holds -- that S is composed of people on average less intelligent than T.

Finally, what a delicious irony it would be if an evolutionarily programmed chatbot was written that succeeded in wasting the time of creationists!

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#148

Post by grantlmiller »

As a libertarian one of my major issues with global warming is that we're basically wasting our limited time & resources trying to address it. Whether our climate modeling is accurate or not, we're basically so far down this rabbit hole that we'd be better off focusing our efforts elsewhere. This TED talk explains it pretty well: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-122089912362687601#

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#149

Post by loewenskind »

ewjordan wrote: post #134
lzw wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the weight of scientific evidence is not on his side. The science clearly points against the global warming hypothesis. It is merely that there is a political/religious/ideological movement to claim that "global warming is settled science" (with no citations, naturally, not that any legitimat scientist would make such a claim anyway.) The earth is getting colder. The termperature changes we've seen over s…

Here's the problem: while I would tend to agree with you if your claim was that global warming is not as clear cut an issue as the mainstream makes it out to be, that's not how your post comes across. The real problem with the way you're arguing is that most of the meta-critiques that you've offered about the way mainstream climate change scientists act read almost exactly the same as the anti-evolution arguments tha…

>The real problem with the way you're arguing is that most of the meta-critiques that you've offered about the way mainstream climate change scientists act read almost exactly the same as the anti-evolution arguments that biologists have been assaulted with for decades.

So what? In both cases people are claiming some party should fundamentally alter how they live (perhaps implicitly in the case of evolution) and/or what the believe based on their findings. Of course this will be faced with scrutiny! If the scientist is correct he/she should be able to prove it. If he/she thinks the evidence just strongly suggests their theory then it should be presented that way leaving the other side to simply agree to withhold judgment for now [1].

>but those arguments mean absolutely nothing, because they are always offered whenever people disagree with the prevailing consensus in a field, whether it's correct or not.

That makes no sense at all. Arguments are meaningless because they are used too much? Utterly illogical, have I misunderstood something here?

>I've always gotten the sense that they really felt that the data supported their claims. Now, that doesn't make them right, but be careful about assuming that they're just perpetrating a fraud for some reason.

I'm sure most of them do. But do you think people from the other side aren't just as convinced of their opinions? A big part of the problem is both sides assuming the other is disingenuous.

[1] Not being convinced is always valid unless there is concrete irrefutable proof. Forming new "theories" based on being unconvinced and evangelizing based on them is not as it is "argument from ignorance" (i.e. "See, they don't know, no one does! Therefor the true answer is...").

Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

#150

Post by loewenskind »

chrischen wrote: post #137
loewenskind wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if both sides of the argument are incorrect, if the second opinion was formed through rigorous scientific investigation and represents and the best understanding that we currently have, why should we treat it equally with the opinion that was not developed through any sort of discourse and research? No, but I don't think that's what the parent was saying. I think you might be making the same mistake he was call…

It doesn't matter how much effort you put into it. It only matters how rational and factual it ends up being.

I was using "put work into it" as a shorthand but yes, this is what I mean: many counter arguments have merit as well. People always tend to assume the other side isn't being rational.
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