Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

That's the ticket. Promote "science" by relentlessly repeating the same thing over and over again and refusing to engage in a meaningful argument.

You're being snide, I suspect, but that's a time-tested and well-proven method of reaching the segment of the population that is currently being inundated with anti-science messages.

Many, many people believe what they hear first and what gets shouted loudest. Not liking that fact, and therefore refusing to engage in those tactics, doesn't make it any less true; it simply cedes a large segment of the population to anti-science proponents who are willing to do what it takes to get their message heard.

Well, that seems to work for the global warming denialists.

(Also, Leck's chatbot actually avoids repeating itself when talking to any particular person. I don't see anything wrong with repeating the same arguments when responding to different people.)

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 assumption here is that there is no way you can believe in X. Therefore it is okay for me to write a bot that spams and pesters everybody who believes in X, since they are horribly misinformed.

Works great -- as long as you're omniscient.

I glanced over the bot's Twitter stream and it appeared that every response it sent out included a headline/quote and a link. None of the tweets were simply assertions without a link to research or an article to back them up.