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Comment by FlemishBeeCycle | Hacker News Reader

I imagine it has to do with political correctness, but it seems there is an undercurrent on HN of treating all opinions as equally valid?

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?*

* Assuming that methodology described in the article is sound, "...searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments ..."

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You're missing the point.

It's not about whether or not the facts he's spamming people with are right or wrong, it's the fact that he's doing it in the first place.

I didn't mean to imply that I was condoning the author's actions. Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I was responding to the parent comment's decrying of the author's actions due to the perception that the author justified their actions through the belief that their opinion was superior (specifically parent's remark about requiring omniscience to justify the action)?

It does raise the question of whether the means justify the end. As people in this thread have noted ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867043, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867162), that this technique may be more effective than a more neutral route. But again, I'm not condoning anything.

It is impolite, and therefore unbalanced, to never agree to disagree.

Then again, if half of your conversation can be replaced by [fill in the blank] your questions may be imprecise.

> It's not about whether or not the facts he's spamming people with are right or wrong, it's the fact that he's doing it in the first place.

I wouldn't characterise it as spamming. He's sending the messages on one of his own twitter accounts. If he was auto-replying on other people's blogs, he might more accurately be accused of spamming.

Go look at the account:

http://twitter.com/ai_agw

It's not one of his accounts, it's a spam bot. A tongue in cheek, funny pictures, really obvious to computer scientist 'hey I'm a bot' account, but it's still a twitter spam bot.

And the bot is auto replying to random people's tweets. It clearly says so in the article.

> It's not one of his accounts, it's a spam bot.

It is a twitter account. He has the password to it, and presumerably no one else does.

That makes it his twitter account.

Email spammers don't have the passwords to their spamming accounts?

Email is sent to other accounts.

These are tweets on his own account.

"there is an undercurrent on HN of treating all opinions as equally valid?"

I think people on HN are used to thinking critically, so responses that disagree with or point out something incorrect about an article tend to get upvoted.

>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 calling out: assuming the other side hasn't put any thought into their argument. Sometimes they haven't but sometimes, despite how radical the position may sound, they have put work into it.

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.

Well in my experience that assumption often holds - most people aren't rational, don't understand the issues and will proceed to try and beat you down with "talking points".

I have a two part test to figure out whether someone's a skeptic or a denier:

1. Ask them some sort of question about their position - "Why do you think X", or "How do you explain this weakpoint in your argument?" Basically try and put them on the spot a bit.

2. If they're evasive, then ask them what sort of evidence it would take for them to change their mind.

If they can't give a good response to either of these questions, then they're a denier - if you can't defend your position, and you're not going to admit to any possibility of error, there's not much point in arguing.

It does often hold, but to me this doesn't justify the arrogance I see so often today. If we spoke with more honest language it might head off some of the defensive responses and make it easier to pinpoint the real break downs in communication. For example, for me the problem isn't that people aren't convinced by the GW evidence accumulated so far (either side). The problem is they are actively advocating a theory based on ignorance (e.g. "it's not conclusive that the cause is X so therefor I assert it is Y").

Sure, but just because something isn't completely conclusive, doesn't mean that it's wrong, or that you shouldn't start taking action based on it. And where do you draw the line? If something's 99% certain, or 99.9% certain, at what point do you stop arguing and take it as fact? When are you allowed to start actively advocating a particular theory?

>or that you shouldn't start taking action based on it.

Those who are convinced should indeed start taking action.

>And where do you draw the line?

That's up to the person. Some people have a threshold so high it will always be beyond our grasp to meet, some have a threshold of "higher probability score than any alternative" no matter how low the probability actually is (e.g. 5% chance vs 2%, 1%, etc.).

>at what point do you stop arguing and take it as fact?

Again, it's up to the person. But again, if the person doesn't accept something as fact I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with them presenting their unconvinced-ness as some kind of alternative "theory".

>When are you allowed to start actively advocating a particular theory?

When you have one. "The other guy is probably wrong" isn't a theory.

That catastrophic climate change is occurring is simply not a given. There are plenty of noted, mainstream scientists who do not believe that climate change is catastrophic, and many who believe that man's impact is not sufficient to affect the environment. If you count Oxford University and the BBC as credible sources, you may already be aware of this.

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