FAQ Off: An Open Source Project to Defeat Harassment Mobs and Disinformation

Eww, automated arguments. I toyed with a similar idea, it can be pretty easy to write a chat bot that automatically responds to common arguments. Anyone who's ever debated the religiously-indoctrinated will see a similar thing, a "script" of common talking points that you pretty quickly see or what they are, thought-terminating cliches. At least with real people you can sometimes find a path through those thought-terminating cliches, or they can find a path through yours, and you can actually think about things.

I'm not looking forward to the future where every time I try to discuss something I'm linked to an (out of date and poorly maintained) playbook that has obvious flaws in it's arguments but is considered an irrefutable source of truth by it's proponents. At least when you're dealing with people on an individual level you can point out when there are issues with an argument.

I know it's hard to have productive discussion about a lot of these things but I can't help but think it would be much better to try and teach people basic epistemology, how to assess what you should count as evidence, how much weight you should give different standards of evidence, rules of debating in good faith, etc.

All these tools for "taking control of the narrative" will be used by your enemies. If you're going to make a tool like that realize that everyone can use tools like that, even your ideological opponents. Try to think about the consequences of your actions, what happens if everyone adopts this technology for "controlling the narrative"? What happens if the "alt right" this post mentions starts using it?

I guess it's nice to make the script you're following explicit though.

> And then, all current and future iterations of the same tired line of questioning can be answered by a simple hyperlink instead of wasting your time again.

That will totally work.

So I looked at one example (the VPN misconceptions one) and coming at it from the perspective of someone looking for an argument (the "Sea Lions" referred to in the OP) the whole thing really just feels like a giant straw man. Few if any of the "questions" in the FAQ are stances I'd actually take in a debate about VPNs, and the flaws I see in the arguments the FAQ presents aren't addressed at all by the follow-up questions that are present.

Cool project. Society desperately needs tools to combat disinformation.

But couldn't this tool also be used to spread it? Also, does it prevent circular reasoning?