Posted by
Steve Smith on
Jan 29, 2021; 8:04pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Strawman-Steelman-tp7600502p7600510.html
Hah! Yes, tools that help with individual and group self-regulation are
definitely of value and I share any implied bottom-up or peer-peer
regulation over *harsh* top down. Like many good things, I think there
is a distribution of "archies" as well as "scales"... which means
there is always room for *some* top-down regulation.
Grooming the "syntax" of my own logic and being able to detect flawed
(especially deliberately tricky) logic in others is valuable, but so is,
as you indicate, softening the advantage gained by psuedonymous
engagement...
I just re-read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and it's sequel which
includes a couple of siblings who, as frienemies engage in a multi-year
pseudonymic online debate with the covert intention of building one of
them (brother) up to become world-leader (Hegemon), even though the
other (sister) does not agree with the brother's methods or values, she
does agree with the logic of the ends he is pursuing (ends-means
conflation/justification). It's pretty clever and lame at the same
time (as I find much of OSC's work, compared to how I received it when
written 30+ years ago)? OSC (IMO) has demonstrated to me a
sophisticated variation of a common Right Wing strategy that I can't
describe well but is probably in those lists... probably headed with a
variety of "false equivalences".
I appreciate your elaborating/enumerating your own ad-hominem character
questions on the alt-right. Such is only in my peripheral vision, but
still of interest. I may dip at least one level into those characters
and see what they are up to. I've been noticing that Prager U. has been
really upped their game on YouTube for me at least... talk about
duplicitous.
FWIW, I inherited a copy of _Straight and Crooked_ thinking from my
paternal grandfather who was slightly ahead of his cohort, having been
born right before the turn of the 19th century and being the first in
his family to get a post secondary education and probably the first
generation to get much if any formal education. His family and peers
were broadly illiterate and as they became so were not necessarily
prepared to parse sophisticated rhetoric laced with deliberate logical
fallacies (e.g. general/yellow journalism of the time).
uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> In an attempt to continue following the alt-right, and having landed on a firm ad hominem character judgement of Curtis Yarvin, I need to track the following 3 people (labeled "Trumpist Intellectuals" in a Bulwark article):
>
>
https://gyaanipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Chuck_de_Caro>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Anton>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Codevilla>
> One of the others, "Tom Trenchard" (e.g.
https://americanmind.org/features/a-house-dividing/2020-a-retrospective-from-2025/), seems to be a pseudonym. But I have reasons to believe it might be this guy based on the "Tom Trenchard" URL at americnamind.org:
>
>
https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/3331751>
> My point being that your idea for *inducing* reasoning from text (and suggesting changes to that reasoning), I think the most reasonable next step lies in the sentiment analysis and plagiarism identification work that's already going on. I'd like to be able to tell whether Tom Trenchard is actually S. Adam Seagrave by comparing his political writing to his academic writing.
>
> I'd actually *prefer* extending that work over your idea because those links you post (and the ideology they imply) seems, feels to me, like top-down imposition of "right reasoning" onto the biology rather than learning, inducing, how animals reason *from* the animal behavior. If we could build up, with ML, coherent models of biological reasoning, *then* we could compare that to extant models of reasoning like that implied in those links.
>
>
> On 1/29/21 8:56 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> In the spirit of some of our other woven threads here, I'm wondering how practical it would be to build a natural language parser which could apply rules such as those found in:
>>
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking>>
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Informal_fallacies>>
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias#List_of_biases>>
>> Seems like a next obvious step after spell and then grammar checkers?
>>
>> Maybe something to be applied broadly to social media?
>>
>> Is it a first step toward an AI Overlord that is more like an overzealous English Major than HAL (2001 space odyssey) or the Lawnmower Man or SID 6.7 (Virtuosity) maybe? I am reminded of the cautionary tale offered in Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands> or "the Humanoid Touch". Even though I knew Jack and heard anecdotes about these stories, I never heard the one described in this Wikipedia article... a root source of those who fear "the Nanny State" (scare quotes intended) perhaps?
>>
>> Maybe easier to implement with Machine Learning and ubiquitous training (details left to the reader) than something closer to a rule-based system? My most recent brush with Natural Language Processing is over 10 years ago and I sense things have progressed in the interim.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>
>>
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
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