From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Feb 18 2003 - 13:01:05 MST
Damien Broderick wrote:
> In my view, a large part of the `Iraq' exchanges on the list are already
> meta: they are disputes about the kinds of evidence that one can bring to
> bear upon a real-world problem, the kinds of reasoning deployed, the success
> and failures of logic, analogy, metaphor, etc, the clouding or biasing of
> judgment driven by preconception, affiliation, narrow self-interest and
> mental/emotional legacy codes.
>
> Of course, attempts to engage in such meta discussions under the
> circumstances of a specific real-world problem are almost inevitably bound
> to go toxic. But if not then, when? If not us, who?
As you point out, metadiscussion under circumstances like these is doomed.
So if not now, then almost any other time or any other topic would be
better. I've seen intelligent metadiscussion. This is acrimony.
Besides which, it all boils down to Bayes' Theorem anyway.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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