
Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense - inmygarage
https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/?p1=A3
======
olefoo
> In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers
> twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.

On the one hand the idea of a reverse search engine is somewhat appealing, on
the other hand; it's Clippy for the internet.

""" I see you're trying to deny global warming. Would you like to:

    
    
      1. research the available facts and science?
    
      2. Have an authority figure you trust tell you, you're wrong?
    
      3. Meet other like-minded singles?

"""

~~~
mims
This is the funniest thing I've ever read on HN. \- Signed, the guy who wrote
the original piece for TR

~~~
olefoo
Thanks. Although I was riffing off a long tradition of geeky humor ripping on
clippy.

On a more serious note; a marketing service that put it's customers brands in
front of people who didn't yet know that those products were what they were
looking for would be an awesome startup from a business perspective and a
somewhat creepy one from a human perspective.

~~~
nervechannel
Isn't that how a lot of internet advertising works anyway?

e.g. You're talking about medical condition X, therefore I shall try to sell
you drug Y even if you don't mention Y or drugs at all in your search
terms/blog post/etc. And I don't care if you even knew that drugs for X
existed.

~~~
olefoo
Looking at it now, it seems I described Google AdSense fairly well. Although I
was thinking more along the lines of something that would insert itself into
your social interactions, like Twitter sponsored tweets.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
FlemishBeeCycle
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 ..."

~~~
statictype
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.

~~~
cabalamat
> _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.

~~~
mattmanser
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.

~~~
cabalamat
> _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.

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

~~~
Dylan16807
Email is sent _to other accounts_.

These are tweets on _his own account_.

------
GiraffeNecktie
Perhaps the "proponents of anti-science nonsense" are also secret chatbots and
the robots have hijacked both sides of the discussion.

~~~
gojomo
If you want a vision of the future, imagine spam bots filling the net with
appealing nonsense -- forever.

~~~
lmz
Isn't this the case in Neal Stephenson's Anathem where truth on the net is
hard to come by because programs keep pumping out plausible nonsense?

~~~
jff
The same thing happens in Vernor Vinge's near-future novels; the "Friends of
Privacy" put out fake personal information everywhere to obfuscate things.

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

~~~
msbarnett
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
By relying on such tactics you are abandoning science. You are saying
essentially "who cares that these techniques can be used to get people to
believe _anything_ , what matters is that we are using them to promote The
TRUTH(TM)". And every religion in history has believed exactly the same thing.

I don't want science to die, I don't want it to be replaced with some new
ideology or religion which can trace its roots to some sciency origin.

Perhaps you can claim that in the short run you've improved things, but in the
long run you've drowned out the vital dialog that keeps the process of science
alive, you've killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, someone
else figures out how to shout even louder and more convincingly than you and
we're back to square one, or the dark ages.

People aren't accepting what you believe to be scientifically provable facts?
Argue more persuasively, provide better evidence. Don't just shout louder.

P.S. Yeah, it's a tough and frustrating process. Nobody said it'd be easy. It
took millenia for human civilization to pull itself out of the morass of
uncritical and superstitious thought. People, many people, suffered and died
for that achievement, and the results have been spectacular so far. Giving up
on science just because convincing other people of something is a frustrating
and difficult process is the height of immaturity.

~~~
msbarnett
> By relying on such tactics you are abandoning science.

I don't think this is true. Science is a means of building knowledge via
testable predictions. It's not a promotional tool.

It's unrealistic to expect that effective techniques for _performing_ science
will be at all effective for _promoting_ science; in fact, we have ample
evidence that trying to promote science via reasoned engagement doesn't work
very well. Anti-scientific proponents of vaccine-avoidance or evolution-denial
continue to gain the mindshare of a significant and powerful segment of the
voting population that "better evidence" has been unable to sway.

~~~
InclinedPlane
By "unable to sway" you mean "unable to sway everyone without any effort and
with almost no delay".

How many people believed in evolution in 1500? How many people believed the
Sun was powered by nuclear fusion in 1900? It's possible to convince people of
the value of scientific inquiry and the truth of the results of scientific
research, but sometimes it takes a lot more time and effort than anyone would
wish.

On the plus side, we have it a lot easier than Galileo did. Our lives aren't
in immediate danger merely because we challenge the dogma of powerful
institutions.

~~~
cromulent
The idea that Galileo's life was in danger is itself dogma.

He put himself into trouble by using the Pope's views in the form of his bot
Simplicio, embarrassing the Pope. He was in trouble, but not in physical
danger.

The irony is that the Church was open to heliocentrism, but demanded more
scientific proof before teaching it.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Galileo was convicted of heresy, placed under house arrest for 9 years (until
his death), and his books were banned. He could easily have been placed in
prison rather than house arrest, at the whim of the Inquisition, the same
Inquisition that executed Bruno 30 years prior and tortured and then
imprisoned Campanella for 27 years. The idea that Galileo was never in any
danger (assuming that one can write off house arrest as non-dangerous) is
patently ridiculous.

~~~
cromulent
The point is that he wasn't in danger from challenging the dogma, as you
asserted above. That is dogma itself. If he was in danger, it was from
embarrassing the pope. He advanced helicentrism long before his heresy trial.
The Pope met with him and said that he could write about Copernican theory.

He was under house arrest for those years at the house of the Archbishop of
Siena. It was a fairly nice life in those times. Galileo and the church got
along very well, but they had to do something to save face for the Pope. I
don't think it's ridiculous.

------
paul
Wow, it's a proactive FAQ! I wonder how many other persistant myths could be
addressed with a tool like this?

~~~
skybrian
The next step: Snopesbot.

------
eitland
The people who are arguing for the climate change are the same group of people
that used to tell me that the (rain)forests are the lungs of the earth.

I grew older, learned agriculture and forestry and saw that in mature forests
the old trees die and rot, releasing the same amount of CO2 that was captured
when they grew.

Now, the same people are telling me that we are responsible for the climate
change.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting the rain forests, but thats because
of the diversity of life they represent. I'm also for reducing the use of
fossile fuel, -because we'll have to sooner or later anyway.

~~~
lzw
Don't let the term "fossil fuel" confuse you. In the early days of drilling
they found fossils in the oil that came up, and this led to the common
hypothesis. But people don't really know the mechanism by which oil is created
(possibly this is true for coal as well.) The russians have an alternative
hypothesis and have some experimental results where wells that were previously
depleted were refilled. So called "Fossil fuels" may be a byproduct of
processes in the earths crust and may not be finite (though we could still
exceed the rate at which they are produced).

The commonly accepted theory is really a hypothesis with not that much science
supporting it. The alternative theory may not have any more science supporting
it, either. But notice how the name and the fact that the commonly accepted
theory has been commonly accepted so long that it becomes "Fact" biases
people's perception of the situation.

I hear people talking about CO2 as if your "carbon footprint" is a relavent
issue all the time-- it has become commonly accepted even though, in that
case, the hypothesis has been disproven. (CO2's absorbtion of IR is low, and
its proportion is low, and thus water vapor is the driver of greenhouse
effect. Further, in the past, CO2 has been vastly higher without a runaway
greenhouse effect.)

------
mnutt
As a similar but less controversial use, it might be interesting to use this
to debunk retweeted urban legends by sending out snopes.com links. But
ultimately I think it crosses the line into spam and just gets annoying.

------
ryanelkins
It looks like it's having a tough time with a lot of misfires (probably due to
sarcasm according to the article), at least from a cursory glance at the bot's
twitter feed (<http://twitter.com/AI_AGW>) that currently has a lot of
apologies.

It's a neat idea though.

~~~
klochner
It just appears that way because he processes the apologies in bulk when he
has time.

Apparently he recently worked through a little backlog of apologies, but if
you scroll down you'll a longer streak of non-apologies.

------
nathanmarz
Makes me think of the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.

Then again, is it still a Turing Test when the human involved is as automatic
and predictable as a computer?

------
kj12345
It's disturbing that (among other things) this programmer has so confidently
separated humanity into "crowd"s, and feels free to deride and explain his
superiority to at least two of these crowds in his quotes. I'm surprised that
this degree of stereotyping and subsequent mockery was published by TR with no
trace of criticism or meaningful commentary.

~~~
jff
First they came for the climate skeptics, and I did not speak out because I
was not a climate skeptic...

Godwin'd.

------
cabalamat
I think this can be an ethical thing to do, provided some circumstances hold.
Consider the sides to be S and T, then the circumstances are:

1\. S are in the wrong

2\. the debate matters, i.e. if S wins, bad things will happen (e.g.
creationism will be taught in schools as science)

3\. the chatbot will suck up more time from S than T (e.g. because T people
are more likely to recognise it as being a chatbot).

Note that each of these is likely to be true if another circumstance holds --
that S is composed of people on average less intelligent than T.

Finally, what a delicious irony it would be if an evolutionarily programmed
chatbot was written that succeeded in wasting the time of creationists!

------
grantlmiller
As a libertarian one of my major issues with global warming is that we're
basically wasting our limited time & resources trying to address it. Whether
our climate modeling is accurate or not, we're basically so far down this
rabbit hole that we'd be better off focusing our efforts elsewhere. This TED
talk explains it pretty well:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-122089912362687601#>

------
cromulent
It looks like cperciva is taking the bot through its paces.

<http://twitter.com/cperciva>

------
rapind
It's definitely clever and fun, but at the same time it's a troll feeding the
trolls, which can't be very productive.

Still. Neat idea.

------
dmoo
obligatory <http://xkcd.com/810/>

------
zeynel1
"Technology Review" should have mentioned at least what language he used. Do
you know?

------
lhnn
Man-made global warming is a myth.

~~~
lzw
It is a myth. It is an ideology that rejects science. And the proof that
hacker news is full of ignorant college students who choose ideology over
science (and capitalism, for that matter) is the fact that any failure to
blindly advocate the socialist position is automatically downvoted.

EDIT: I take the downvotes this post is getting as proof that my hypothesis is
correct. If my hypothesis were wrong, I would get actual responses or counter
arguments attempting to illuminate me. Downvotes are cowardly.

~~~
orborde
I think this comment is heavily downvoted because it's all self-righteousness
and ad hominem ("ignorant college students") without real discussion.

You're probably getting downvoted elsewhere for claiming global warming is a
myth, but you're making actual arguments, so those comments aren't in the
karma hole. Your comment here is just bile without useful content.

