

Paying People to Argue With You (or How a Guy Found a Novel Use for Amazon's Mech Turk) - chaostheory
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/05/1353215

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Alex3917
Would anyone else be interested in renting out the services of one or more
professional devil's advocates if such a service existed? I thought of setting
up a website a while back doing this as a consulting thing, but I wasn't sure
if there would be any market.

~~~
dood
Heh, I had the same idea, probably because I enjoy arguing and finding flaws
in arguements so much. If anyone does start this up, let me know, I'll help!
However, I suspect the market for telling people what they want to hear is
much bigger ;)

The origin of the term 'Devil's advocate' is interesting, "Formerly, during
the canonization process of the Roman Catholic Church, the Promoter of the
Faith, or Devil's Advocate, was a canon lawyer appointed by the Church to
argue against the canonization of the candidate. It was his job to take a
skeptical view of the candidate's character, to look for holes in the
evidence, to argue that any miracles attributed to the candidate were
fraudulent, etc. The Devil's advocate was opposed by God's advocate, whose job
was to make the argument in favor of canonization."
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_advocate#Origin>]

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zach
Wow, so now all us wanna-be essayists can thank people at the end of our posts
like PG does. Except that nobody will have ever heard of the people we thank.

Of course, you could just send copies unbidden to people anyway. Hmm.

Thanks to Al Gore, Donald Knuth, Warren Buffett and Sergei Brin for reading
early drafts of this comment.

