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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[SalmonGod]

As for the bit about the nature of pro-lifer's arguments and stance -- it's quite clearly rooted in deep emotional convictions.  But I think there are a couple explanations that haven't been suggested yet as to how they don't recognize the same contradictions in their arguments as we do.

[snip]

Maybe.  ...Or an infallible book said so. And the verbal explanation in situations where a verse number won't suffice is just whatever pops into mind first to justify it that's hard to immediately contradict. With "didn't get a chance" fitting the bill quite nicely.

Sure.  You can go the "people are stupid and there's no point trying to understand it further than that" route if you really think that's most constructive.  There wouldn't be much point trying to argue it with you.

A giant wiki that collects arguments on lots of different subjects and presents everything in a concise, dry, heavily itemized tone would have a completely different cultural effect, I think.

I'm a bit confused about the goal of this project in the first place. Set aside the need for difficult to find unbiased judges, etc. for a moment. How do you actually envision it looking and what purpose does it serve?

Specifically, do you want to itemize all the arguments and then refute them? That sounds almost utterly impossible to do in an unbiased fashion or in many cases even to do in ANY fashion. As mentioned in the above part of this post, often it's stuff like "the Bible said so" or whatever, and there is no clear logical response to that either way, positive or negative.

Or do you intend to merely list arguments without comment? If so, I'm not sure how that would help anybody. ALl it would do is remind people of what arguments to make then they make them and probably go around in already well-hashed circles even more so than they do now.

I just really don't see a clear goal here or vision, which needs to be CRYSTAL clear if you're actually gonna talk about steps required to make it happen.

It's not something I'm likely to actually pursue.  I just come up with ideas like this, file them away, and revisit them later when they're relevant to refine them a bit more.  Maybe someday I'll actually act on one, but I tend to have the most exciting (to me) ideas about things that I don't have nearly the means or know-how to implement.

The goal is to speed up the process of cultural digestion of controversial issues. 

There's generally an end-point to common debates, like a script where the scenes may be non-sequential, but you can read through it all and that's the end of it.  A limited number of arguments that each side still thinks holds weight, and that the other side likely has some response to, explaining why they don't think it does.  These things evolve memetically, where you see individual actors going around confronting each other, having the same exchanges over and over and over again.  They're all reading from the same script, and they know it.  But they don't know how much of the script the other person has read through, and generally one or the other will walk away from the exchange feeling superior - not because they were right, but because they knew more of the script and that gave them the last word.  And every once in a while someone will think of a new line to add to the script, which will then stir everyone to initiate a new round of these encounters.  Millions of people will go through the same motions all over again just to arrive at the new end-point of the script.

So imagine if all the endlessly repeated content of these exchanges is put on display, everybody can look at it and know the most updated version of the script.  And when people have their clashes of ideology, they can both skip straight to asking each other if they really have anything to offer that hasn't already been covered.  If not, they can both avoid wasting their time and getting all worked up.  Then maybe broader cultural digestion of the topic can progress more smoothly as a whole, instead of being a scattered mess that kind of lurches forward asymmetrically.

I can think of other added bonuses.  For example, I mentioned hand-picking a limited number of writers to collaborate in representing each stance on an issue.  Ideally, these would be people who approach the task professionally, explain their side of things clearly, and write in a non-inflammatory tone.  If such a thing becomes a common resource in the same manner as Wikipedia, maybe that could help reduce misconceptions and contentiousness between opposing sides on various topics, further enabling cultural processes to progress more constructively.

[Angle]

That's a really good explanation. And yeah, that's one of the things Agora is supposed to address. Once a discussion has been completed, it could be archived, and people could refer to the whole thing.

[GavJ]

Sure.  You can go the "people are stupid and there's no point trying to understand it further than that" route if you really think that's most constructive.  There wouldn't be much point trying to argue it with you.

I didn't say stupid. Dogmatic is not the same thing as stupid.
Dogmatism does have however, as one of its primary features, the quality of being almost impossible to understand further than simply recognizing its existence, if you do not share the dogmatism in question.

I would LOVE to try and understand further, but for the many (certainly not all) people who are motivated by this, I see no way to do so.  And for this particular issue of abortion, the "many"-ness of it is overwhelming -- only 15% of people who don't identify with a religion identify as pro-life in America, compared to an approximately 50/50 split of pro-choice/pro-life in the general population. It's one of the most religiously aligned topics in the country at the moment, and so the frequency of hitting the dead end brick wall of dogmatism is extremely common if you push the question with most people, I have found.

I wish it were more often based on some foundation of philosophical "value placed on human potential" or whatever, and I'm sure for a few people it is, but almost certainly not most. Unfortunately (unfortunate for debates or policy-making, that is, most of all).

So imagine if all the endlessly repeated content of these exchanges is put on display, everybody can look at it and know the most updated version of the script.  And when people have their clashes of ideology, they can both skip straight to asking each other if they really have anything to offer that hasn't already been covered.  If not, they can both avoid wasting their time and getting all worked up.  Then maybe broader cultural digestion of the topic can progress more smoothly as a whole, instead of being a scattered mess that kind of lurches forward asymmetrically.

Ah, that is much clearer, thank you.

In that case, I would suggest that you don't need or even want judges at all, or writers or anything like wikipedia. Instead, what you would want are computer algorithms that can be fed actual repeated examples of conversations about the same topic, hundreds of them, and can pull out the overlapping common "scripts" to the extent that they exist. I think this would both be better responded to by everybody due to guaranteed lack of bias, AND it would be more actually informative and useful being derived from actual first hand data, not people play-acting second hand from experience or research filtered through a brain full of relevant (and polluting) experiences.

Doing it in a way that actually produces literal scripts might be overly difficult, but bullet points in rough chronological order of when they might appear in a discussion would be extremely doable as an automated task, and probably perfectly sufficient for what you want it to acocmplish.

This also has the advantage of being cheap/free after developing, and instantly staying up to date and instantly incorporating new issues on the fly with very little effort -- all the host has to do is solicit examples of the debate in question and shovel them into the input hole.

[SalmonGod]

Sure.  You can go the "people are stupid and there's no point trying to understand it further than that" route if you really think that's most constructive.  There wouldn't be much point trying to argue it with you.

I didn't say stupid. Dogmatic is not the same thing as stupid.
Dogmatism does have however, as one of its primary features, the quality of being almost impossible to understand further than simply recognizing its existence, if you do not share the dogmatism in question.

I would LOVE to try and understand further, but for the many (certainly not all) people who are motivated by this, I see no way to do so.  And for this particular issue of abortion, the "many"-ness of it is overwhelming -- only 15% of people who don't identify with a religion identify as pro-life in America, compared to an approximately 50/50 split of pro-choice/pro-life in the general population. It's one of the most religiously aligned topics in the country at the moment, and so the frequency of hitting the dead end brick wall of dogmatism is extremely common if you push the question with most people, I have found.

I wish it were more often based on some foundation of philosophical "value placed on human potential" or whatever, and I'm sure for a few people it is, but almost certainly not most. Unfortunately (unfortunate for debates or policy-making, that is, most of all).

I don't think there's anything philosophical about it.  I'm one of those who thinks that religion, as abused by dogmatically hateful types, is just an excuse, channel, and rallying point for fucked up psychology that would still be present without that institution to validate it. 

I've never found dogmatism to be the brick wall.  I've found that if you're discussing with someone who isn't completely insane, and you continually press the reminder that anyone outside of their religion will never recognize it as a valid basis for determining their lifestyle, AND you do this without causing an offended reaction that triggers their defensive walls, that you will eventually whittle it down to a simple emotional recoil.  "I just think what gay people do is gross" or "I can't accept the termination of an innocent life that never had a chance" or something of that nature.  Every time, in my experience.

What I described was what I see as the vague notions that spring out of that emotional basis and assemble to form the dogma that we know.  My interpretation of one element that I thought was missing from the discussion, anyway.

So imagine if all the endlessly repeated content of these exchanges is put on display, everybody can look at it and know the most updated version of the script.  And when people have their clashes of ideology, they can both skip straight to asking each other if they really have anything to offer that hasn't already been covered.  If not, they can both avoid wasting their time and getting all worked up.  Then maybe broader cultural digestion of the topic can progress more smoothly as a whole, instead of being a scattered mess that kind of lurches forward asymmetrically.

Ah, that is much clearer, thank you.

In that case, I would suggest that you don't need or even want judges at all, or writers or anything like wikipedia. Instead, what you would want are computer algorithms that can be fed actual repeated examples of conversations about the same topic, hundreds of them, and can pull out the overlapping common "scripts" to the extent that they exist. I think this would both be better responded to by everybody due to guaranteed lack of bias, AND it would be more actually informative and useful being derived from actual first hand data, not people play-acting second hand from experience or research filtered through a brain full of relevant (and polluting) experiences.

Doing it in a way that actually produces literal scripts might be overly difficult, but bullet points in rough chronological order of when they might appear in a discussion would be extremely doable as an automated task, and probably perfectly sufficient for what you want it to acocmplish.

This also has the advantage of being cheap/free after developing, and instantly staying up to date and instantly incorporating new issues on the fly with very little effort -- all the host has to do is solicit examples of the debate in question and shovel them into the input hole.

An interesting idea, but I think it has its flaws as well.  The design of the algorithm could also be accused of bias.  It would take a lot of work to accumulate samples, and ensure that those samples were equally gathered from across the spectrum of opinions.  And its output wouldn't be as elegant and relatable as human writing.

[GavJ]

I've never found dogmatism to be the brick wall.  I've found that if you're discussing with someone who isn't completely insane, and you continually press the reminder that anyone outside of their religion will never recognize it as a valid basis for determining their lifestyle, AND you do this without causing an offended reaction that triggers their defensive walls, that you will eventually whittle it down to a simple emotional recoil.

I agree that most dogma is rooted in emotional training or recoil or whatever you want to call it.
I can't say I see how that helps the situation, however. Brick wall is brick wall, whether you draw the semantic cutoff for what you call a "brick wall" as the moment dogma is uncovered, or whether it happens half a block later in emotion town, the end result is the same.

I simply give up when I uncover the dogma, because even if there is something deeper, it doesn't matter to me if that deeper thing is just as entrenched and unassailable as the dogma is. It's like the difference between turning around and taking a different road when you see billowing smoke in front of your car, versus driving further and then turning around and still taking a different road only when you see fire. I'm simply saving myself that little bit of extra effort, once the outcome is already inevitable.

The design of the algorithm could also be accused of bias.

Can you suggest any reasonable example of how an algorithm could possibly be programmed ahead of time to bias toward one consistent partisan position across hundreds of different topics that the programmer doesn't even have a list of prior to finishing the code?

Keeping in mind, by the way, that since you would probably want to make the code open source as a means of guaranteeing neutrality to users, such an example also has to be something that could somehow be not only biased, but undetectably biased even to experts reading said code.

It would take a lot of work to accumulate samples, and ensure that those samples were equally gathered from across the spectrum of opinions.

This is at worst an equally difficult barrier to either an algorithm or a human writer. And much more likely LESS of a barrier, since:
1) Computers can parse 15,000 documents in seconds, and a writer would take half a lifetime, meaning that the algorithm has greater flexibility in being able to use brute force methods to reduce variance rather than delicately chosen perfectly balanced examples from careful research. (It can ALSO use human provided delicate, careful research if desired. Hence "flexibility")
2) Computers also have greater flexibility in research than a human writer, since a computer can use all the same research as a writer would on the one hand (i.e. a human could research examples and then feed them in, same as a human would to prepare for writing an article) AND/OR on top of that, computers have options like crawling the web automatically and being constantly vigilant, versus writing an article that quickly becomes dated until somebody writes another one.

And its output wouldn't be as elegant and relatable as human writing.

Agreed. But we already have elegance and relatability in national debates - go pick up an op ed or a bestseller.

The niche that isn't already filled is cold hard unbiased reference resources. That's where the unsatisfied demand is, not in more elegance.

[da_nang]

NSA targets the privacy-conscious

[smjjames]

NSA targets the privacy-conscious

They called a Linux users magazine forum an 'extremist forum'? Either NSA or someone at NSA must absolutely hate Linux or something.

[palsch]

They called a Linux users magazine forum an 'extremist forum'? Either NSA or someone at NSA must absolutely hate Linux or something.

Going by this, not so much. The actual code;

    // START_DEFINITION

    /*These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by extremists on extremist forums. */

    $TAILS_terms=word('tails' or 'Amnesiac Incognito Live System') and word('linux' or ' USB ' or ' CD ' or 'secure desktop' or ' IRC ' or 'truecrypt' or ' tor ');

    $TAILS_websites=('tails.boum.org/') or ('linuxjournal.com/content/linux*');

    // END_DEFINITION

That is, TAILS is a Linux version advocated on extremist forums, and the websites listed as referring to it include a linuxjournal review/overview of the distro. It doesn't follow that the journal itself is the forum they are referring to as extremist.

[SealyStar]

NSA targets the privacy-conscious

One thing even the NSA fans (who exist for some reason) can agree on (albeit from a different point of view):

That the NSA, a US government agency, spends shittons of time stalking people who use Tor, created by a US government agency, is a pretty so bad it's good example of bureaucratic competition in action.

[Rolepgeek]

Hmmmmm...

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

I think I'd rather just watch and save my belligerent arguitude for other things.

[misko27]

Referring back to earlier, I'll start off by assuming we are referring to arguments where we are trying to convince the opponent, rather then merely appear to win? We really get into the psychological there. Changing a person's mind, I've found, is two parts: First breaking down what they believe, then putting in your beliefs. The first one is the hard one; one method is by proving it isn't the most accurate interpretation of their desires (e.g. convincing someone that leader X shouldn't be supported because they failed in principles X, Y, and Z, or, on a more basic level, that belief W isn't consistent with their beliefs L, M, and O). The problem is mere accuracy is not sufficient to persuade people; psychology comes into play and biases almost always have some room to maneuver.

NSA targets the privacy-conscious

One thing even the NSA fans (who exist for some reason) can agree on (albeit from a different point of view):

That the NSA, a US government agency, spends shittons of time stalking people who use Tor, created by a US government agency, is a pretty so bad it's good example of bureaucratic competition in action.

What the hell are you saying with that sentence? I think you want to put dashes in there? Like this:

...created by a US government agency, is a pretty so-bad-it's-good example of bureaucratic competition in action.

That makes much more sense. While I'm at it, I'll mention you could use some dashes, semi-colons and parentheses to more properly show the subordinate clauses, but that's too much grammer-nazi for me.

Yes agencies fight a lot. Too much. It happens everywhere really: fairly often you will come upon a passage in news articles noting that while the state department of some country has one take on a resolution to a crisis, the military of the country has different ideas (I think that is a omnipresent issue actually).

[Descan]

My favourite tactic is to assume every axiom or point-of-fact someone is using to support their argument is true (while still pointing out that they're not settled issues, or that they're disputable facts), and then point out how their argument fails even with that assumption.

I.E. "Even if abortion is murder, making it illegal doesn't stop it or lower the rate, it just drives it underground where it's more dangerous for all involved. The only way to lower abortion rates is to increase contraceptive availability and education about it's use."

Or: "Even if you assume a fetus is an actual person, we already believe in bodily autonomy. We don't kill one person to save the lives of 10 others, we don't force people to give blood, hell we don't even take the organs from corpses unless we have their express consent before their death. Even to save another person. Forcing someone to carry a baby to term means you're giving more bodily autonomy to corpses than to pregnant people."

[GavJ]

I think the House Judiciary Committee has finally found a brilliant solution to online sales tax evasion!

https://freethefuture.org/petition/petition-to-free-the-internet/?utm_source=i360&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=Universe4

1) Start fake petitions like this one, from not-IRS-sounding websites.
2) Instant tax audits for anybody who signs it, since they are almost certainly evading internet sales tax.

It's. So. Elegant. 

[Duuvian]

There was a story today about how in addition to finding useful information, 9 out of 10 people the NSA spied on were normal internet users who used the same forums and such as people the agency was actually interested in. Half of those were American citizens and despite attempts to censor their personal data the news organizations reading the leaked files found instances where it was was not removed. So much for not violating the 4th, eh? I should note that according to the news story many of the things recorded would, if made public by unscrupulous and partisan employees, do a very good job of eliminating their chances at winning a public election.

In addition another diplomatic ruckus with Germany was caused by a German discovery and arrest of an employee of one of the German spy agencies who was a secret agent for the NSA. According to one of the multiple Yahoo news stories about it, one of that double agent's goals (among others) was collecting information about the Snowden leaks.

[palsch]

Lawfare link about the story.

For me this has raised a couple specific issues. But the biggest is that this information was and could be leaked.

I honestly didn't believe that Snowden had access to this sort of information. The stuff he leaked previously was classified, but the sort of archived presentations that isn't especially sensitive and I would have expected someone in his position could have gathered (archived presentations and the like). That he had access to this new material is an indictment of the NSA's internal procedures and the harshest mark against them so far IMO.

The over-collection is, as Lawfare points out, a mathematical truth of this sort of monitoring. I'm actually surprised it's as low as 9/10 non-targets sampled. Think about how many people's communications would be caught up if they tried monitoring your activity for a week. Guess the typical target is fairly insular or they only monitor relatively small scale communications?

The ineffective or missing minimisation is far more worrying in this context. It's expected that they will record things that are outside their remit, but the system relies on them removing such information before it is archived. There are also concerns about materials being kept beyond the time they are relevant or useful. It's obviously hard to tell how effective or justified it is from second hand accounts like this, but this should be more than enough evidence for further review of both policy and practice (IIRC a review is underway, but not sure how broad it's remit any more).

The fact that it is now in the wild so to speak is somewhat worrying as well. There is some serious stuff there. Quoting the Post;

...fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Some of this information could be of considerable value to various groups and that's before you get to the raw privacy concerns of individuals. Given the state of the leaks I'd fully expect the complete archives to become public knowledge at some point. There seem to be a few groups in possession of the materials at this point and there are some nasty personal and institutional politics in the background. Snowdon put a hell of a lot of trust in those he handed the leak to.



I was over at Lawfare getting this link; the Hobby Lobby ruling being used as a precedent by a Guantanamo detainee arguing he has a right to communal prayers during the Ramadan under the RFRA.