Jiro comments on Archimedes's Chronophone - Less Wrong
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Comments (82)
The description of what the chronophone transmits is vague enough that no matter what I say, there's always a plausible way to interpret that description such that it would fail to work. As you, as the person posing the problem in the first place, get to decide which interpretation is correct, that means there's no solution.
I don't buy this argument either. Someone might not want to specifically construct persuasive arguments against X. Rather, he tries to construct persuasive arguments about X regardless of they are for or against it. Then he decides to accept or reject X depending on whether the persuasive argument he created happened to be for or against it (possibly changing his preexisting opinion about X in the process). Once he has constructed the persuasive argument (either for or against) and has his newest opinion for or against X, he then tries to convince others of it.
It also ignores the difference between an argument being persuasive to yourself and to others. Perhaps some believers in X and some believers in ~X want to come up with arguments that confirm their preexisting position. Both of them manage to produce arguments that convince themselves. But it turns out that when they use those arguments on other people, they're not equally effective in convincing other people. In fact, it turns out that believers in X can convince a subset of believers in ~X to switch sides, while believers in ~X cannot convince a similar subset of believers in X to switch sides.
(And it might be hard to see this because once the arguments have spread, when you get to the next generation, the arguments are already floating around, so the people who if they had been born earlier would have started out believing in ~X but gotten converted, would have started out already believing X and had no need to change their mind. You would then observe this and think "nobody can be convinced by argument to change their mind" when in fact all the people who are susceptible to persuasion by argument are already on the side that has the persuasive arguments.)