Well, the obvious problem is that I can't convince Archimedes of anything I currently believe by providing arguments for it. Once you realize that, the next logical conclusion is to simply try to improve Archimedes' beliefs. For instance, if I were to critique modern science and its failures relative to bayesianism, it would come out as a critique of Archimedes' system of obeying authority. Additionally, I've recently been wondering about the line between sentience and non-sentience, and more specifically if animals like dolphins might actually deserve to be classified as "people" (as a side note, if anyone knows of any research on just how sentient dolphins are, I would be really interested in seeing it). If I were to talk about that, I suspect it would come out as a series of musings about whether women, slaves, etc, might deserve personhood rights.
If I try to be clever and argue for something I don't personally believe, there will be flaws that I can see in the argument, which will translate to flaws that Archimedes can see easily. So for instance, I can't put together a series of arguments in favor of slavery, because I will see flaws in those arguments. One obvious way I could get around this is to put someone else on the phone. I'm sure I can find a very well educated priest or rabbi who believes that following authority is the best system of epistemology, and despises science. That individuals arguments (of course, I wouldn't explain how the chronophone worked) would come out as arguments that sound convincing to Archimedes that following authority is bad. I could do something similar with my dolphin idea by putting the most eloquent speaker for PETA I could find.
Today's post, Archimedes's Chronophone was originally published on March 23, 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Useless Medical Disclaimers, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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