LESSWRONG
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johnlawrenceaspden100

Upvoted. Heat conduction is involved in the true answer. The student has demonstrated that he at least knows where to start thinking about the question. I'd have more respect for someone who said 'heat conduction', or for that matter 'caloric flow',and tried to work out how that might work than someone who said 'fairies'. Given that this is a question from a physics teacher, you're not wrong to try to find physics explanations before you go to 'trickery', which is exactly the sort of 'explain everything' hypothesis that we're nervous of.

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7Desrtopa
This is exactly the sort of mistake that Guessing the Teacher's Password was written to disabuse. The answer demonstrates no understanding of the phenomenon.
1Psy-Kosh
Huh? What about hindsight bias?
Your Strength as a Rationalist
MrPineapple511

a rationalist should acknowledge their irrationality, to do otherwise would be to irrational.

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Bayesian Judo
MrPineapple10

All you did was show that your argumentative skills were better. His intial belief mentioned souls, and i dont think you ever did. I'd like to see some sort of testability for souls :)

As to your reply of possibly proving his religion false, if he was better at arguing, he may have replied that at the least it might prove his understanding of religion false.

And of course its not as if you have created an AI.

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3Hul-Gil
Your points are irrelevant. The man asserted that his religious beliefs meant Artificial Intelligence was impossible, and that's what the author of this post was debating about. No souls need to be tested, because the existence of souls was not contested. Nor did Eliezer say he had created an AI. I'm also surprised no one pointed out that Mark D's "reversal" scenario is totally wrong: if Eliezer was unable to create an AI, that does not at all imply that the man's own assertions were true. It might, at best, be very weak evidence; there could be many reasons, other than a lack of a soul, that Eliezer might fail.