archeon

We all have knowledge, ideas and beliefs that rest on a solid foundation and those that sit on shifting sand. The trouble is they all look the same to us, if we knew which was sound and which not we would change things. Before we reach a age of reason, well meaning adults hot wire us full of their biases and that is especially hard to shift. Debating an issue with our peers is a good way to sort out the wheat from the chaff. If we can defend a position, at least to our own satisfaction, we have more confidence in the foundation underpinning it. But when someone grabs us by the scruff of the neck and shakes until we realize the position we hold is indefensible, then we were wrong. And now we know it. Bruised ego aside, we now have a clearer view of the world, new avenues of knowledge open up. Win, lose or draw, we always end a debate with more knowledge than we started with. For this process to work we need protagonists, people of opposing views. Those who agree with us may give confidence in our foundations but do not challenge them. A good debate has us strain every neuron, raid every memory bank and finding reserves we never knew we had. Passion, sound and fury, within reason, give the brain a good workout and keep the audience engaged. I have bad karma for a post stating that AI was going to prove that humanity and science were incompatible by ending us. Bad karma is a good sign, I have found my protagonists, lots of them it would seem. They may help me prune back the old dead growth of false data to a few healthy branches, sun and air can circulate and new growth and fruits will appear. On lesswrong bad karma is punished by restricting posts to one a week which is more than I will ever need. More troubling, comments are restricted to one a day which is a good way to kill debate stone dead, not that there has been any. Edit, bad karma of more than 15 restricts comments to 1 every 3 days. Access to the drafting facility is restricted which is self defeating,