I used to think that critical attacks on a person's general thinking were reasonable, but I have found that the best way to reduce the most hostile and intolerant comments is to be overly objective and refrain from making any personal comments at all. Unfortunately, I have found that you have to refrain from making friendly or shared-experience kinds of remarks as well in order to use this method to effectively reduce the dullest sort of personal attacks and the grossest exaggerations.
The best method of bringing the conversation to a higher level is to get as many people as possible to refrain from sinking to the lower levels. Some of the most intolerant remarks that I received from a few people in this group were for remarks where I said that I thought that there was a chance that I might have received some divine guidance on a logical SAT project that I was working on. At one point, to the best of my recollection, Ben Goertzel made the statement that since a polynomial time SAT was impossible, discussion of polynomial time methods of SAT would be banned from the group! Since polynomial time vs non-polynomial time SAT is famously unprovable, Ben's remark seemed a little presumptive for someone who was at the time justifying a negative reaction toward my statements of a possible personal religious experience. The expression of one's religious beliefs is not strongly related to the study of AI, but the study of beliefs is. I feel that my presentation of my the issue, of the possibility that the Lord had actually become involved with a study of an extremely challenging AI related problem was relevant because the study of God cannot be done through the conventional science that only sees faith or imagination as being in direct opposition to it. You cannot prove or disprove the existence of God by discovering a resolution of the p vs np problem, but you can examine the nature of religious experience of a person who is working on the problem. Some conjectures do not yet reduce to repeatable experiments because they first need further refinement and an objective appreciation of the frame and nature of the kinds of experiments which would be required to examine them scientifically. We all have the ability to help and guide each other toward achieving our personal goals while improving our social skills at the same time. It's not rocket science. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
