Ben,
While I've had much less time lately and am preparing to get more involved soon I too am hesitant on reading some of the threads and it pains me to see Tinter STILL having his trolling effect! IMO while he actually sometimes has intelligent insight and articulation on other angles he completely does not get it but portrays himself as some sort of authority. I've thought of just banning him quietly but I'm a person who can side with Jains on not killing insects so it's hard for me (I'm not saying Mike is an insect), but most people here have wanted him gone already since day one. Uhm, sorry for not banning him ya'll and for all the trouble he has caused. The experiment has failed IMO, Mike you really are impeding progress by failing to make the required effort to understand some basic concepts while you callously flaunt that ignorance and insult others' intelligence. There really needs to be a way to auto-communally ban someone (a discussion list Fail2Ban J) though in this case those who would have voted to ban might have already left the list ages ago. Since there is no auto-banning/moderating mechanism and for expediency probably a warning should be made and someone needs to be manually made into an example, a sacrificial offering perhaps for the future of AGI? John From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[email protected]] I'm curious how many people think we should start a policy of banning obvious trolls from this email list? I don't have an extremely strong opinion one way or the other. However, I note that the presence of so much trolling does cause me to avoid looking at the list most of the time, because my default assumption is that the average post will not be interesting... The obvious inspiration for this question is Mike Tintner. While he has a certain sincerity to him, nevertheless, he is basically a troll on this list in the Internet sense. He thinks everyone researching in the AGI field is badly misguided and tells us so, repetitively, over and over. And he really doesn't understand the basic concepts of computer science -- he thinks there are "non-algorithmic computer programs", or ways to operate computers non-algorithmically... which really is not true if you take any standard definition of "algorithm" ... Occasionally Tintner has spurred interesting discussions. But mostly he just says the same boring, misunderstanding-based stuff over and over again... Anyway, I can go either way on this personally, but I'm curious what other list members think. Should we ban Tintner and any other similar trolls who emerge, or let them use the list as their trolling-ground? Note: I absolutely would NOT want to start banning people for believing AGI is impossible and saying so, or positing unpopular ideas, or saying everyone in the field is misguided, etc. But being sooooo repetitive with the same exact points over and over again -- to the point where you're the most active poster on the list, yet you don't really understand the core technical concepts underlying the field the list exists to discuss -- this verges from nonconformist thinking into trolling, IMO... Curious for others' thoughts.. ? -- Ben ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
