[FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

In the spirit of some of our other woven threads here, I'm wondering how
practical it would be to build a natural language parser which could
apply rules such as those found in:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Informal_fallacies

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias#List_of_biases

Seems like a next obvious step after spell and then grammar checkers?

Maybe something to be applied broadly to social media?

Is it a first step toward an AI Overlord that is more like an
overzealous English Major than HAL (2001 space odyssey) or the Lawnmower
Man or SID 6.7 (Virtuosity) maybe?   I am reminded of the cautionary
tale offered in Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands> or "the Humanoid
Touch".   Even though I knew Jack and heard anecdotes about these
stories, I never heard the one described in this Wikipedia article...  
a root source of those who fear "the Nanny State" (scare quotes
intended) perhaps?

Maybe easier to implement with Machine Learning and ubiquitous training
(details left to the reader) than something closer to a rule-based
system?  My most recent brush with Natural Language Processing is over
10 years ago and I sense things have progressed in the interim.

- Steve



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

> Interesting. Thanks. I used Ada for 5 years contracting (mostly for the Army) and never once heard any of these terms used that way. And I was part of the group that pitched new projects to our clients. I'm wondering if it simply fell out of use or if I was too holed up in my own little world. We did commonly use the phrases "skeleton" and "fleshing out".
>
> Also FWIW, the straw man fallacy is not solely an adversarial concept. You can straw man yourself. You can accidentally straw man someone. There are 3-way attempts at constructive ... what? ... trialog (?) where each party straw mans the others position on the way to a common ground. Etc.
>
> It's unfortunate that we focus on competitive, zero-sum, and adversarial senses of such things. But that need not be the case.
>
>
> On 1/28/21 12:30 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> Perhaps no-one cares or shares my confusion with the use
>> Strawman/Steelman championed by Glen and adopted by others, however:
>>
>>    consensus development:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man_proposal
>>
>>    vs polemical debate:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
>
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