From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Mar 08 2002 - 15:26:33 MST
CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
>
> I think we've long past the point where reasonable people can doubt
> HIV -> AIDS. If somebody disagrees to the point that they'll
> claim otherwise in a public forum, they should put up or shut up:
> inject themselves with a high titer of infectious cultured HIV. That's
> a traditional approach to show an infectious agent isn't relevant.
> That they haven't IMO just points them out as frauds. Even
> they don't believe their own nonsense.
I realize that it's a tempting debating tactic to get your opponents to kill
themselves, but in this case (a) they will linger around before dying,
arguing the while and (b) they may thereby infect others as well as
themselves. There are also minor ethical questions as to the propriety of
exploiting the stupidity of others so as to cause them to commit suicide in
order to accomplish the short-term objective of winning an argument on the
Extropians list.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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